28/02/05
32Josh has come to save our Aas.
I posted this as a browser news sidenote earlier today, but I think it’s worth mentioning this significant event here too. Until now, all the paid workers at the Mozilla Foundations were those on Mozilla/Firefox. The Camino project – embedding the gecko rendering in a native cocoa browser was undertaken entirely by volunteers, mainly Mike Pinkerton. They didn’t just work on Camino though, as I understand it, Mike also helped produce the Mac builds of Mozilla. (As an aside, read this fascinating interview at Ars Technica).
Josh Aas is a fairly recent addition to the the Camino development team, and he’s helped bring new life to the project. Now, in a move that shows solid commitment from Mozilla to the Mac platform, they’ve hired Josh. This is great news, and makes me very hopeful for the Mac future of Firefox and Camino. All the best with your new role Josh!
Update : Josh has clarified his new role further. It seems that his role will cover Firefox, Thunderbird and Camino, and code that is shared amongst these 3. This is just fantastic news, and I can’t wait to see what happens.
Tags: browsers.mozilla, camino, firefox
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Stuart Langridge said 1270 days ago:
I don’t want to appear mean about this, but, well, none of you Mac people seem to treat a Mozilla browser as a first-class citizen of your desktops, so I’m slightly surprised at this move by Mozilla. I mean, you’re all using Safari. Despite how it pretty much has demonstrably worse rendering and worse support for things. Because it looks pretty and comes from Apple. Perhaps you’d see that there are other reasons why you choose it, but why should the Mozilla people dedicate time and effort to the Mac when everyone flocked to Safari when it came out?You may now tell me that I’m talking rubbish. :-)
Daniel Andrews said 1270 days ago:
As a Camino user, this is great news. Josh has been doing a phenomenal job just in his spare time, and I look forward to seeing what he can do when he is able to devote more to the Camino project, and even Firefox is that’s what’s asked of him. They couldn’t have picked a better guy for the job.(I’m a bit partisan to Camino, so I hope that’s where they have him spend most of his time hacking.)
Jeff Wheeler said 1270 days ago:
I’ve been spending all day macifying ( :) ) Firefox, with most of your methods, and a couple others. I am greatly appreciative for Mozilla finally attempting to make their browser’s look decent on Mac, so I can stop using Safari.Daniel Andrews said 1270 days ago:
Stuart:I think the rest most of us don’t care about Moz products is the simple fact that Firefox (and even Camino) are not very good “OS X citizens” at this point. Things like integrated spell check, keychain integration, native form fields, and OS X – style preferences simply aren’t in Firefox (most of these are in Camino, but even it is still behind the times).
Once you use an app like Safari or Omniweb, you see how an OS X browser SHOULD behave, look, and feel. I still check all my sites in Firefox, of course. But until the UI and the way it interacts with me feels more like a true Mac app, it’s hard for a lot of users to accept it as a “first class citizen”.
Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
Stuart – thou shall feel my wrath.“We all use Safari” because its very good. Not only is it fast, and integrated into the OS, it provides the best text rendering of any browser I have ever seen. What ‘Worse rendering’? True, there are a few areas where its CSS support doesn’t quite match Gecko, and its DOM support could surely be better, but its far better than you make out. Then again, you wouldn’t really know – how long have you used Safari for?
Mac users are fed up of getting ported PC apps. Safari and Omniweb were the first browsers built solely for the mac – with no hint of porting.
Your assumption that we use Safari because it ‘looks pretty and comes from Apple’ really makes my blood boil. No we’re not that shallow!
As to why Mozilla should devote time and resources to Macs? They obviously think its worth it. They also thought it was worth going after IE too. I think its worth it.
Besides, as everyone knows, I don’t just use Safari. I use Omniweb (more than Safari), Firefox and Camino. I really hope that Mozilla make a better Camino and Firefox better mac browsers than Safari, but IMO they haven’t yet.
Mike D. said 1270 days ago:
Could someone explain to me why there is a need for both Camino and Firefox on the Mac? I mean, I like Firefox’s newer codebase a lot and I like Camino’s better “aquafication” quite a bit, but what is the reason why these two products should not be one?Michael Carvin said 1270 days ago:
Safari’s not perfect, but I certainly wouldn’t say it is “demonstrably worse”. The KHTML variant WebCore is based on has a lot in common with Gecko, a point Dave Hyatt could really expound upon. Safari’s maybe a step behind rendering-wise, at best.Second, Mozilla and its kin definitely look, feel, and behave like Windows or Linux ports. From that perspective, you could argue that the Mac platform had been given short shrift by the Mozilla team when it comes to recognizing the importance of UI to Mac users (hope Gruber doesn’t get all uppity about UI consistency again ;-))
I’m glad that the Mozilla team was able to provide a feature-equal Firefox to our platform, and honestly, we Mac users are really blessed with a wide variety of world-class browsers. Even Opera 8 has the MARINAKX skin which really makes the browser feel more Mac-like.
Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
Mike – Firefox is the cross platform product (it can go on the Mac, so it does), while Camino exists for those who want a more native app. Thats the thinking anyway…Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
“Second, Mozilla and its kin definitely look, feel, and behave like Windows or Linux ports. From that perspective, you could argue that the Mac platform had been given short shrift by the Mozilla team”What he said!
Stuart Langridge said 1270 days ago:
Jon:See, told you you’d tell me why I was talking rubbish. :)
Omnes:
I freely admit that I’m basing my comments on Safari’s worse rendering on things that other people have said, rather than my own personal experience. Essentially, I’m viewing Safari from my perspective, a fairly heavily DOM-focused perspective, as holding back the development of client-side applications in the same way that Internet Explorer does. Build a DOM app, and, more often than not, it won’t work in Safari. I don’t dispute that Hyatt and the team are working on it,and working pretty darn hard, but it’s still quite a way behind.
You see, here’s a discussion that I didn’t want to get into. In my opinion, and it’s not an opinion that everyone shares, a web browser is to get at the web. Being better at rendering websites is more important than integration with the OS. The reason I didn’t want to get into this is that, every time I’ve brought this up with a Mac aficionado, they sneer down their nose at me and say “well, if you used a real operating system you’d understand what good UI was and you wouldn’t feel like that”. Qv “blood boiling” comment above.
The distinction here is Jon’s sentence, “a better mac browser than…”. I want a better browser first, a better browser for my platform second. Epiphany, the “official” Gnome browser, integrates better with Gnome than Firefox does, and I use Firefox because it does more stuff. The way I see the view of the Mac user community is that, in my position, people would likely be using Epiphany because it’s better integrated. So maybe this is a difference of views, but it’s a difference where I really don’t understand why someone on the opposite side from me would be on that side. I wait patiently for explanations, preferably in words of one syllable because the other side outnumbers me and therefore I am clearly rather dense for not getting it. :)
I am surprised that Mozilla are devoting time and resources to OS X. I think it’s a jolly good thing that they are, but I can’t help but think that if I were a Mozilla developer that I would feel repeatedly snubbed by the Mac platform and the Mac user community. Gecko was a demonstrably better browsing engine than KHTML—whether Gecko is better than current WebCore is something on which we will agree to disagree, I think—and Apple didn’t use it, for unclear reasons; the ones I remember being bandied about were that it was too complicated and licence-unfriendly. Similarly, and again if I were a Mozilla developer, it would, I think, look to me as though the Mac user community almost unilaterally jumped ship to Safari as soon as it came along. These accusations are doubtless unfair, but, as I say, I think that that’s how I would feel about it. The fact that the Mozilla people are concentrating on OS X as a platform to the extent of paying hackers is, as Jon says, a marvellous development, but I think that I might see it as more marvellous than you do.
Tomas said 1270 days ago:
Stuart wrote: “if I were a Mozilla developer that I would feel repeatedly snubbed by the Mac platform and the Mac user community.”All they have to do to feel less snubbed is to release a better product—better in the ways that Mac users want it to be better. I use Firefox myself, for the reasons you mention, but I recognize the fact that it’s very far from Mac-like (which more or less is synonymous with “great UI”).
Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
Stuart – labelling Josh as a ‘hacker’ is very harsh. What do you base that critique of his skills on?_“The reason I didn’t want to get into this is that, every time I’ve brought this up with a Mac aficionado, they sneer down their nose at me and say “well, if you used a real operating system you’d understand what good UI was and you wouldn’t feel like that”. Qv “blood boiling” comment above.”_
The problem is Stuart, the assumption that Mac users are blinded by prettiness and twinkly lights is not a good way to start a discussion! Thats troll talk, and you’re better than that. That wasn’t my response anyway. Its not just about UI, or even integration. Rendering counts too, and Safari is bloody good. It even supports CSS properties that Gecko doesn’t.
As for the rest, I’d just be repeating what others have said already.
This was supposed to be a happy post dammit!
Scott Johnson said 1270 days ago:
I mean, you’re all using Safari.Check out my current User Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1
We aren’t all using Safari.
Daniel Andrews said 1270 days ago:
Mike D. –Camino and Firefox both share the same rendering engine under the hood. The only difference really is the extensions and one is a native OS X app, while the other is not. In a perfect world, there would be some way to combine the two. However, the way Firefox is written doesn’t really allow for this to ever take place. Hence, Camino should be around for a very long time.
Camino .9 actually will be very nice, with (finally) spell checking, forms autofill (using address book if desired) and tons of other things I’ve come to expect when using Safari and Omniweb.
Stuart Langridge said 1270 days ago:
Um. “Hacker”, to me, is a compliment. Think the old sense of the word, where it meant “talented programmer”, rather than the new “security breaker” sense.I appreciate that it looked like I was saying that Mac users are blinded by twinkly lights. The problem is that, from where I’m sitting, someone who chooses to use a browser that doesn’t render web pages as well but has icons that fit in better with the rest of their desktop is being blinded by twinkly lights. That’s why I asked for an explanation. As I said, whenever I’ve asked for one before, I’ve just been sneered at for not using a Mac, and I’d really like to understand.
Kudos to the Safari team, again, for the work that they’ve done, and, if we ignore my scripting/DOM focus, let’s say that Safari and Gecko are equivalent renderers. (I don’t have data on this like you do, so I’ll go with your evaluation.) My perception was that, even when Safari wasn’t as good a renderer, there was a mass exodus to it anyway, which is the thing that I don’t understand. Certainly you’re not part of that, Jon, since you’ve been writing about the variety of OS X browsers for ages now, but…I don’t understand! Help me understand…
Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
” “Hacker”, to me, is a compliment” – oh! Thats OK then ;o)“The problem is that, from where I’m sitting, someone who chooses to use a browser that doesn’t render web pages as well but has icons that fit in better with the rest of their desktop is being blinded by twinkly lights.” – Its not icons though. Its the system spell checker (which I’m training to learn English!!), integration with the address book, ability to use applescript. DOM support is supposedly improving greatly for v2 BTW. As I said, its text rendering is the best. Clean, crisp type, properly spaced. As Firefox and Camino use the older ‘Quickdraw’ screen rendering on the mac, it looks anemiac next to Safari’s native ‘Quartz’ rendering. There is talk of converting Camino and Safari to use Quartz though, which I think will make a difference.
Don’t knock OS intergration though. Being a good desktop citizen is important. If all the form widgets looked alien to other apps, you’d be wary.
Anyway, here’s the main point, when Safari came out, the majority weren’t migrating from Mozilla en masse, it was from IE 5 ! Phoenix (now Firefox of course) wasn’t available for mac, Mozilla Suite was a bloated Netscape based thing. It was only Camino – and most mac users hadn’t heard of Camino. I hadn’t heard of it until Safari came out, and for the first year, I used that instead of Safari.
Most mac users hadn’t heard of Mozilla – it was only those in the web development niche that had come across it. I was certainly only aware of IE or Netscape when I was a print designer.
The release of Firefox has seen Safari’s share on the mac decrease. I can;t find the URL, but a recent survey showed a Safari and Firefox to be roughly 3/4’s to a quarter. Firefox is gaining popularity amongst mac users certainly – extensions being the main ‘pull’.
ozean said 1270 days ago:
Mac users are fed up of getting ported PC apps. Safari and Omniweb were the first browsers built solely for the mac – with no hint of porting.Well, we shouldn’t forget about the pioneering role of Alexander Clauss’ iCab! Also, iCab is making great strides forward. If you still have your old registration number ready, go and get one of the 3.0.0 betas. Finally some CSS support in iCab.
Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
I’d love to try the iCab betas, but alas, I was never registered! They’ve got a lot of ground to make up though…Stuart Langridge said 1270 days ago:
On hackers, there’s the How to be a Hacker guide. Do ignore the rest of it, though, since Eric Raymond, the author, is a bit too full of himself.I ought to be a bit clearer: I don’t think that integration or UI or similarity of look-and-feel is worthless, by any means. I just don’t think that it’s as important as actually rendering web pages well, if you’re a web browser. Your point about Safari taking users from IE, not from Mozilla, is a well-put one, though, and I’m revising my opinions based on it. It’s possible that I assumed that more people were using Mozilla over IE than actually were—I don’t understand why they’d have made that choice, but, hell, I don’t understand why they make that choice on Windows either and 90% of them do :)
From the sounds of it, the things that Mozilla needs to do to win the hearts and minds of Mac users are entirely in the field of knowing how to plug in to the rest of OS X. Presumably the reason that they haven’t done this is just that they don’t have enough good Mac peolpe hacking on the code, rather than because they don’t know how? If the former, which I imagine it is, then this is why you’re so pleased with the Mozilla Foundation hiring the guys, because then they will have time to work on it? Good stuff, if so.
(PS. Is the comment-remembering thing broken? I’ve tried both ticking and unticking the box when posting a comment, and it steadfastly refuses to remember me.)
ozean said 1270 days ago:
I am writing this comment with the latest iCab beta and I must say that it renders your blog beautifully. ATSUI text rendering is quite the thing. I’ve just sent you an e-mail with a screenshot of iCab rendering your weblog.Jon Hicks said 1270 days ago:
I just don’t think that it’s as important as actually rendering web pages well, if you’re a web browser. – Thats the thing, apart from DOM support not being Gecko’s standard, its a very good renderer. Lack of DOM support isn’t as obvious to the user – its the coder that notices that more!I assumed that more people were using Mozilla over IE than actually were—I don’t understand why they’d have made that choice, but, hell, I don’t understand why they make that choice on Windows either and 90% of them do :) – Same reasons – knowledge, and bad experience with Netscape 4. Mozilla just wasn’t well known – if at all. Also, IE 5 mac was a damn good browser. The first one to use DOCTYPE switching, and it had superior CSS rendering to IE Win, including transparent PNGs! It also had some great features too.
Presumably the reason that they haven’t done this is just that they don’t have enough good Mac peolpe hacking on the code, rather than because they don’t know how? – There’s an element of that, but its also that they’re concentrating on the Windows platform for obvious reasons. The only reason that development on Firefox for mac started was because a Mac user called Kevin Gerich made a port of it. I remember trying it – it looked just like the windows version, but it was blindingly fast. Mozilla then took it on later.
(PS. Is the comment-remembering thing broken? – Yes, it does that to me too!
Chris McElligott said 1270 days ago:
Now that he’s been hired by Mozilla, hopefully he won’t be doing all FireFox work. When I read the article I though Camino would take another step back. Mainly because I though Josh would do only Firefox work as Camino isn’t really an official Mozilla product more of a side project… Correct me if I’m wrong though.The Wolf said 1270 days ago:
Many people here complain about mozilla products not being very good ‘OSX Citizens’, and I thought I should add that they are not very good Gnome ones either. I wish the native gnome browsers where better :(Riccardo said 1270 days ago:
Here’s my view on the “why they make that choice” issue.I think that the average Joe The User somewhat tends to expect the web to be broken, while doesn’t expect applications to be broken.
This is the result of years of balkanized web, and it’s especially true on the Macintosh platform.
Back in the days when interoperability and web standards seemed just a chimera, you simply had to accept that many sites didn’t display or work proprerly outside IE/win as part of the nature of the web.
On the other hand, Apple OSes have always accustomed users to top notch UI design and consistency.
When Safari went out, it was the first Mac browser to be a lightweight, consistent and nice looking app.
IE5 was a huge step forward for its time, but it was bulky and somewhat inconsistent. First Mozilla builds were really bulky and inconsistent. Netscape has always been bloated.
That’s the reason many non-technical users loved it and never looked back.
Tony said 1269 days ago:
It wasn’t something I quite grasped (or even really considered) prior to recently acquiring my first Mac, but Firefox simply is not the best browser available for Mac OS X.It starts up slower than Safari and OmniWeb, and it does have the feeling of being “retrofitted” for the platform.
I think it’s very easy to just discount user experience as being trivial, but I think it’s important to realize that we come to expect certain visual cues and reactions when we perform certain tasks. Just like most web users expect a link to change color on hover as a cue that it is indeed a hyperlink.
Out-of-the-box, Firefox acts quite a bit like a Windows application. It doesn’t seem to be interacting with the OS at the most basic levels. The fact that form fields and controls look at behave differently on Firefox than on every other OS X application is a big deal. Most casual users probably aren’t going to follow a laundry list of customizations just to make in focus form fields have that nice blue halo.
