Is our favorite lizard dead? I've been using Mozilla as my primary Web browser from version 0.7 of it or thereabout (that must have been early 2001); I've been recommending it to everyone since version 1.0 (released 2002-06-05); and I recompile the beast (the Sea Monkey, to be precise) every week or so based on the then-current CVS snapshot. Now since Mozilla 1.4 this summer, perhaps even 1.3, I can't recall any significant novelty of any kind: whether new feature, bug fix, or anything. It seems that they've been releasing new version after new version that were practically identical with each other: is this because the death of Netscape left Mozilla moneyless? I follow MozillaZine, but uninteresting news items are all I ever see, like, this-or-that corporation recommends Mozilla, or this-or-that government decided to use Mozilla for its internal use, or here-or-there you can buy Mozilla promotional tee-shirts (or coffee, or whatever): fine, but not really to the point.
Perhaps the activity is still going on other fronts, such as FireBird and ThunderBird — those I do not use (because recovering all the Sea Monkey features that I need would require installing zillions of not-too-stable extensions), and I feel like all of what Mozilla is doing now is putting back in these children what used to be in the Sea Monkey and which they had removed to create the birds.
Actually, I've observed a few
regressions in the layout engine, affecting this 'blog. In this very
page, for example, the right margin and/or the bottom margin of each
entry is always wrong with the Mozilla version I use (at least one of
them is too large, and sometimes both are). In this paragraph, in
principle, the left and right margins (the distance between the edge
of the text and the edge of the entry's bounding box) should be
precisely the same, and should also be the same as the bottom margin
of the entry (the distance between the Comments
link and the
bottom edge of the box); typically this isn't the case. I haven't
submitted a report for that bug, because I was unable to provide a
clear test case, and it isn't systematically reproducible anyway.
Like everybody, I have my pet bugs in the Lizard. Every time a new
release is announced on MozillaZine, half of the posts are sarcastic
comments from people who ask, have they finally fixed <my
favorite bug> yet? I really really can't use Mozilla until
they do; <insert some more blathering about why this bug is
super-important and should be on the developers' top-priority
list>
. Well, I don't complain that much, but I'm still annoyed
that Mozilla can't
handle XHTML content incrementally (which sort of
forbids the use of XHTML, and, consequently, of
XML), <ruby>
support is still missing, X
Window System selection is buggy, helper
applications can't be passed any command-line arguments (this is
the most ridiculous bug ever, and could be fixed in five minutes by
anyone who knows a bit about the Mozilla source tree), pixel
roundoff problems (this is a serious design problem, of which I
already spoke here) still occur, ChatZilla
does not handle DCC, tooltips cause various
troubles,
SVG has the most ridiculous crash
bug, and so on. I'm not even bothering to count, report, or
mention, printing bugs, because Mozilla printing is so utterly broken
that I've never been able to do anything remotely useful with
it (when I wish to print HTML documents, I generally turn
to Konqueror or something;
maybe I should try FOP instead).
Anyway, none of these bugs are likely to be fixed anytime soon,
unfortunately: if I really cared, I would learn enough
C++ and enough Mozilla-hacking to fix them myself (some
should be relatively easy), but, of course, I won't. But it's not so
much the fact that my favorite bugs aren't (ever going to be) fixed
that worries me: it's the fact that nothing seems to be
happening, these days.
Hello, Mozilla? Is anyone there?