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February 9, 2000

Mozilla's New M13 'Bug Killer' Build

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The Mozilla Project is inching toward its much-delayed commercial release as the successor to Netscape Communicator. Will Mozilla be strong enough to succeed in its own right, or will it gain users only among those who hate Microsoft? Will America Online force-feed the new browser to its users, carpet-bombing the world with Mozilla CDs? Do you think Netscape and the Mozillans can catch up, or has too much time elapsed? Is it "game over" for Netscape--or a whole new beginning? Join in this discussion!

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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

By Fred Langa

Mozilla 5.0, the long-awaited, much-delayed open-source successor to Netscape Communicator, finally went into alpha release at the end of January.

Mozilla 5 has been architecturally complete since November's "M11" pre-alpha release. The M12 release in December cleaned up the code and added various debugging and reporting tools. The new M13 release is a stabilized, more polished version of M12, and it is the first official "alpha" release of Mozilla 5. It's intended for full-time use by developers so they can sniff out the problems that remain.

But anyone can download a copy from http://www.mozilla.org/binaries.html, and it's instructive to do so.

For one thing, because the M13 build is architecturally complete, it will give you a good idea of where the Mozilla 5 project is heading. For one thing, it looks quite different from the current Communicator; the graphics remind me of some Linux shells or perhaps generic X-Windows.

A "My Panels" sidebar automatically shows a plethora of information, including sites with similar information, a mini site analysis, and popularity rankings.

Although much has changed in Mozilla, longtime Netscape users will appreciate that many important browser features haven't been arbitrarily moved or altered. For example, you can get to Mozilla's cache settings via the same edit/preferences sequence used by the current Communicator.

The M13 build displays most ordinary Web pages without trouble, but support for advanced features is still weak (as is to be expected in an alpha). To see exactly what the alpha could and could not do, I subjected it to the battery of 300 or so browser tests comprising BrowserTune (http://www.browsertune.com).

In its foundation functions, the alpha Mozilla 5 is already better than Communicator 4.7. For example, Mozilla 5 finally cleans up some ancient bugs and nonstandard behaviors (such as in table and form handling) that have plagued Netscape browsers for years.

But multimedia support (sound, video, streaming media) is almost entirely lacking in this build. That's to be expected--the developers want to get the core browser right before they start layering in plug-ins and add-ons. We'll have to wait for future builds to see what Mozilla 5 will support natively.

Support for cascading style sheets, Dynamic HTML, the Extensible Markup Language, the Extensible Style Sheet Language, and data binding ranged from unfinished to nonexistent in this build. Mozilla 5 is clearly moving toward full support of World Wide Web Consortium standards, but the current build does not fully support the consortium's current standards and is not backward compatible with older, proprietary Netscape features such as the "layer" tag.

The alpha also is noticeably slower at displaying pages than is either Communicator 4.7 or Internet Explorer 5+, but this is a common trait of alpha releases that have not yet been optimized and still contain debugging code.

The scripting engine also is not yet tuned: It performed the BrowserTune general scripting tests 18% slower than Communicator 4.7, and the BrowserTune text-and-window scripting test was an incredible 70% slower. The browser also stalled dead on several pages with large, complex scripts.

There are a host of minor bugs and weirdnesses, too, but for an alpha, the M13 release is in excellent shape. According to Mozilla.org's timetable, there will be at least seven more releases, with the final one, M19, due out probably this summer. By then, Mozilla 5 should be an excellent browser.

But I have to wonder if it will matter. Until a few weeks ago, I might have said yes. I thought America Online might drop its agreement with Microsoft, for example, and supply its 22 million users with a copy of Mozilla, making it an instant hit and a major force. But now that AOL has become the media giant it is (with Time Warner and EMI records becoming part of the company), any attempt to force-feed a particular browser to its users could run afoul of antitrust laws. In effect, AOL would be doing exactly the same thing it accused Microsoft of during the Microsoft-Department of Justice trial.

Plus, Mozilla 5 is very, very late. The project was announced almost two years ago, and the final version was supposed to ship in December 1998. During Mozilla's extended gestation, Microsoft cleaned up its browser act and turned the free Internet Explorer 5 into a highly capable, standards-compliant browser. Opera is still advancing and getting better with each release. And, according to BrowserWatch, there are more than two dozen other browser types and brands out on the Web, each competing for mind- and marketshare. It's not as though there's a crying need for yet another browser out there.

I last covered Mozilla almost a year ago in this space, and my conclusions then may still apply. I said Mozilla will "be a hit (almost no matter what) among the rabid anti-Microsoft partisans, but it's hard to imagine what inducement the Mozillans or Netscape could offer to average business users who already have an excellent browser. ...

"Netscape's gamble may have backfired: With the external distractions of the open-source movement and the even larger distractions of being eaten by AOL, the company may have lost too much momentum. It just might be 'game over.' "

But what's your take? Will Mozilla be strong enough to succeed in its own right, or will it gain users only among those who hate Microsoft? Will AOL force-feed the new browser to its users, carpet-bombing the world with Mozilla CDs? Do you think Netscape and the Mozillans can catch up, or has too much time elapsed? Is it "game over" for Netscape--or a whole new beginning? Join in this discussion!

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