Small Paul said 1269 days ago:
I use FireFox on my Mac. I enjoy the built-in and extension-based power tools, and I prefer its handling of bookmarks (including RSS bookmarks).But gosh, is it ever sluggish.
Kevin Gerich said 1269 days ago:
“The only reason that development on Firefox for mac started was because a Mac user called Kevin Gerich made a port of it.”That’s very kind of you Jon :) but I don’t think that my build of Phoenix had that much influence. I think the Mozilla Foundation realized that if stand-alone apps were going to take the place of the suite that they would have to support Mac OS X.
It’s great to see that the MoFo is commited to the Mac.
Damian said 1269 days ago:
One of the guys writing for O’Reilly tries really really hard to make OS X users like Firefox. But after talking it up, even he has to admit that it can’t touch Safari:“It does not support the Services menu”
“It doesn’t spellcheck”
“It doesn’t open from other apps in new tabs”
(He gives two more reasons that are non-critical or outdated, IMO.)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0596007183/chapter/hack28.pdf
I specially agree about the Services Menu. I’ve extended it with ACW from Rixstep (I love those guys – their stuff is so cool!)
http://rixstep.com/2/20050103,00.html
Sod, that intrusive proposed Google searchbar for Windows:
http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0205f.shtml
With a genuine Cocoa app on OS X I can send any word or phrase I* want from any Services-menu aware app to *any search engine (and so much more besides) ... if I use Safari.
I’ve seen the urge to replace great apps like Safari described as “the grass is always greener syndrome”. People want to steal a march by installing something that doesn’t come with the machine in hopes that it makes it more interesting that that of the Jones’s nextdoor. But when it comes to Safari (and Mail) this is crap. Dave Hyatt is no fool: he knows what he’s doing.
I agree Ominweb is worth a try – but then it uses Webcore, doesn’t it?
I’d sooner spend the time and/or money on downloading useful 3rd-party apps made using the Cocoa framework – Transmit, The Apple Core Project, NetNewsWire, Unison, Pacifist, etc. ... maybe Stone Studio, if I could afford it. :-)
Paul Davidson said 1269 days ago:
I think the Safari/KHTML rendering engine is terrific, and I’ve never had a problem with it. If they made the Javascript/DOM engine a teensy bit more gecko-compatible, that would be nice. It will also be nice once rich text editing is available.I love some of the strides Safari is making with CSS 3, like the text-shadow property. I hope gecko and KHTML get into a race implementing new CSS features.
Anyway, I find myself using mostly Omniweb and Camino, depending on the situation. Any improvements made to Camino will be greatly appreciated. It would be nice to get Midas into the official releases, and the tabs and bookmark toolbar need some prettying-up. Firefox looks really nice in that regard, despite the clunkiness of non-native widgets.
Lauchlin MacGregor said 1268 days ago:
I am a PC user whose fiancee uses a MAC, and since I’ve moved into our apartment with her, I have been using exclusively mac. I completely understand why mac users love safari. The whole operating system is designed for designers, so wanting a browser that not only works well, but actually works well on the system should not be too much to ask.I’ve actually found that Firefox (my fav browser btw) doesn’t show scroll bars at all (or renders them poorly) on the mac. I have to guess as to where the scroll bar is. I’m not sure why this is, but it has driven me to camino quickly. I’d use Safari, but I’m stubborn and want to have my own browser, and she uses Safari…(yah..I’m weird)
Anyway, look at it this way, all you Linux users…you have plenty of people working for you to tie browsers into your platform, and because of this, you have a tightly integrated browser that utilizes (mostly) your system in the best way possible, so unless you’ve worked on a mac for longer than five minutes, you wouldn’t understand.
Anyway…back to the subject at hand….I applaud Mozilla bringing on Josh, and I hope that he works well with the team.
Tyler Thompson said 1267 days ago:
Lets add the close tab button to the actual tab instead of a main close button for the selected tab. For some reason this bugs the hell out of me and ultimately makes me use safari more than firefox. But I think both are great.Chris Parker said 1265 days ago:
Thats great news Jon.Ive only recently discovered Camino and have found it to be without a doubt the fastest browser available on the mac. I still use Firefox a lot, but have gradually switched my usage to Camino. Even better, ive discovered that somebody has compiled a G5 build of Camino at http://camino.ilnm.com which seems to be even faster.
Ive posted a mini-review of my first impressions and even mentioned your awesome metal skin for Camino on my site: www.cmpdesigns.com/sitenews.asp