July 2003 Archives

Regular readers will know that I keep my eye out for Mozilla-related news on the web and often link to the stories and blog posts that I find. Today, while mucking about in the various search tools I frequent for Mozilla-related news, I ran acorss a number of articles and blogs discussing Safari's doubling market share since February

What does that mean and what's the total potential maket there?

Jobs says there are 7 million OS X users. I thought it would be nice to try to find some data that backed that up. According to published reports, Apple has been between 2 and 2.5% of global PC sales for the last few years (more on this at Google.) There have been about 120 million PCs sold each year for the last few years. If few of the Apple sales were upgrades of machines already running OS X then it's quite possible that there are 7 million OS X users out there - so Jobs may not be wildly off-base.

If oneStat (which says Safari has 0.25% of the browser market) and Global Reach (which says there are 620 million intenet users) are to be belived, then Safari has about 1.55 million total users today.

What about Mozilla/Camino/Firebird on Mac OS X? I really don't know. This paragraph is wild speculation based on shakey numbers :-) Roughly 10% of Mozilla downloads (seamonkey+camino+firebird) are for OS X. If Mozilla's has 1.6% of the total internet market (according to oneStat) then roughly .16% of the intenet should be using OS X Mozilla. That would be about 1 million Mac OS X Mozilla users (based on the Global Reach number).

So what does this mean for OS X as a browser market? If Safari is 1.5 million users strong and Mozilla/Camino/Firebird is 1 million, that leaves 4.5 million Mac OS X machines out there that are still up for grabs.

If users realize that there's something better and can be enticed to take the plunge and download a better browser, there is definitely room to grow, for both Safari and Mozilla/Camino/Firebird, in the OS X installed base.

I personally can't stand IE on Mac OS X and I'm sure that, as the word spreads about Safari and Camino/Mozilla/Firebird, more and more users are going to want to upgrade to a more capable application. While it's not a huge block of users (just under 1% of today's total intenet population if the relevant above numbers are legit) I think it's one that's worth going after.

Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, faster page rendering, faster downloading, better support for the standards and the real-world web - the reasons to get off of IE are abundant.

Oh, I almost forgot; the market share growth statistic from all those "Safari doubles market share" stories, when mapped against actual users gained, is roughly 1/3rd of the user growth that Mozilla had in the same period. Still, quite impressive for a product that only recently came out of beta.

note: I suck at math and I've got a reputation for unrealistic predictions and wild, unfounded speculation. On top of that, I only use OS X about three days a week so pretty much everything I just said is probably rubbish.

After considerable time spent searching Red Hat Bugzilla for my Severn issues I finally found one of them - the package manager bug 100445. I haven't located my network hang or batstat crasher yet but I'm gonna spend a few more minutes looking before I file.

I just discovered (via mozillanews) that there's an extension for Firebird which gives it support for Mozilla sidebars. Get the extension at Basic's page and then install all your favorite sidebar panels.

I've been on Red Hat 9.1(?), Severn, for a few days now and most of it works pretty well.

The big problems I've experienced so far are in the package manager tool and network management tool. The package manager seems to not recognize that the CD containing the RPMs is in the drive and mounted, repeatedly insisting that I put the CD in to install. The network utility hangs my system any time I make an adjustment and I'm forced to reboot. Oh, and the batstat applet crashes when I try to start it. Other than that, things are so far so good.

I guess I should go check Red Hat's Bugzilla to see if any of this is reported :-)

The bugfix follow-up to Firebird 0.6 is finally available. This fixes the autocomplete crash, a few security bugs and picks up lots of great core Gecko fixes from the Mozilla trunk. Firebird 0.6.1 is currently available for Windows and Linux and we're working on getting Mac builds completed. Enjoy.

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 was relased today. See the Thunderbird 0.1 Release Notes for information on what's new, installation, and known issues. Great work, mscott!!

If you haven't tried Mozilla Thunderbird yet, I suggest you take the plunge. It's light and fast and does pretty much everything that Mozilla Mail does (including junk-mail filtering) along with a few great features of its own like a new 3-pane view and customizable toolbars. Thunderbird is based on current Mozilla Mail code so even though its version number is still very low, all of the core technologies are quite mature and I haven't had anything like dataloss with any of the recent Thunderbird nightly builds.

via blake and mozillaZine: Firebird was named as a Linux Format "Hottest Pick."

Overall, Firebird is a great browser, jam-packed with goodies and ready for even more through extensions. It's fast, attractive, easy-to-use and mostly reliable, and it's guaranteed a prosperous future.

Thanks to Alex for the catch on the bad link and the correction on the award.

Blogging does make a difference. If you're using Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird, blog about it. Tell your friends. Convert your family. Install it on your co-workers' machines (be careful ;-). Get the word out. Make some noise. Grass-roots marketing will be a driving force in the success of the Mozilla effort and weblogs are where the leather meets the pavement. If you're using Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird, commit to blogging about it regularly. Commit to evangelizing it to one person a day and converting one person a week.

For more on marketing Mozilla, check out Bart Decrem's post at mozillaZine.

some good photos under the bridge and posted them as "the last dance." I'm the ghost.

