David Tenser wrote: > Yes, it's obvious that Mozilla's aim is to make a near-perfect, secure > webpage renderer. Gecko is the heart of it all. > > The problem is, too few real people are actually using Mozilla, so no > one knows just how many security holes there is in it (and I bet it's > *hundreds*, based on the the number of bugs reported every day). You > simply can't say that Mozilla is a good replacement for IE when it comes > to security. We simply don't know that yet.
There are probable more mozilla testers than IE will ever have ! Mozilla is a browser targeted at developpers, most of mozilla users are techies unlike IE users and they participate to mozilla development. IE users don't even have a proper way to report bugs and nobody knows what IE source code is like. As far as security is concerned, IE security flaws are mainly due to MS technical choices (activeX, JScript...) and its integration into the OS. The latest Messenge/IE bug is a good example of it : http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2847331,00.html In fact, with such a reasonning, you should also say that Linux And FreeBSD are unsafe OSes since they are also Open Source projects used by very few people (in % of market share, of course :-) ) > > And Mozilla _is_ far behind when it comes to speed and features. The UI is almost as fast as IE's on a recent machine. > Unfortunately, I cannot blame only them for the speed issues, since one > reason why it's slow is that it is not part of the Windows API. IE will > always be faster than its competitors. Page rendering is often faster in Mozilla on my PC. But Mozilla could at least have > better (and more) features than IE has. But it hasn't! it definitely has : - Much _much_ better CSS/DOM/ECMAscript support + PNG support - Javascript events fine tuning (no unwanted pop-up windows for instance) - tab-browsing - themes - user stylesheets - <link> site navigation bar - block images from servers (kill banners) - cross-platform rendering - master password protection - Dom inspector, venkman, comprehensive page info... > > Right, Mozilla is the most standards compliant browser available to > date. But what about usability? Will mozilla ever be as user friendly > and customizable as IE? I never found IE user-friendly, in fact many people sticked to NS4 just because they found its UI more intuitive than IE's. > > Mozilla should add every little feature they can find in IE/OE, and make > sure they do it all better! If Outlook Express has more advanced > filtering options than project Mozilla, something is wrong. There is nothing wrong, Mozilla is a work in progress and new features are added every day. Development will not stop at 1.0, 1.0 is not any kind of holy grail to achieve, it will only mean API freezing. Pascal
