Mozilla.

I have been waiting a long time for the Mozilla project to release their version 1.0 and it finally came last week. I really wasn't too keen on doing a review of a 'not ready for prime time' product, even though their versions previous to the all-powerful 1.0 number should be in no way considered 'beta', as the term goes. I must tell you that it was worth the wait.

Mozilla all started in 1998 (great year!) when the fine folks at Netscape released the source code to their browser. Microsoft was in full swing in their campaign to banish the browser that popularized the Internet when this great development for Linux and Open Source came about. Shortly after the Mozilla group was formed, they immediately realized that the person who had written the source code for Netscape was the same one who designed the oxygen tanks on Apollo 13. Needless to say, they thought it best to do a complete re-write The result of all this work is the fine Mozilla 1.0, which in the end is more than just a web browser. The Mozilla project is really the start of whole new way of interacting with content on the Internet.

The Gecko engine is at the heart of the Mozilla browser. This takes the HTML and other code on web pages and presents it to you in an attractive way. Gecko is now being used by other web browsers for not only Linux but for MS Windows and MacOS as well. As a matter of fact, Netscape, which we will be dealing with shortly, abandoned their old code as of version 6 and now uses Mozilla code. Talk about getting your investment back!

Mozilla is a very stable. In my opinion, is is the stablest browser for Linux. I have been using it since version 0.9.4. That means I have had hundreds of hours observing its behavior and making notes on its performance. As far as I can remember, it has only crashed on me once or twice. This was probably due to a webpage written by some shareware addicted pseudo-programmer using Windows 3.1, composing his Britney Spears tribute page with bold temerity.

Strengths:

• Stability
  I already said this, but it deserves repeating. The Mozilla team deserves much praise as well. There's nothing more annoying than your browser crashing when you've just written twenty paragraphs defending your ideas on Slashdot (calling MS defenders 'useless spawn of pond scum') and you didn't have time to push the post button!
• Tabbed browsing
  Mozilla didn't invent this (It was the Opera people), but the team had the good sense to incorporate this into the browser. Each new webpage can be opened in a tab inside the browser environment itself. You can control the behavior of tabs in the preferences menu.
• Good HTML rendering
  Mozilla is neither too forgiving or too curmudgeonly when it comes to rendering bad HTML code. A lot of people who hack out HTML by hand will forget to close a tag or will misplace one here and there. If the mistake is a blatant one, the browser should not render it. If it's a harmless peccadillo, then there should be some leeway. Mozilla seems to get this point.
• Good bookmark system
  One of the things I get paid for is for looking at web sites, so I bookmark quite a good number of them. There's a good system for organizing these.
• An email and IRC client
  I must confess that I use neither of these provided with Mozilla, but for the person who likes to have the total web experience, this is good.
• decent web page viewing
  There are people who like to make the text on webpage microscopic. It's easy to remedy this with Mozilla. Press CTR and '+'. Just the text becomes bigger and the fonts display nicely. Some other browsers just don't seem to get this right.
• Easy customization
  There's a very flat learning curve to get Mozilla to do what you want. Manage cookies, block images, store passwords for frequently visited sites (Like Linux.org and the New York Times). Mozilla's got a very good memory for those sites that you've visited and haven't bookmarked - both in the URL dialog box and the history browser.
• A thousand other things
  There are really a lot of nice things about Mozilla. I say that mainly because as I have observed its evolution. You're never saying 'boy, I wish it did this ...'. If you want Mozilla to do something, it probably already does.

Weaknesses

• A need for speed
  Mozilla is still a bit slow compared with other browsers. That much it inherited from Netscape. It offers a lot of things, so the obvious cost of that is speed. In today's world of 128 Mbs of RAM, that shouldn't be particularly annoying though.

Mozilla is a very fine browser. It will surely become the most popular browser on the Linux platform. If it weren't for Microsoft's monopoly, it would probably stand a good chance at becoming the most popular on Windows as well.

Next --> Netscape