I've been using Mozilla (both 0.93 and 0.94) as my main browser for a few weeks now. I am running the Mac version on OS 9.1. My computer is a 400 megahertz G3 with 128 megs of RAM. My guess would be that my comments hold for the windows version as well, but I have no direct experience with it on that platform or any other. I've tried to use Mozilla at a few points in the past (I really gave M14 a good try) but found I had to revert back to Netscape 4.7 because of speed and stability issues. The latest releases of Mozilla, on the other hand, are good enough for me to use on a daily basis. What follows is an attempt at an even handed analysis of where it's at, with the hope that this will help other people decide if it's time for them to give it a try.
As I already mentioned, I'm coming to Mozilla from Netscape Navigator 4.7. Perhaps people using Internet Explorer will have a different feeling. My guess is that Mozilla will seem more familiar, and therefore more acceptable, to people coming from Navigator. But I think this is only an initial response, and doesn't matter too much in the long run. In any case, this isn't meant as a comparison, but just as a look at Mozilla. The fact that I'm coming at it from Navigator should probably be noted, but it's certainly not the whole story. O.K., here goes.
Stability This is the big one. If a browser crashes, and especially if the crash takes down your whole machine requiring a reboot, then it is not usable. Politics, as I'll mention toward the end, is important in all this, but it makes no difference if the software crashes. Previous releases have been too buggy for me. This seems to be a common sentiment, although these things always differ from machine to machine. Perhaps there are some computers, with some specific configurations, that did well with previous builds. All I can say is that this was never the case for me. But as of 0.93 Mozilla is "stable enough." I do a lot of work inside my browser. Many hours a day. Over the past two weeks Mozilla has crashed around five times. This isn't perfect. I wish it never crashed. But this doesn't slow me down too much. Navigator 4.7 would have crashed less, but it would have crashed at least once, so they are both in the same ball park. If this was the only criteria I'd have to give Mozilla the thumbs down, but it's good enough so that this doesn't put an end to the possibility of using it.
Speed Mozilla renders pages quickly. Much quicker than navigator 4.7, especially in those cases where many nested and/or full page tables are employed. My limited experience with 5.x versions of IE on the Mac would put the rendering speeds about the same (no, that isn't a very scientific view.) Sometimes Mozilla seems amazingly fast. But rendering pages isn't the only issue. In other ways Mozilla is annoyingly slow. It is very slow to boot up (although very much faster than it was around M14, which for sure is not saying too much.) Menus are slow. When you click on bookmarks there is a tiny delay before the menu drops down. There is a tiny delay before almost every action like that. If you open a new blank browser window it takes 2 to 3 seconds for it to appear. That is a noticable lag. Clicking on Preferences takes even longer for the preference window to appear. This is almost too much for me to bear, but not quite. If there is no reason for you to like Mozilla (or dislike IE for, say, either political or security reasons) then probably this will stop you from wanting to use Mozilla. But if any of the good things make you want to like Mozilla, probably you can live with these little delays without too much trouble. Certainly it's not a deal breaker the way slow rendering of pages would be. That's the main thing, and Mozilla does this well. It's reasonable to expect that these speed issues have not been dealt with (as they really aren't central to the browser code) and that optimizations will be made in future releases on the way to 1.0.
Standards I'm not going to go into the details of HTML, CSS, and DOM standard support. But let's just say that Mozilla does well here. Coming from Navigator 4.7, which does extremely poorly in this regard, I feel like I'm finally seeing the web the way it was meant to be seen (which is something like saying, I'm finally seeing it the way most people see it in IE.) Good enough. I'm sure there are lots of fine grained arguments going on about exactly how compliant Mozilla is, but for the average user these debates are probably of little concern. I say Mozilla passes here no problem.
Mail I don't use it for mail. Integrating email and web browsing together never seemed like a good idea to me. I like plaintext email, and simple plaintext email software. Using Outlook Express for email seems like an exceptionally poor choice, but I guess that's a different essay. Anyway, I can't say anything about Mozilla mail.
