Matt Williams wrote: > David Tenser wrote: > >> Exactly my point. You can customize Mozilla to be a totally different >> browser if you really want and have the time. On the other hand, you >> could also make your own web browser from scratch if you had the time >> and knowledge, so that doesn't help the average user. It seems for me >> that Mozilla doesn't aim for the big market. It aims for developers. >> What is that, 5% of the market? Maybe 10? > > > For what it is worth, I am an average user and with the help of the > Netscape newsgroup I find that 6.2.1 meets most of my needs. I find > that the posts to the newsgroups that complain the most are from people > who are much more in the mold of developers. I think most of the > average users are quietly using Netscape as the latest incarnation of > "The Silent Majority"
Read here http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$35 Interesting reading about the lack of usability in Mozilla. At least I agree with the author. >>> Any color as long as it's black. BUT YOU CAN USE ALL KINDS OF >>> DIFFERENT SKINS! >>> >>> Oh, well, not really, something like a grand total of SIX at last >>> count, if you search really hard and don't mind a lot of stuff not >>> working. But that XUL was sure worth it! Pfhht. > One quick question . . . how does having a skin make your life easier or > more productive?> If not, why put so much effort in supporting skins in Mozilla? Truth is, most of the users doesn't care much of skin support in a browser. >> Yeah, I was amazed by the fact that Mozilla have been around for >> several (?) years, and there's only like five skins available. And as >> you point out, few are viable alternatives to the tvo main skins. > > Who cares? And why do they care? My initial point was that there is much effort in making Mozilla skinnable, with a solid API foundation to work with, but most users would benefit from customizable toolbars instead of skins. >> Anyway, I can't complain much about standard-compliance with Mozilla, >> aside from trivial issues such as favicon.ico. But Mozilla is going >> nowhere on the Windows platform as long as they don't also focus on >> the UI and associated functionality. The average Windows user does not >> care if the Gecko engine renders the page with higher precision and >> (maybe) speed compared to IE. > > Why don't they? If they don't what do they care about? They care more about simplicity and usability than page rendering speed. But Mozilla is making progress here, so lets wait and see what happens in this area. >> Yes, I realize that what I just wrote sounded strange, since the UI >> _is_ the Gecko engine, as you so cleverly pointed out. This is why >> Mozilla is so slow! Ok, the page may be rendered faster according to >> some advanced benchmarking tests, but the average user (I keep getting >> back to that user!) won't even notice it. She will only notice that >> the program loads slowly and is slow overall. > > Your loading comment may be right, but compared to the loading of > Windows NT its licketty split, so I guess everything is relative. As an > end-user of both IE and 6.2.1 I find them to be of comparable speed. Can > you give me some URLs that show the speed differential that you refer to. I refer to the loading speed, which is constantly improving. Again, read here for more info: http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$35 Thanks to Pratik for the link. / David
