I just built and ran 0.8.1 (NT4 on 700mhz/256MB notebook), which is my first experience with Mozilla. I've done a lot of webreading before actually trying it, and I wasn't sure what to expect since I have very positive expectations from reading about its design/functionality, tempered against a *lot* of negativity from third party reviews/commentary (esp. on NS 6). I'm coming at it from the perspective of a technical lead who wants to base his company's future product (distributed transport management systems) direction on a rich, componentised, open source and portable platform, and started out (after a lot of research into many alternatives) really hoping that Mozilla would shine through as "it". My first impressions are generally positive, with some reservations: 1) It looks fantastic, and the functionality is way beyond what I expected - though see 4) below. Everything else I run now seems dull and boring. If this gets really finished, its going to be AWESOME and, because its a next-gen platform, not just a browser, IE/MS better watch out. It makes me wonder what an open OS desktop would look like if done entirely with XUL. 2) Performance needs to be improved maybe 20-30%. I can't say I noticed much difference in actual download/rendering speed compared to my existing browsers (NS4 and an IE 5.5 extender), but the overall feel of it is rather cumbersome. It's still usable though (if a little irritating) and, of course, I totally understand that the UI is based on the rendering engine (that's the beauty of it) not standard OS controls, and the relevant code base and makefiles are probably still unfinished/unoptimised. 3) Its nowhere near robust enough for something which is supposed to be fairly near completion. I've had numerous start-up and crash problems in my first hour using it, in which I didn't really try anything very complicated. I understand that 0.8.1 was originally going to be 0.9, which was one stop from the "gold" 1.0.0 sometime quite soon. My gut tells me 4-6 months to a truly solid mass market product - of course I say this without much underlying knowledge, but my gut usually works better without it (several months before my brain catches up!). 4) This is my one "real" gripe: it ** really ** needs a multiple browser window interface (I avoided saying "MDI" because it doesn't have to be that per se, though it could be). You only have to look at all the IE-wrapped multiple-window browsers out there (and MDI coming back in the next MS Office) to see that this is important, and they don't have functionality/UIs which are as "concentrated" as Mozilla. After 30 mins of typical browsing/mailing/newsing I was drowning in open windows, and changing a theme (which then has to be applied to all of the open instances) took forever. I know there are many "SDI" advocates out there too, but I can only say that, having used an multi-window IE wrapper for a few weeks, sometimes with 150 pages open, I would no more go back to single-window browser than I would gnaw my own foot off :-) Maybe a sub-project should be spawned to look at this (if there isn't one already). 5) The build process is horrible. I've never known anything need so many tools and emulations to build, and I lost track of all the compile/link warnings spat out (isn't this against the official rules?). I can't help wondering if there's any correlation with 3) above. Anyway I don't want the above to sound too negative - IMHO they are clearly insignificant in the big picture and, if things like these are properly straightened out, Mozilla would get my vote as the pinnacle achievement of the open source movement so far (Linux included). Maybe it can even put some sugar in Microsoft's tank.I don't know if the actual developers and main helpers look in here but, if so, great work! Just my few Euro's worth.... is that still around 10 cents?? :o) Cheers, Chris.