I've got severn, the latest Red Hat beta, up and running. My first impression is that they've done something to improve UI responsiveness. Maybe that's not the case and my old install was slower for some other reason but this just feels a bit quicker. I'm having difficulties with the package manager and automounting CDs. There's not a lot that sticks out as being new but I've only been on it for a day so maybe I'll find more as I go.

Today we have new (maybe final?) candidate builds of Firebird 0.6.1. You can help us out by testing builds from firebird ftp and reporting any problems in the comments here or over at the mozillazine discussion thread.

We've taken four additional Firebird fixes into the 1.5a branch and created another round of Firebird 0.6.1 candidate builds. See the mozillaZine discussion thread for more information.

Well, so much for that little excursion. Madrake 9.1 is not for me :-(
While the install was pleasant and the first few hours were an interesting adventure, KDE proved to be too featureful at the expense of usability on basic issues and Mandrake's value add wasn't as "friendly" as what Red Hat offers. My three big early disappointments were that Mandrake didn't make wireless configuration (and network in general) nearly easy enough, KDE didn't make an easy task out of something as simple as adding a volume control to the panel, and the combination of Mandrake's additions to the K Menu (start menu thing) and the stock items was just a mess (attempting to customize only made things worse).
I'm sure it's all quite easy for those who have been using that distro and that desktop for a while, but it wasn't good enough for me. Too bad.
I'm off to install the new Red Hat Linux beta, Severn. I'll let you all know how that turns out.

This afternoon I downloaded Mandrake 9.1, backed up my home dir to CD, formatted my drive and installed Mandrake. I've been full-time on Linux since I discovered how much better suited to certain tasks it is than Windows.

My first full-time primary desktop Linux was Red Hat 8 and I've been using that and Red Hat 9 as my primary environment for about 9 months.

Today I decided it was time to see what it was like in KDE and what the other distros looked like. I looked around and Mandrake seemed the highest-profile KDE distro. After a failed first attempt install - the install just hung about half way through and even though it picked up where it left off, I was left with a mostly broken finished product - my second attempt was much more successful. Mandrake has a user-friendly installation routine and almost all of my hardware was automatically detected and didn't require any user intervention. The one exception was my laptop screen and I had to search through a list, finally settling on "flat panel 1600 x 1200" which I assume to be a generic driver. It worked fine and I was off to the races.

The desktop is pretty nice. I had to jack up the fonts in several places to get legible on this resolution (maybe the OS should offer that if the user selects one of the top resolutions?). A couple of downloads later I had Firebird and XChat2 up and running. I explored some of the bundled applications, poked around in the Konqueror uber-application a bit and I'm almost confortable with things.

I'll report back in a few days after I've got the rest of my environment set up and put some more time into it. So far so good. Linux has certainly come a long way in the last three years.

We're planning on doing a Firebird release based on the Mozilla 1.5a branch. This isn't going to be Firebird 0.7 since we haven't met our goals for features and fixes but we think it's important to get the autocomplete crash fix (and a few other fixes) into the hands of all the people currently using 0.6.

We've made the first round of builds based on the 1.5a branch and they're available for testing: Windows and Linux builds just made it to FTP so grab a build and let us know what you think.

Mozilla 1.5 Alpha is available for download

I suppose I should do more to keep an up-to-date blogroll with lots of interesting links but I'm just too lazy. Until I get around to updating, here are a few technology related blogs that I frequent and that you should definitely check out (and bookmark.) These folks are great bloggers that contribute significant new content to blogtopia (and beyond):
John Udell
BurningBird
Tim Bray
Noah Shachtman
Rasterweb
Dan Gillmor

With this last ftp fix, we've got everything in 1.5 Alpha that we want. If all goes well with testing we could have a release in the next day or so. I've got most of the release docs done and I'll land those tonight or tomorrow morning. If you want to help test the (hopefully) final 1.5a bits you can get them at our ftp site. Feel free to note any problems you discover here in the comments or send me mail.

This is an alpha release so expect bugs. There have been some good changes in this cycle and I'm looking forward to seeing what kinds of issues are turned up when it gets more widespread milestone testing.

Nidelven IT has posted two Thunderbird documents. The first, Introduction to Thunderbird, Part 1 covers installation and setup. The second part describes the primary Thunderbird window and basic mail reading. Helping new users get up to speed with our great products is critically important and I'm looking forward to more docs like this.

Tim Bray writes in The Door Is Ajar:

the incumbent is vulnerable, the alternatives are good and cheap. We just have to figure out how to get the alternatives in front of enough of the right people, and eventually just stand back and get out of the way.

He goes on to call for a blogger button campaign. Take a minute for the full article. It's a good read.

update: Richard Tallent responds with an 8 point plan that seems reasonable to me.

Via Arthur, it sounds like John Walkenbach has made the switch to Firebird. John is the man when it comes to Excel books. He's also been a regular contributor to various computer magazines.

update: It sounds like John could save himself a lot of grief by making the switch to Mozilla Thunderbird mail. If you haven't experienced the joys of Mozilla's junk-mail controls, don't wait. Drop everything and get your hands on Mozilla 1.4 or Mozilla Thunderbird.

