OT: Alternatives to Firefox and Google

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 07:17:36AM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   They started out as extensions.  Mozilla lacks an SOB at the top to
> say "NO" to "more features".  Linus Torvalds has remarked that a lot of
> his work consists of telling people... "No, we are *NOT* including your
> pet "feature" in the kernel".
> 
>   Mozilla reminds me of General Motors.  In the early 1960's GM
> introduced the smaller Chevelle to compete against the Volkswagen
> Beetle, which was getting lots of buyers turned off by the full-size
> Impala.  However, by 1973, the 1973 Chevelle was just as long as, and
> 500 pounds heavier than, the 1963 Impala.  You don't even want to ask
> about the 1973 Impala.  Mozilla is a lot like that.
> 
>   Java was the first attempt to produce a pseudo-operating system on top
> of WIndows.  How many Java applets do use use today?
> 
>   Netscape 4.x was OK in its time.  But AOL took over, and repeated
> Sun's Java mistake.  Rather than update Netscape to handle evolving HTML,
> they spent untold millions working on turning Netscape into a pseudo-
> operating system on top of Windows.  We all know what a roaring success
> that was... NOT.  As Netscape fell behind evolving HTML standards IE won
> the browser wars, mainly because AOL basically sabotage Netscape.

Netscape 4.x was horrible.  It was by far the worst version of netscape
ever released.  It had numerous bugs, it had rendering errors, it
screwed up the spec, and drove web designers nuts because they couldn't
do what they wanted due to netscape 4.x's bugs.  It was in fact WORSE
than IE6 in that way which is saying a lot.  netscape 4.x single
handedly destroyed the use of frames forever because of the stupidity of
the programmers.  Many of the good developers that had worked on
netscape fled while 4.x was in development because they couldn't deal
with it.  I highly suspect the reason things stalled for them was that
the code base was a disaster, and certainly the code that was eventually
released as mozilla's starting point took multiple years to clean up
before anything even remotely useable came out of it (including
completely rewriting the renderer from scrach, which is why we have the
gecko engine today).

>   Mozilla came out as an all-in-one browser/newsreader/email-client that
> was big and bloated.  I'm sure we all remember the jokes about...
> "about:kitchen sink".  Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was introduced as the
> lightweight, browser-only, version of Mozilla to counter this.  After a
> few years, the bloat has returned.
> 
>   Open source seems to have this fascination with creating a pseudo-
> operating system on top of Windows.  Java works on cellphones because
> the cellphone makers *WANT* apps to make their phones desirable, and
> therefore they co-operate.  A pseudo-operating system on Windows faces
> the same sabotage from MS as IBM ran into when it tried to make OS/2
> binary compatable with Windows 3.1, and MS brought out 3.11.

Well an os on top of something else seems to have been popular ever
since someone thought up emacs.  I guess we know who to blame now. :)

>   Once again, the buzz is about creating a pseudo-operating system on
> top of Windows, to run internet apps.  It is doomed.

Java never intended to just run on top of windows.  Running on solaris
and pretty much everywhere else was important too.  By running on
everything sun hoped to take over everything and eventually sell people
machines that just ran java natively (and hence faster and cheaper
probably).

--
Len Sorensen
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