Cookies Cookie support is great. I'm not sure how it is in IE. Probably more advanced than Navigator (which has almost none) but I don't think it's as good as Mozilla. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I've heard Opera has very good cookie management, but I don't know first hand. Anyway, in Mozilla, like most other browsers, you can set it to either accept all cookies, reject all cookies, warn you before accepting cookies, or only accept cookies that get sent back to the originating server. But Mozilla does much more. Through the preference window I can call up another window which will display all the cookies that have been set on my machine. I can erase them all, or selectively through this window. When I erase selectively I can tell Mozilla to remember the cookie to be erased, and never accept one from that server in the future. This is a very nice feature. Bye-bye doubleclick. And also, if you set it to warn you before accepting cookies, you have the same sort of 'remember this choice' option. If you always want to accept a cookie from this site, just tell it once and have it remember that choice. If you never want a doubleclick cookie, just tell it once and it will remember (although doubleclick has many servers - like: ads.doubleclick.com, banners.doubleclick.com, etc... and you have to do it for each different server name.) I love this feature. Can IE do this? I'm surprised if it can't, but I've never heard that it can. Probably it will be able to in the future. This might be my favorite thing about Mozilla.
Complaints I have a few other complaints that don't fit into the categories above. The worst is that it doesn't feel rock solid in the response department. Sometimes, especially if I'm moving fast, I'll have to click on things twice. I'll click a link, and even get a visual response, but nothing will happen. Same goes for forms. Sometimes I have to click submit buttons twice. This is pretty annoying. It's not really a bug, because it only seems to happen when I am a little bit at fault. As if I maybe didn't hit it right. But I never got this feeling in Navigator. If I clicked in the location field I would always have focus in the locations field. Mozilla isn't broken in this respect, but it feels less forgiving.
Smaller complaints include the fact that when I click to open a link in a new window the window opens at full screen size. Navigator 4.x would open the new window at the size of the window you are opening it from. This is sort of personal, and not a big deal, but it bugs me. In a similar vein, the location field (where you type in a URL) is hard to edit. If I want to selectively edit just part of a URL I feel like it fights me. For instance if I just want to remove '/weblog/' from the end of http://www.digitalmediatree.com/jim/weblog/ it takes me a few clicks to get it properly selected. It's hard to describe, and again, it's more of a personal preference than a bug, but if you do a lot of navigation through hacking off little bits of the URL (I do) then this is a pain. If you don't do that sort of exploring (I wonder what's in the parent directory?) then this won't matter much.
Politics I don't like Internet Explorer. But maybe you should. It's not that it's a bad program. Probably it's the best browser out there. I just don't like Microsoft in a political sense. I think the web should be built on open standards, and while IE has very good support for the basic web standards, I am very concerned about their strategy referred to as "embrace and extend." What this means is that while they support the standards (mostly) they also add in a lot of extra features that are only found in IE (that's the 'extend' part.) From one perspecive this is reasonable. They say they are just giving their customers new features that are being asked for. But from another perspective this is a devious plot to take over the internet. People make websites that use these Microsoft specific features, and then other browsers cannot make full use of those sites. Sometimes other browsers can't make any use of those sites. I'm not sure what the response here should be. I think Microsoft should be allowed to do this if they want, but I wish they were penalized in the market for doing so. Unfortunately, it's a complex issue, and most people don't understand what is happening, or what is at stake. So I don't think it's a legal thing, and I don't think they should be stopped from making their browser however they want. But I'm going to do my part to penalize them in the marketplace. I'm not really urging you to do the same. Maybe you're fine with Microsoft dominating the internet. They make a technically capable browser, so one might reasonably ask what the problem is. I think the problem is that they only care about dominating the market, and they don't care about the eventual quality of the market they are dominating. A microsoft web will be low quality in the same way that televsion is low quality. It will only be about selling you crap. But that's just my opinion. And I thought AOL would never make it because people didn't want the web dumbed down. So what do I know?
