The browser war is over. What Mozilla offers is more akin to a browser insurrection.
It's been a rocky road for Internet Explorer, but it's arguably fair to say that it's finally won the browser war. Sure, maybe it had 90%+ market share a good two years ago, but that whole monopoly suit was something of a thorn in its side. With the DOJ itself taking on the role of Androcles and pulling out all but the last shreds of that thorn, IE can theoretically sit back and enjoy its market share.
There are still browser alternatives out there, including one time king of the browsers Netscape; not that anyone but a sadist with a lot of memory to spare runs Netscape. Opera's an excellent browser alternative, but many people are reluctant to actually spend money on a browser, and open source alternatives like Konqueror have lagged somewhat in the features department.
Four long years ago, in a galaxy far, far away
One of the most important things to come out of Netscape's radical realignment into a free browser was the announcement and ensuing development of Mozilla, the open source version of Netscape. All further releases of Netscape would be released based upon existing and tested Mozilla prerelease builds. It's been over four years since Mozilla itself was announced, however, and it's still not actually up to version one yet. Cynics might point out that vaporware releases are more commonly the province of games designers, but Mozilla has plodded along a slow but steady track quite deliberately in its near half-decade of development. The latest Mozilla off the ranks is the promisingly titled Mozilla 0.9.9. Surely Mozilla 1.0 can't be too far behind. We tested the Windows version of Mozilla 0.9.9.
Mozilla is currently just a web browser, based on the Gecko rendering engine. Future plans call for the underlying engine to be much more than a browser, and more of a cross platform tool for software (including browsers) to run on. For the time being, though, your exposure to Mozilla will still be in its browser incarnation.
Why switch?What then, makes it a compelling browser to use against IE, which, let's face it, already has operating system pre-eminence and a firmly entrenched position in the Windows hierarchy?
Well, for a start, if you're not part of the Windows hierarchy, Mozilla has a certain appeal. Name an operating system, and there's probably a Mozilla port for it. And if there isn't a version for the obscure OS you do run, you could always offer to build it yourself.
While it's still technically a prerelease version, Mozilla 0.9.9 is quite stable. Crashes did occur, but were very few and far inbetween. Page rendering -- claimed to be a core part of what makes Gecko desirable -- is as swift as it is in Internet Explorer, and pages, for the most part, look identical. If you're going to bother with Mozilla, it's worth working out which plugins you use most frequently. Common plugins like Flash will even recognise that you're using Mozilla, which is neat.
For users who've looked at previous Mozilla builds, 0.9.9 has a few new tricks under its sleeves. MathML, a W3C specification for displaying complex mathematical formulae, is implemented on those systems that support it, and there's support for SOAP as well. Depending on the version and OS that you looked at, there's also a bunch of additional new features, ranging from TrueType support for Unix platforms to SSL support for the Be version.
Like Opera, Mozilla supports browsing through individual tabbed windows or through complete separate windows, a la IE. Unlike Opera, though, there's no obvious option to make tabs the default, which we found somewhat annoying. In terms of options, everything is handled through a very standard preferences bar, and it's here we hit one of the only bugs we've found in this release. On occasion, the preferences window will refuse to close with a click of the OK button, and can only be cancelled. This isn't an unknown bug; Mozilla.org notes that it still happens. Definitely something to be fixed.
Users migrating from Internet Explorer will initially find a few odd key choices and options that speak more of Mozilla's Netscape heritage than anything else. Pages are opened via a CRTL-L keystroke rather than CTRL-O, which Mozilla uses exclusively for opening local files. Mozilla still uses Netscape's bookmark setup, but will intelligently search out Internet Explorer favorites.
One criticism that's been thrown at Mozilla in the past is that it's somewhat slow to actually start. Mozilla defenders point out that IE starts more quickly than Mozilla because the internal IE rendering engine is so closely tied into Windows itself. In other words, IE (they claim) takes as long to load; it's just that it's part of Windows normal boot procedure rather than a genuine separate program loading time. If you've got the memory to spare, Mozilla can be included in the Windows boot sequence, speeding loading times. In any case, Mozilla 0.9.9 didn't strike us as taking any longer to load than any other reasonably sized Windows application.
When somebody asks you if you're a God, you say yes!Mozilla uses XML to define its appearance using what it calls XUL (pronounced "Zool", think "Ghostbusters"), the XML-based User interface Language. This means that the entire interface isn't just skinnable, it's also not too complex to program for. As could be expected, Star Trek themes abound. The version of Mozilla we downloaded came with two themes, Classic, which looks almost exactly like version 4.6 era Netscape, and Modern, which has a certain Mac OS X ambience to it. Switching themes shows off the elegance of Gecko as a rendering engine; changes were implemented faster than we could track them, and switching back is just as easy. Things that make it go boom
One thing that did impress us with the Windows version of Mozilla were on the rare occasions when it crashed. Yes, you read that correctly, we liked it when it blew up into small stinking chunks. Why? Well, unlike IE, when Mozilla crashes, it doesn't tend to take the entire operating system with it, instead generating a small polite error message. If you have one of the talkback builds enabled, Mozilla will request that you send the crash data back to Mozilla.org for analysis in much the same way that Windows XP does.
Ultimately, browsers have been used by people more as a matter of convenience and familiarity than technical merit, and on that basis it's unlikely that Mozilla will ever unseat or even mount a spectacular challenge to IE. But if IE isn't your choice of browser, or you like the ethics of open source development, Mozilla's definitely the leader of the pack. At the end of the day it's free, it's a relatively small download -- around half to a quarter the size of IE 6, depending on download options -- and it does what a web browser should do -- browse the web.
Mozilla 0.9.9
Company: Mozilla
Price: Free
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