Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Tim McNerney wrote:
>
>>>How can something run late if it had no target release date?
>>>
>>You can hide your head in the sand and claim that it isn't late because
>>it never had an official release date. But by any reasonable estimate,
>>you are running years late.
>>
>
> We're doing better than any other browser, based on time from zero source.
No you're not.
> Don't forget that Microsoft have been working on IE for longer than
> we have been working on Mozilla.
The difference being they've had a dozen usable releases in that time
frame. Mozilla has had 0. Even .9.2 still corrupts my email on a regular
basis.
>
>
>>I think there is a good chance that Mozilla 1.0 will take the same
>>amount of time that Netscape 1-4 took to release.
>>
>
> Probably longer, since we have to implement everything that 4.x had PLUS
> MORE in order to be relevant.
Do you work in the software industry? I don't mean this to be insulting,
but I really can't understand some of your comments unless I assume that
you've never done any coding. By your arguement, to rewrite Excel from
scratch would take 20 years, Windows would take 25 years, X Windows
would take about 18 years. The idea about starting a product from
scratch is that hopefully, you've learned something. If you are ever
working in the industry and recommend a rewrite from scratch for a
product that has been around for a while and estimate that it will take
as long as it took to get to that point originally, you will be
unemployed before you get a chance to unroll your roadmap.
>
>
>>It's fine if you want to go on about how you can do whatever you want
>>and release only when everyone is happy and no one can do anything about
>>it. You're right. Just don't expect anyone to give a shit when it does
>>happen. You'll have the most standards compliant browser (standards that
>>have almost all been superceded) that no one in the world uses.
>>
>
> If when we release we're the best browser in the world, why would nobody
> care? That makes no sense.
Several points. There is very little chance that Mozilla 1.0 will be the
best browser in the world. The best I think you can reasonably hope for
will be the most standards compliant browser. There is a lot more to a
browser than that, though. IE is a solid, stable, easy to use product
that is not terribly standards compliant.
Second point. Even if it were the best, the best doesn't always win. In
fact, it is rarely the main factor in a products success.
And finally, no one will care, because the most important factor in a
browsers success at this point is whether it will display the pages out
there the way the author intended. And authors could care less about
w3org at this point, because in order for an author to write a page that
will appear correct to their users, all they have to do is write it so
that it appears correct to IE. Writing a page that will work with
Netscape 4.x at this point is an afterthought. Writing a page to work
with a fully standards compliant browser isn't even that. When folks
managed to argue that mozilla should switch to gecko so that they would
be able to finally code to a single standard, they probably didn't
expect to get their wish granted in the way it has happened. Mozilla
killed the viability of Netscape Communicator, the only real competition
to IE, and so now web designers only have to code to one standard. And
that standard is defined by IE.
If mozilla ever does release 1.0, the only web pages that will look
better with it than IE will probably be w3org, the mozilla test suite
and www.hixie.ch.
--Tim
