Re: [SLUG] Mozilla M16 released.

[Matthew Dalton <matthewd@nospam.research.canon.com.au>]

Padmini Naidu wrote:
> 
> What is the state of Mozilla? I was reading through the postings on slashdot
> and it seems the people are far from happy about the slowness of releases
> and features. Does anyone know when thew final release is due, Ive heard
> many people say 'when its ready', but its been in development for what seems
> like years now!

Yes, it has been years - Mozilla *is* a complete rewrite though.

I've got the Win32 version of M15 installed on the PC I'm typing on
(WinNT... bleearrch - work PC). It seems pretty good to me. I mean, some
of the old Netscape features like completion are missing (although this
is one of the additions to M16) but it renders the sites I visit okay,
and I can usually even use it instead of Netscape on sites that Netscape
barfs at (before I had to use IE). It has crashed, but not noticibly
more often than Netscape (4.72).

I don't tend to visit many sites with lots of Java/Javascript/SSL pages
though, so YMMV.

> I was under the impression the since netscape decided to
> release the source this was the first big test of the open source / bazaar
> type design paradigm.

If you haven't already noticed by the Linux 2.4 release schedule, "It'll
be released when it's ready" is usual for an open source project. This
doesn't mean that open source projects always take forever... it means
that quality is not sacrificed for the sake of an early release (note
that I'm not talking about developer releases, but real production
quality releases).

It always amazes me when sites like ZDNet proclaim that Linux (and
therefore, open source) are just like Microsoft software because they
appear to have "missed a deadline". The developmental models are
completely different -- it means nothing to compare them in this way. I
could go on...

> Any thoughts or further resources i could be looking at to find a few
> answers?

Yes. Go to http://www.mozilla.org and download M16 for your OS. Try it.
Make up your own mind.

Matthew
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