Mozilla Is Ready for the Internet

            Do you get on the internet?  Do you visit websites?  You have to use a web browser to turn the information in a webpage into something that is readable by the computer in order to see it.  Microsoft’s poorly coded web browser, Internet Explorer, is the most-widely used; it accounts for approximately 90% of website traffic.  Several years ago, the majority of internet users believed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer won the “browser wars” for good.  Web pages were designed to look good in Internet Explorer, but Netscape and the other inferior browsers didn’t matter.  Contrary to popular belief, Internet Explorer is not anywhere near ideal, and the heavily developed Mozilla has the potential to become even more widely used.

            In January of 1998, the corporation Netscape made the announcement that it would stop selling its web browser, Netscape Navigator, and many other web applications.  Not only would these products now be free, but Netscape would open up the source code to them all, including Navigator, their web browser.  Now the general public could create an open-source web browser, where the source code would be viewable and editable to all.  On March 31, 1998, all eight megabytes of code were released to the public by the Mozilla group, the few programmers who organized together and received Netscape’s grant to be responsible for managing the code and distributing it for free.  This was major.  But it was hardly a beginning.

            Mozilla was not functionally better than any other browser in the beginning.  But since its code was opened, hundreds and now thousands of programmers have worked together in contributing code to make Mozilla the best browser ever.  Many founders wanted to ensure that Mozilla would stick to internet standards better than Internet Explorer.  Together, everyone decided what would make getting on the internet more pleasurable.  There were numerous areas where Internet Explorer fell short that Mozilla now does not.  A major advantage is that in Mozilla, pop-up advertisements are blocked.  In Internet Explorer, these pop-up ads on websites are a huge nuisance.  Some websites can even crash your computer by overloading Internet Explorer into too many individual windows.

            Mozilla also has the ability to do what is called “tabbed browsing.”  This way, multiple websites can be opened up together at the same time.  Hitting F5 reloads all the websites you have a tab on.  It can make checking news, stocks, weather, and other things very quick and simple.  Pages also usually load much faster, often by more than a second per page, in Mozilla than in most other browsers, probably since the code is much more efficient.  It is hard to tell for sure why Internet Explorer is slower though, since the public is not allowed to view the code.  Users of the internet might think their connection is slow, but what browser they use also plays a role.  Another feature in Mozilla is that people with poor reading vision can now enlarge all types of webpage text with Mozilla’s text zooming ability.  Many websites use a fixed type of text, and those using text-enlargement on Internet Explorer will still have trouble seeing the text.  Small text is only an inconvenience though.

            Internet Explorer has a lot of vulnerabilities.  Mozilla does not.  This is primarily because of an unnecessary feature in Internet Explorer called “object caching.”  The feature is supposed to make the internet more closely tied to the computer.  However, this allows for nine known exploits where a hacker can even read files on your computer and see what websites you have been to recently because of it.  Whenever a bug is found in the Mozilla software, thousands of programmers will get the issue fixed very quickly.  Due to the popularity of the project, Mozilla is becoming the browser favored by many developers.

            Many other browsers that have been losing to Internet Explorer are about to be losing to Mozilla.  Internet Explorer is slow and full of exploitable and dangerous bugs. Opera, which is known as the fastest browser, costs money: forty dollars, and its source is closed like Internet Explorer.  It is also somewhat feature-lacking.  Netscape, the DNA that Mozilla has its roots in, is slow and lacking of features.  Its source has been closed since 1998 when they gave the code of that time to the Mozilla group.  Safari, Apple’s well-coded browser is only for Apples; its source is closed also.  Mozilla, unlike the others though, has only become well-known by the masses in the past few months.

Slowly, Mozilla has successfully gained a lot of headway by being incorporated as a native browser by many producers of Linux, which is an open-source operating system unlike Windows, into their software.  In the past year, Mozilla has also received a great deal of publicity on Slashdot.org, the biggest technology news site on the internet.  Slashdot.org has constantly alerted its nearly one hundred-thousand daily readers to Mozilla news and other projects going on by the Mozilla.org foundation, like even making a virus-immune e-mail client which would ideally replace Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail programs.

Many computer users dream of being able to build a great computer based off of as much free open-source software as possible.  This would be a computer absent of essentially all Microsoft products.  This ideal computer’s operating system would probably be Linux, not Windows, and its web browser by default would be Mozilla.  Its office software would not be Microsoft Word and Excel.  Another group, openoffice.org, is working on replacing that.  Together, many heroic programmers are working hard absent of pay to bring down many proprietary softwares.  Mozilla itself is a huge step forward towards this future.