Conclusion The bottom line for me is that since I won't use a Microsoft product I really want Mozilla to be good. As of 0.93 it is good. Hopefully it will get better. Probably it is not quite as good for the general user as IE. In a limited way it is not even as good as Navigator 4.7. But you can use it. So if you have that sort of inclination, give it a shot (direct link for windows 9.1 megs or Mac 11.7 megs - for OS 8.5 to 9.x.)
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As I already mentioned, I'm coming to Mozilla from Netscape Navigator 4.7. Perhaps people using Internet Explorer will have a different feeling. My guess is that Mozilla will seem more familiar, and therefore more acceptable, to people coming from Navigator. But I think this is only an initial response, and doesn't matter too much in the long run. In any case, this isn't meant as a comparison, but just as a look at Mozilla. The fact that I'm coming at it from Navigator should probably be noted, but it's certainly not the whole story. O.K., here goes.
Stability This is the big one. If a browser crashes, and especially if the crash takes down your whole machine requiring a reboot, then it is not usable. Politics, as I'll mention toward the end, is important in all this, but it makes no difference if the software crashes. Previous releases have been too buggy for me. This seems to be a common sentiment, although these things always differ from machine to machine. Perhaps there are some computers, with some specific configurations, that did well with previous builds. All I can say is that this was never the case for me. But as of 0.93 Mozilla is "stable enough." I do a lot of work inside my browser. Many hours a day. Over the past two weeks Mozilla has crashed around five times. This isn't perfect. I wish it never crashed. But this doesn't slow me down too much. Navigator 4.7 would have crashed less, but it would have crashed at least once, so they are both in the same ball park. If this was the only criteria I'd have to give Mozilla the thumbs down, but it's good enough so that this doesn't put an end to the possibility of using it.
Speed Mozilla renders pages quickly. Much quicker than navigator 4.7, especially in those cases where many nested and/or full page tables are employed. My limited experience with 5.x versions of IE on the Mac would put the rendering speeds about the same (no, that isn't a very scientific view.) Sometimes Mozilla seems amazingly fast. But rendering pages isn't the only issue. In other ways Mozilla is annoyingly slow. It is very slow to boot up (although very much faster than it was around M14, which for sure is not saying too much.) Menus are slow. When you click on bookmarks there is a tiny delay before the menu drops down. There is a tiny delay before almost every action like that. If you open a new blank browser window it takes 2 to 3 seconds for it to appear. That is a noticable lag. Clicking on Preferences takes even longer for the preference window to appear. This is almost too much for me to bear, but not quite. If there is no reason for you to like Mozilla (or dislike IE for, say, either political or security reasons) then probably this will stop you from wanting to use Mozilla. But if any of the good things make you want to like Mozilla, probably you can live with these little delays without too much trouble. Certainly it's not a deal breaker the way slow rendering of pages would be. That's the main thing, and Mozilla does this well. It's reasonable to expect that these speed issues have not been dealt with (as they really aren't central to the browser code) and that optimizations will be made in future releases on the way to 1.0.
Standards I'm not going to go into the details of HTML, CSS, and DOM standard support. But let's just say that Mozilla does well here. Coming from Navigator 4.7, which does extremely poorly in this regard, I feel like I'm finally seeing the web the way it was meant to be seen (which is something like saying, I'm finally seeing it the way most people see it in IE.) Good enough. I'm sure there are lots of fine grained arguments going on about exactly how compliant Mozilla is, but for the average user these debates are probably of little concern. I say Mozilla passes here no problem.
Mail I don't use it for mail. Integrating email and web browsing together never seemed like a good idea to me. I like plaintext email, and simple plaintext email software. Using Outlook Express for email seems like an exceptionally poor choice, but I guess that's a different essay. Anyway, I can't say anything about Mozilla mail.
Cookies Cookie support is great. I'm not sure how it is in IE. Probably more advanced than Navigator (which has almost none) but I don't think it's as good as Mozilla. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I've heard Opera has very good cookie management, but I don't know first hand. Anyway, in Mozilla, like most other browsers, you can set it to either accept all cookies, reject all cookies, warn you before accepting cookies, or only accept cookies that get sent back to the originating server. But Mozilla does much more. Through the preference window I can call up another window which will display all the cookies that have been set on my machine. I can erase them all, or selectively through this window. When I erase selectively I can tell Mozilla to remember the cookie to be erased, and never accept one from that server in the future. This is a very nice feature. Bye-bye doubleclick. And also, if you set it to warn you before accepting cookies, you have the same sort of 'remember this choice' option. If you always want to accept a cookie from this site, just tell it once and have it remember that choice. If you never want a doubleclick cookie, just tell it once and it will remember (although doubleclick has many servers - like: ads.doubleclick.com, banners.doubleclick.com, etc... and you have to do it for each different server name.) I love this feature. Can IE do this? I'm surprised if it can't, but I've never heard that it can. Probably it will be able to in the future. This might be my favorite thing about Mozilla.
Complaints I have a few other complaints that don't fit into the categories above. The worst is that it doesn't feel rock solid in the response department. Sometimes, especially if I'm moving fast, I'll have to click on things twice. I'll click a link, and even get a visual response, but nothing will happen. Same goes for forms. Sometimes I have to click submit buttons twice. This is pretty annoying. It's not really a bug, because it only seems to happen when I am a little bit at fault. As if I maybe didn't hit it right. But I never got this feeling in Navigator. If I clicked in the location field I would always have focus in the locations field. Mozilla isn't broken in this respect, but it feels less forgiving.
Smaller complaints include the fact that when I click to open a link in a new window the window opens at full screen size. Navigator 4.x would open the new window at the size of the window you are opening it from. This is sort of personal, and not a big deal, but it bugs me. In a similar vein, the location field (where you type in a URL) is hard to edit. If I want to selectively edit just part of a URL I feel like it fights me. For instance if I just want to remove '/weblog/' from the end of http://www.digitalmediatree.com/jim/weblog/ it takes me a few clicks to get it properly selected. It's hard to describe, and again, it's more of a personal preference than a bug, but if you do a lot of navigation through hacking off little bits of the URL (I do) then this is a pain. If you don't do that sort of exploring (I wonder what's in the parent directory?) then this won't matter much.
Politics I don't like Internet Explorer. But maybe you should. It's not that it's a bad program. Probably it's the best browser out there. I just don't like Microsoft in a political sense. I think the web should be built on open standards, and while IE has very good support for the basic web standards, I am very concerned about their strategy referred to as "embrace and extend." What this means is that while they support the standards (mostly) they also add in a lot of extra features that are only found in IE (that's the 'extend' part.) From one perspecive this is reasonable. They say they are just giving their customers new features that are being asked for. But from another perspective this is a devious plot to take over the internet. People make websites that use these Microsoft specific features, and then other browsers cannot make full use of those sites. Sometimes other browsers can't make any use of those sites. I'm not sure what the response here should be. I think Microsoft should be allowed to do this if they want, but I wish they were penalized in the market for doing so. Unfortunately, it's a complex issue, and most people don't understand what is happening, or what is at stake. So I don't think it's a legal thing, and I don't think they should be stopped from making their browser however they want. But I'm going to do my part to penalize them in the marketplace. I'm not really urging you to do the same. Maybe you're fine with Microsoft dominating the internet. They make a technically capable browser, so one might reasonably ask what the problem is. I think the problem is that they only care about dominating the market, and they don't care about the eventual quality of the market they are dominating. A microsoft web will be low quality in the same way that televsion is low quality. It will only be about selling you crap. But that's just my opinion. And I thought AOL would never make it because people didn't want the web dumbed down. So what do I know?
Conclusion The bottom line for me is that since I won't use a Microsoft product I really want Mozilla to be good. As of 0.93 it is good. Hopefully it will get better. Probably it is not quite as good for the general user as IE. In a limited way it is not even as good as Navigator 4.7. But you can use it. So if you have that sort of inclination, give it a shot (direct link for windows 9.1 megs or Mac 11.7 megs - for OS 8.5 to 9.x.)
- jim 9-21-2001 6:18 pm