"David W. Fenton" wrote: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Matthew Thomas) wrote in >... > > I don't like Mozilla. From a user's point of view, Mozilla is > > worse in every respect -- except page rendering speed -- than 4.x, > > MSIE, or iCab. The installation process is worse, the footprint is > > worse, the UI is worse, the responsiveness is worse, the feature > > set is worse, the configurability is worse, and the platform > > integration is worse. > > I don't know what Mozilla version you are using, but the one I'm > using (0.9.6) is: > > 1. faster than IE 5.5
The figures in <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3BBB359B.1BF08A01%40mailandnews.com> are still largely accurate. Mozilla is now a bit faster than it was then, but MSIE 5.1 is also a bit faster than MSIE 5.0 was then. > 2. renders pages more reliably and more attractively than NS 4.x Mozilla's current style sheet support is certainly more reliable and attractive than that of 4.x (that's an understatement). However, a large majority of the Web pages about which Tech Evangelism bugs filed in Bugzilla, where the pages don't work in current Mozilla builds, the same pages work fine in 4.x, making Mozilla's rendering seem less reliable now than it was then. And the increased attractiveness brought about by Mozilla's improved style sheet support is largely counteracted by its incredibly ugly HTML form controls. > 3. not made by Microsoft That's something which (alas) matters to perhaps five percent of the computer-using population. > 4. more stable than NS 4.x by a long shot I can't comment on that, since I use daily builds rather than milestones. > 5. has the tabbed UI that is far, far superior than anything IE or > NS 4.x have to offer MSIE does a devilishly clever thing: it uses the window manager provided by the operating system. That way it manages to behave consistently with most other apps on your computer, except Mozilla. > 6. fast enough on my ancient Win95 P120 with 128MBs to be my > default browser (though it is definitely not fast in many ways). For a laugh, a couple of months ago I ran the Windows versions of MSIE 5.0 and Mozilla 0.9.6 on a 486 with 24 MB RAM. MSIE was just about bearable, with pages rendering in about 40 seconds on average. Mozilla, on the other hand, took about two and a half minutes per page. (Turning on Quick Launch hardly made any difference to Mozilla's startup time, but it did make MSIE's startup take twice as long, which I found extremely funny.) > One of the false speed tests that IE wins is load time. IE puts up > a window a lot faster during loading than Mozilla, but YOU CAN'T DO > ANYTHING WITH THAT WINDOW for a very long time after it loads. I > can type into the Mozilla URL text box as soon as I can see it. But you don't see it until Mozilla is well into loading your home page. Ceteris paribus, if actual speed is the same in each browser, then the browser with the greatest *perceived* speed will win. So it is better to put up a window more quickly, even if the user can't do anything with it. >... > Maybe Mozilla is unacceptable on the Mac, but on Windows, it's the > best browser available. >... Oh, right. That would explain why so many millions of people have downloaded it, like they downloaded Netscape 3.0 (which really *was* the best browser available). -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing <http://mpt.phrasewise.com/>
