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Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek)
eWeek reviews
Mozilla 1.5 beta. "With the Mozilla 1.5 Beta, the project is
promising improvements in performance, stability, standards support and Web
compatibility. But new features are not the primary focus. The beta release
marks the beginning of the project's journey to focus more energy on end
users and promotion of its efforts now that it is an independent
organization, Mozilla President Mitchell Baker said."
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Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 1, 2003 22:20 UTC (Mon) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link] If "standards support" and "Web compatibility" are at the top of the priority list, one can only hope that the brain-dead decision to remove MNG support from Mozilla in the 1.5 branch will be reversed ASAP.
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 13:12 UTC (Tue) by dbhost (guest, #3461) [Link] What content creation software supports this format? I have been doing graphics for web and print for a long time now and have never been exposed to MNG. It does look promising however. A good alternative to .gif if it can get the file sizes down to a decent level...
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 14:09 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] I don't know about MNG, but with PNG you can get files even smaller than GIF's; it seems Photoshop and friends are crappy in exporting pictures to it; look it up!
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 15:10 UTC (Tue) by cpetig (guest, #13241) [Link] ImageMagic lets you easily create mngs out of animated gifs (convert x.gif x.mng). Usually these things are about 10% smallerAnd MNG is your only (free) option if you want to have transparent or animated pictures which are jpeg compressed [like mjpeg with transparency]. But I don't know of a decent tool to create such beasts either (perhaps an experimental film-gimp version). Since MNG is a superset of png and jpg executable size is not a good reason to kill it (you should be able to leave the png and jpg code out). [I know it's not as well tested as the older code]
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 1, 2003 23:41 UTC (Mon) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link] Much as I like to use Mozilla, and am glad it exists as an alternative to MS Internet Explorer, I must say that friendliness to the end user has not exactly been a hallmark of the Mozilla organization to date. Hostility to any end user who dares question decisions handed down from On High has been closer to the mark, in fact.I can only hope this means the Mozilla foundation plans to go through the bug database and really think about how some of those bugs are affecting real end users, and real enterprises which have considered deploying Mozilla. sPh
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 13:28 UTC (Tue) by mmealman (guest, #9223) [Link] Here's a great example of that.http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 13:49 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] IMHO it's perfectly acceptable for a project not to encourage antisocial behavior or netiquette breach, even if it can be implemented. Tolerating sloppiness is one thing, tolerating ignorance is another. Most topposters don't know that topposting is bad. Make it hard for them to toppost, and they will learn to quote properly.Don't we criticize Microsoft Outlook that it makes it too easy to run attachments and get infected? Not everything should be easy. Bad things should not be. That's the moral obligation of the developers.
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 14:28 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] Ok, here's the deal: I looked up what you say it's an example of "user-unfriendlyness" of moz developers. And, guess what, it's not. It's simply a case of people who don't know the basic rules of netiquette, mainly because MS Outlook and Outlook Express invented a new way of doing things.The bug reporter, to the lazy guys who don't want to visit it, is asking the moz team to put the sender's signature above the quoted e-mail text, when replying. It happens that, when replying to an e-mail, the polite thing to do, and the appropriate thing to do, bandwidth-wise, is to edit the quoted e-mail and intermingle your comments with the comments of your interlocutors, in a dialog-like fashion. And it's with very good reasoning: if you just quote the whole message thread below your message, (1) the quoted text adds nothing to the discussion; it's useless, because the only connection made by the reader of the new message with the quoted message is the "Subject:" header; the quoted text will most likely never be seen, and (2) because it's useless, it's a waste of bandwidth. It's impolite, anyway, too, to have a big .signature cloggin every e-mail you send. People on the bug report "Additional Comments" tried to explain that "message composing above quoted text" is evil, to no avail.
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 2, 2003 17:50 UTC (Tue) by joib (guest, #8541) [Link] A: Top postersQ: What's the most irritating thing on usenet?
Mozilla's New Focus: The End User (eWeek) Posted Sep 5, 2003 2:16 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (✭ supporter ✭, #7050) [Link] A: No.Q: Should new text come before quoted text?
Distros should do a better job of bundling plugins Posted Sep 2, 2003 2:51 UTC (Tue) by dwalters (guest, #4207) [Link] It's nice to see that Mozilla will be focusing more on end-users in the future, but this is all moot unless the major distros do a better job of bundling plug-ins (to be honest, I'm not entirely sure it's necessarily the fault of the distributors; perhaps it's more to do with licensing issues).It has always annoyed me when upgrading to the latest version of Red Hat Linux on my family's PC, that I always have to go through the ritual of installing Java, RealPlayer and Flash plug-ins, and players for MPEG, MOV and AVI files, just to make the browser useable to visit a lot of web sites. And these installations are not necesarily straightforward either, so I'm not sure how Joe Average User is supposed to be able to do it.
Distros should do a better job of bundling plugins Posted Sep 2, 2003 4:49 UTC (Tue) by ctg (subscriber, #3459) [Link] You need to try a different distro. Not all distros are Red Hat. Red Hatis very hard line when it comes to including things that are not free software - so all of the plugins you mention are not included for that reason. Most other distros take a different view (with the exception of Debian). So, SuSE for example, includes java, flash and real. And supports MP3 playback out of the box. I expect the same would be true of all the desktop oriented ones - Lindows, Xandros etc.
Distros should do a better job of bundling plugins Posted Sep 2, 2003 12:12 UTC (Tue) by dusty (guest, #14668) [Link] It takes like 15 minutes if you have broadband to download and install all the plugins for Redhats distro build. I do wonder what the avg person thinks when they have to go to a terminal for the first time? I have only seen one real auto installer and that was for Unreal 2003, which is .sh. It really gets down to what is simpler vs. what is truly 'open'. I will take the open and download what i need as for as plugins thank you. Redhat stands up for us. If all companies did than binary onlys would be a thing of the past and EVERYTHING would be open.
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