Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Netscape and CSS

Author:Dori Smith
Posted:12/10/1999; 12:24:23 PM
Topic:Netscape and CSS
Msg #:13541 (In response to 13533)
Prev/Next:13540 / 13542

Well, what's actually happening is that Netscape is taking the time to do it right and not ship a browser full of incomplete support for standards. Mozilla will be 100% css1, html4.0, xml, ecmascript compliant. And it will have substantial support for css2 and other newer standards. I believe developers will author to standards, not to just whatever is dominant.

My perception is that Netscape is doing two things: creating a standards compliant browser, and adding a large number of bells & whistles to an already too large product. I don't want an email client, news reader, or IM client in my browser. Yes, I'll download it for testing, but so long as a browser includes all of that stuff, it'll never be my primary browser.

I believe (just an educated guess) that if you hadn't spent the time working on all the non-browser related crud, you'd have shipped a browser by now.

What question did you have of Eric? I will go to him myself and ask it if you like.

Eric's been saying that he can't give any information about ship dates. All I asked him was if he could make any comment about the dates that Mozilla has publicly available.

He could have said "Mozilla and Netscape are two different entities." He could have said "Those are target dates, and it doesn't mean that we'll meet them, and I don't want to make promises I can't keep." Either of those would be fine--not to say that I would have been thrilled, but I would have understood where he was coming from.

Instead, he mumbled something and shut the seminar down 5 minutes early. I apologized profusely to the people in line behind me who were also waiting to ask questions.

Just to be clear: he told me later that day that he hadn't realized that he still had time left, and that he thought that the sessions were 60 minutes, not 75. But either way, not answering questions and not knowing how long your session is scheduled to be is unprofessional. Oh, and when he told me why he cut the session short, he still didn't answer my question.

It's easy to be critical.

Y'know, this is one of the things that I've noticed about Netscape. Asking questions makes you "critical." Sorry, but I'm not going to drink the Koolaid again. You have to tell me why you want me to agree with you. I don't just BELIEVE because you want me to BELIEVE.

Have you tried out the latest build of mozilla?

No. I tried both M9 & M10, but they were too buggy to be usable. When I heard that M11 had horrible speed problems due to adding progressive rendering, I decided to skip it and wait for M12.

Dont you really believe that if Netscape had shipped an earlier but buggy release that they would be flayed alive and really be discounted? Instead we're doing it right the first time. I believe that this strategy will pay off in the end.

Have you taken a look at the StatMarket surveys that I referred to? Do you have surveys that show that people who are currently using IE5 will switch to Netscape 5?

There was a recent PCWorld article that said that Communicator 5 would be 10-20% faster at rendering pages than Communicator 4.7. By my calculations, this makes Communicator 5 considerably slower than IE 5. Do people want a slower browser, that includes functionality that they don't use/need?

If you have a reason that you know that people will want this, tell us that reason. Right now, it all seems to be based on faith.

Given: Netscape won't be shipping a final version of Communicator until at least next June (based on things they've said publicly).
Given: Netscape browsers are losing market share every day.
Given: Netscape has no plans that I've heard of to ship a Navigator (browser-only) replacement.
Given: Communicator 5 will be considerably slower than IE 5.x (see ref above).
Given: AOL will continue to ship IE as their default browser (nothing else has been said publicly).

QED: Netscape is irrelevant.

Just tell me which of my statements is incorrect, and I'll reconsider my conclusion. But attacking me personally just makes Netscape look bad.

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