The matrix is reloading …

Chris “coldacid” Charabaruk has posted a silly rant criticizing CNet’s review of Mozilla 1.0. “Perhaps trained monkeys write their reviews”, he says, concluding that “Perhaps it’s time for the CNet management to pull their heads out of Microsoft’s ass”.

Chris, perhaps it’s time for you to take a holiday.

You can try spraying invective at everyone who doesn’t think the Mozilla groupthink. But that solution doesn’t scale — because there are millions of those people, so you’ll just end up with ulcers, and they’ll just end up ignoring you. It’s much more efficient just to fix the problems they’re complaining about. Let’s take them one at a time.

[The review] implies that closed source software is always superior to any open source counterpart. Something we know to be false.

Who’s this “we”, Chris? Mozilla contributors? Slashdot readers? The people you hang out with on IRC?

Currently, open source software is only better at the invisible stuff — stability, security, and (in some cases) speed. In the visible stuff, it tends to suck, and the visible stuff is what the general public judge it on. Now, even putting aside its usability problems, Mozilla’s interface is just plain sloppy. And it’s only natural to expect that sloppiness to continue in the back end, even if it doesn’t.

The cure for this is polish and patience. Polish Mozilla’s front end, so it looks more professional than Internet Explorer’s front end, and people won’t be so surprised that the back end is more professional too. And develop more Free software which is clearly better than its proprietary competitors, so people get used to the idea that it can be better.

… Pages [designed for Internet Explorer] look odd [in Mozilla] for a reason, that reason being that IE’s renderer is not truly standards-compliant. Well, Mozilla is.”

I could quibble at the black and white statement (Mozilla’s standards compliance is far from perfect, and Internet Explorer is far from hopeless), but that’s not the point. The point is, how on earth do you expect users to know this? Do you expect the W3C specifications to seep into their brains by osmosis?

If you want to fix this problem, implement the icon in Navigator’s status bar which goes sad when a page is badly non-standard. Just have it complain about missing doctypes to start with, then we can gradually get more picky in later versions. That would achieve more than a dozen evangelists would.

You'll find that behavior all over Mozilla. File->Exit or File->Quit, they all close Mozilla completely. As it has been from the beginning. Why have you not caught on to that before?

Because it’s a completely retarded behavior, Chris, that’s why. It’s an unfortunate tradition on the Mac (though even there, you’d expect a browser and a mailer and a Web page editor and an IRC client to be four separate programs), but elsewhere it’s just dumb. Microsoft figured this out a long time ago, and removed the “Exit” menu item from Internet Explorer. Of course, when I recommend the same for Mozilla, people whine, because they would rather protect their own comfort zone than make Mozilla usable for the general public. (Instead, these people propose adding a confirmation alert, one which says “Are you sure you want Mozilla to be completely retarded?”.)

If you actually found bugs [in Chatzilla], then file them in Bugzilla. I'll bet that you just didn't know what the … you were doing, you clown.

Oh, grow up. Bugzilla’s interface is even worse than Chatzilla’s is — and as with Chatzilla, Bugzilla’s maintainer is going to keep it difficult to use for as long as possible. Expecting a reviewer, of all people, to file bugs is just daft.

“Uninstaller included?: No” Found on the download page. There is an uninstaller (for installer downloads).

Maybe you have a point here — I can’t tell, because I can’t run Mozilla on Windows. Since the Windows architecture is broken to the extent that programs typically need installers, perhaps it should be more obvious that Mozilla can be uninstalled without one. Perhaps this was was the trigger which set you off, hunting for flaws in the review rather than flaws in Mozilla.

Chris, don’t get mad, get even. Fix the bugs in Mozilla. It’s easier.

[2002-06-14: An apology.]