Mozilla Milestone 11

The Mozilla project grew out of Netscape’s decision to not only make its browser free, but also to make its source code available for developers to mess with. Netscape (now owned by AOL) created a specific licence (the NPL) to cover how open source versions of Netscape, dubbed ’Mozilla’, may be developed and distributed.
What has grown out of that decision (now almost two years ago, which is a lifetime in some open source circles) is not just a push to create a newer, better browser, but also a distinct development community, looking to consistently improve Mozilla and enhance its feature set.
There’s no ’release’ version of Mozilla available (as yet), just consistently changing builds. As details are finalised, and the builds become more stable, ‘milestone’ releases of the browser allow the wider community to take a peek at how the fledgling browser is coming along. These milestones (APC looked at Milestone 11) are far from even being beta software, and come with the requisite warnings about the potential for dire things to happen to your operating system. APC has run Mozilla for some time, and apart from the odd crash, our systems have yet to catch fire.
You may be thinking, ‘Hang on — the two major browsers are free. Why should I care?’. There are a couple of major reasons. For a start, the next major release of Netscape’s own Communicator product (presumably 5.0, although they could always go mad and call it Albert) will contain code culled from Mozilla. If that isn’t enough to float your boat, there’s always the fact that Mozilla is an evolving product open to scrutiny — which means (in theory) better and quicker bug fixes, no strange hidden applications to suddenly send information to remote servers, and the promise of bigger and better — as soon as somebody gets around to coding it.
If even those arguments aren’t enough to sway you, a quick look at Mozilla might just do the trick. There’s certainly a lot that mimics its Netscape heritage, but the interface has a slick overall appearance that’s significantly different to anything else available. Add to that the promised inclusion of customisable browser ‘skins’ and the sky’s the limit.
The other enticing feature of Mozilla is the speed. When Mozilla runs, it runs fast. The central rendering engine (The NGLay-out project, or Gecko) is used for both page display and interface rendering, and it works quickly and relatively seamlessly. If you’ve every wondered what your browser is actually doing in the background, you may be interested in reading the report generated by a background application that tracks your progress.
Mozilla itself is spread across a number of different applications, which allows for much more discrete bug fixing, as well as the provision of several unique features. The entire project has been designed from the ground up to be multilingual, and by separating the language module from the source program, this simply becomes a question of having the correct module.
The inclusion of language modules also brings us to one of Mozilla’s neatest features: translation. A menu function allows you to translate a page between a number of languages with ease, although the results tend to be a little gramati-cally suspect.
If you’re feeling brave, you can compile Mozilla yourself, or even have a crack at creating a version for an as yet uncharted operating system, but you’ll have to be quick, as most operating systems are already covered. For the less-brave end user, compiled versions of the code are available constantly at Mozilla.org — APC had a look at the Win32 version, but there are also versions available for Mac, Linux, and various Unix flavours. The important thing to remember about Mozilla is that it’s a constantly growing beast, so these early releases are essentially bug generators. If it crashes, you should submit the bug so it can be fixed.
The practical upshot of all this should be a better, faster browser for everybody. That’s got to be good. Unlike a lot of commercial software, the documentation lists exactly where everything installs, how to use it, where to place it in directory terms and how to delete it all once you’re done.
At this early stage there are also features that are yet to be implemented, and features that still need more development, such as java, JavaScript and XML support. In addition, there is a certain degree of instability (although APC has seen worse commercial release software), but the promise is definitely there for a whole new browsing experience. Add the multiplatform nature of the application itself, and you’re looking at a browser that stands a very good chance of actually being a ‘standard’ in the all too confusing browser wars.
The final argument to try to convince you to give Mozilla a swing? At 5.6M for the Windows version, it’s approximately one-tenth the size of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.