I've been working some on getting Mozilla 1.5 Alpha released. It should be happening rsn. It's been mostly wrapped up for several days but we're all busy and so it's taking a bit longer than normal to get everything in place. This alpha release contains lots of good fixes. Take a look at the changelog if you're interested.

Scott continues to charge ahead and we get a sampling of his work with the latest thunderbird nightly build. No linux or mac builds yet (I just built it last night and have been using it all day on linux and it's great).

Via RasterWeb, the University of Washington is promoting Mozilla. Nice.

I've received a handful of emails and a few comments here at the blog asking about me and whether I'm still employed. The answer is that yes, I'm still employed by AOL and working out of bldg 21 on the Netscape campus. I'll be working here, along with a handful of others, for the next couple of months to help make the transition. This means I'll continue to be involved in shipping Milestones. I may also be involved some in helping to move old hardware, set up new and faster hardware, etc. etc.

Finally! A Mozilla Foundation :-D

Mitch Kapor has posted some thoughts on the Mozilla Foundation.

If you haven't updated to a recent thunderbird build in a while then now would be a good time. So much has happened recently. Scott, you rock!

Lots happened while I was away :-) Mozilla 1.5 Alpha froze and branched, mozdev.org got taken down by a DOS attack, Arvid Axelsson updated the Mozilla Firebird theme with some new icons and lots of other cleanup; really spruced things up, Blake Ross added auto-scrolling to Firebird on Windows and fixed about a dozen bugs, and Linus Torvalds undertook work on a kernel patch to improve Mozilla loading performance.

I'm back but too tired to blog. Alaska was amazing (again.) Back to posting after I get some sleep :-)

Deanna and I are off to Alaska for a week (again). I won't be toating the laptop and I don't think I'll bump into any internet cafes while rafting the class IVs and Vs of Six Mile Creek (again,) kayaking Resurrection Bay (again,) whale watching and glacier hiking in the Kenai Fjords National Park (again,) or wildlife viewing at Wonder Lake in Denali National Park (first time.)

Back in about a week. 'Till then, enjoy some of the other Mozilla blogs.

I've mentioned on a couple of occasions my desire to read RSS feeds tied to particular topics rather than particular people/blogs. The answer seems to be to subscribe to a feed of search results for that topic at a good RSS search tool. I've taken to subscribing to Feedster search results (which are available as an RSS feed) and using that to keep up on various topics that I'm intersted in ("mozilla," "mars," "astronomy," and "firebird," for example.)

I was lacking just two things to make this a really nice experience. First, I needed a clean and simple feed reader for Firebird. I'd tried NewsMonster which is just too big (and too featureful,) Aggreg8 which isn't quite finished enough and doesn't integrate well with Firebird, and ForumZilla which is also still in the very early stages. None of these really fit my minimal needs.

RSS Reader Panel to the rescue. It has a clean bookmark-based interface that integrates well into Firebird's sidebar, (it even has it's own toolbar button available in the customize palette) and uses the Firebird extension settings mechanism. It's just very sharp and very Firebird.

The second problem I have is that Feedster (unquestionably the best RSS search tool on the planet) only offers ten results in their search results RSS feed and this is insufficient for my needs where there are usually a few dozen new posts that match my search each time I run it. With the regular search I can specify up to 100 results per page but the RSS feed URL doesn't seem to accept the &limit=100 bit. Maybe the kind folks building this great tool will help me out :-)

David Tenser reports "The Extensions pages at Mozilla *bird Help now indirectly uses the centralized database at database.mozdev.org!"

I really liked the title of this one: Mozizzle Fo Shizzle. The post highlights a few key features that should make anyone want to move away from IE.

The WaMCom project has Mozilla 1.3.1 compiled for Mac OS 9! For all you OS9 users that were begging for a 1.3 release (mozilla.org discontinued making mac classic builds at 1.2), you can now enjoy spam-free email, image auto-sizing, and much, much more. Kickass! (Spread the word.)

Slashdot has a good posting today on the emerging Chinese Mars program. The post contains some good links and some reasonably intersting discussion if you avoid the silly political debate and insults.

eWeek on Mozilla 1.4:

eWEEK Labs found the new features in Mozilla 1.4, which was released on www.mozilla.org this week, to be remarkable improvements that enhance what was already the best browser option out there.

Ben Goodger on Mozilla Firebird:

We have wanted this for a long time. For years, in fact. We are proud of Firebird, we have aggressive plans for developing and marketing it. We feel Mozilla has wallowed in the shadows of obscurity and irrelevance for too long, and are actively working towards a future where we present a viable alternative browser for millions of computer users around the world.

Henrik Gemal has a great article on building Mozilla Thunderbird using free tools on Windows. Good stuff!

I somehow forgot to post this yesterday. Sorry.

The second Mars Exploration Rover, named Opportunity, will not launch until July 5th at the earliest. They've decided to spend a little more time on this cork insulation thing.

According to Techweb mozilla.org claims to have stamped out thousands of bugs in 1.4. It's more than a claim.