[WEB4LIB] Gecko on the go?

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew I. Mutch <amutch at tln.lib.mi.us>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Friday, December 18, 1998 8:47 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Gecko on the go?


>A few weeks ago, I asked for a reaction to Netscape's announcement of the
>release of Gecko, the layout engine that has emerged from the Mozilla
Open
>Source effort to create the 5.0 version of Navigator.  At that time, a
few
>"doubting Thomas's" said "we will believe the hype when we see it!" :)
>So, now that there has been time to test-drive this new engine, what do
>people think?

I guess I am, by name, one of the doubting Thomases.  I have now had a
chance to download the actual "gecko" developer's preview, rather than a
build from a couple months ago from mozilla.org.  I think it is, well, a
developer's preview.

I have only heard claims for what the final release should support, but it
takes almost no time to see that gecko does not support all of HTML 4, it
does not support all of CSS1, and some of what it does support is
incomplete or wrong.

I don't doubt that this engine will ultimately come a lot closer to doing
things right, and that it will be used to make Netscape 5.x a
substantially better browser than Netscape 4.x.  In the meantime, I think
it's unfair to both users and developers for anyone to start basing
expectations (about performance, about compliance, about anything) on
gecko.

>
>I personally am very impressed with the speed at which pages are loaded.

[Bill Drew adds, "It took 2 seconds to load our college homepage.  It
takes Netscape 4.0 or IE 4.0 at least a minute to do that."]

If I save the CNN page or SUNY-Morrisville page on my hard drive (just to
take network delays out of the mix) I see essentially identical loading
times in gecko, IE5b2, and Opera 3.5.

>You simply have to watch it layout an entire page like CNN or CNET in
>the time it takes one of the 4.0 browsers to get the top headers
>displayed.  Others apparently are too.  One commentator thinks its the
>best thing since sliced bread.  See:
>
>http://webreference.com/html/gecko/
>

I dunno, I tend to tune out when people issue breathless statements like
"...it shows every sign of becoming the catalyst for nothing short of
another information revolution that has been years in the making. And I do
_not_ exagerate."  That's extrapolating a lot from a release described by
one of the Netscape developers this way: "It's not a beta, and it's not a
browser, but it's a great sneak peek..." (Angus Davis on
netscape.public.mozilla.layout, 12/10/98)

I'm probably coming off as the resident curmudgeon again.  So I'll
reiterate: there's a lot of promise here, and what the Mozilla people have
promised for gecko's future is terrific.  But this product needs to be
hammered on hard to make sure it does what the Mozilla people have said it
will do.  It needs to become a real product and get a thorough, productive
alpha test, then it needs a thorough, productive beta test.  Fortunately,
that's going to happen in an environment where the tests *will* be
productive, and fast-paced.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu