Firefox 3 for Mac was a seventeen MB download. That seems very compact, considering that Netscape 3 was a thirty MB download, and that was ten years ago!
Do all those people at Mozilla/Firefox really do all that work just for personal gratification, or to stick it to Microsnuff, or what's going on?
I think they primarily do it in order to have a usable Web Browser for themselves.
ReplyDeleteThis is the main motivation for all serious hacking.
Almost everyone needs a hobby. Why couldn't it be programming? And being part of some open-source development team not only provides a hobby, but also a sense of accomplishment, and far more so than many day jobs.
ReplyDeletesense of altruistic accomplishment, and far more so than many day jobs
ReplyDeleteBesides, it's a great way to get people to buy their coffee mugs and T shirts.
I just managed to resurrect an old laptop I thought was dead, it was still on Netscape 7, what a piece of bilge water compared to Firefox 2.x. Firefox 3 is now on that machine. I like it, it's snook in a few things that I used to have in Netscape and appreciated, but weren't in Firefox.
Thing I don't understand, what happened to Netscape? I took a bad upgrade around Netscape8.x, it was so flawed that I flirted with Opera for a week, then moved to Firefox. Did Netscape die because of AOL?
Why SeaMonkey? That is like a prehistoric Netscape Navigator in look and feel. At least it has a built in HTML editor. Something Firefox 2.x lacks.
Sorry, but I tried Safari. It is so "left handed" in control placement it was almost gauche!
"... HTML editor. Something Firefox 2.x lacks."
ReplyDeleteMy goodness. I thought the Firefox project was started specifically to get back to basics and produce a Web Browser without a built in e-mail client, HTML editor, NNTP reader, etc.
jwz has publicly stated that this was, in his opinion, where Netscape started to go astray. (And the rest is history.)
Now, of course there are some who still don't get it. They are the ones who are working in the SeaMonkey project. While Firefox is a stripped down, back to basics, "slim" web browser. SeaMoney is a continuation of the Netscape/Mozilla application suite.
For the most part I am glad that it simplified. At the time I was left without a HTML WYSIWYG. Our department intranet was HTML based, and learning HTML on top of Verilog was more than I wanted to do at that time.
ReplyDeleteThe only other HTML editor readily available in the office was MS-Word. Can you imagine, every time you made a "hello world" page it would put in so many MS tags you were forced to view it on IE, which wasn't on our Solaris boxes (hence the Opera push that came in when Netscape stopped supporting UNIX).
There are so many tools that try to be all things to everyone. I back away from Leatherman and top end Swiss Army knives too.
Netscape, when I last used it, seemed to be a front end binding two browsers (Mozilla and IE), a mail tool and a "security suite" which was trying to out-do the Norton and native Windows security. It was getting too much.
I used to think the password management was better in Netscape, but now I find it intrusive.
I guess what I really want is a tool like the old Adobe Page Mill, you know, HTML WYSIWYG with a cosseted FTP util for resource gathering and uploading your local pages to your ISP or web host with resolution from absolute to relative paths.
Maybe Eolake should chime in. I understand he uses some kind of a WYSIWYG (all you can get is what you see) kind of app for building that nudie pix site of his.
ReplyDeleteI've never used one myself (I just use a text editor), so I can not give any recommendations.
I use Adobe Golive, I have since it was called Golive Cyberstudio 2.5 a decade ago. It's really not fit for a site the size of Domai, though, it takes 12 minutes to open the site file!
ReplyDeleteHey, I like the protection of KISS. all you can get is what you see works fine for dabbling. A decade ago there was not Flikr or Picasa, so a home web page was how you shared kid photos with great aunt Maude. She was amazed that it wasn't a reel of 8mm or an envelope of 3x4.5 prints.
ReplyDeleteAt work, it was the pre- Wiki days, and all we needed was quick links to how-to's and a daily summary created by a Perl script from the overnight simulations. Didn't have to be sexy.
Golive would be the scale I would like for a home page, but now Picasa and Blogger suffice...
"I use Adobe Golive, ... it takes 12 minutes to open the site file!"
ReplyDeleteWhoa! Even if you just want to fix one typo, you have to wait 12 minutes to do it? I didn't know it was that bad.
So, how do you spend the waiting time? Take the Cooper test? ;-)
"Even if you just want to fix one typo, you have to wait 12 minutes to do it?
ReplyDeleteSo, how do you spend the waiting time? Take the Cooper test?"
I could run about 120 meters in 12 minutes, I think.
But no, I usually go watch Robot Chicken or sommin.
The Site File is 640MB!
But I can of course open a single page instead if I want.
Usually I open it and keep it open.
"But I can of course open a single page instead if I want."
ReplyDeleteOk, that's it then. I don't know what a "Site File" is. I assumed you have to wait 12 mins to perform any change at all on the website.
No no. That would be unusable. Even 30 seconds would be.
ReplyDeleteWhat I call the "site file" is the big file which Golive has created, which keeep track of everything about the site, like link relations etc. Inside that one are icons for each page and graphic.