The Lurker

Mozilla

Lots of people I know are starting to try Mozilla. Somebody told me the other day (I'll check my logs later to see who it was, heh; it was either Neelix or westyx) that two minutes with Mozilla was enough to convert him. Last night xaverlex (who looked like sticking with Netscape 4.x indefinitely, until it committed suicide and refused to show anything other than his home page) said he was getting a lot of use out of the "block images from this server" feature. People who thought Mozilla was a pile of crap even as recently as some of the 0.9.x releases are suddenly impressed.

I've been using Mozilla as my main browser for about two years now. I disliked Netscape 4 enough to overlook Mozilla's shortcomings, and on Linux there wasn't much in the way of alternatives (though perhaps I should have given Konqueror a try). For much of that time I wouldn't have recommended it to anyone. But lately I've been exposed to Internet Explorer again, and now I would without hesitation recommend Mozilla to anyone. IE6 just feels clunky, in the same way Netscape 4.x did two or three years ago. It'll be interesting to see to what extent the next major release of IE will be a response to Mozilla. But if Netscape's market share doesn't increase significantly, there'll be little reason for it.

I read somewhere AOL's latest pre-release of their client software, contrary to earlier rumours suggesting otherwise, is still based on Internet Explorer rather than Mozilla or Netscape. I can see why they wouldn't want to rewrite their entire interface in XUL, but I'm surprised they didn't move to Gecko (the core of Mozilla, which handles displaying web content). Having those millions of AOL users browsing the web with a non-Microsoft browser might get people writing to web standards, which would have convenient side-effects for Linux users like me.