Mozilla M3 Release Available Now

Makali writes "Just took a quick peek at the Sunsite FTP mirror of ftp.mozilla.org and Sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk is up and contains tarballs for several platforms. Fetch! " Downloading my copy now, now considering how badly screwed up my machine is right now, the odds of it actually running is about 1 in 12 *grin*.

It's about standards

Gecko is the first good web browser the world has ever known.

HTML was designed from the ground up with several goals in mind, that seem to have been completely forgoten by most people over the years. The whole basis was to separate structure from style enabling a document to be viewed on any system. XML finall takes this concept to it's conclusion in a manageable fashion. HTML was about using structural tags such as H1 rather than hard coded font tags, because a heading will look much different on an 1600x1200 monitor than it will a cell phone.

So with the growth of the web you get a billion traditional media people designing web pages, that have no concept what the word _dynamic_ means, all writing pages that _must_ be viewed at 800x600, because they only know how to create pages for fixed paper mediums, and because they never bothered to actually learn what HTML was about. How many web designers even know what SGML is let along understand that HTML is an application of it? Admitedly, this only includes about 99.99% of the web designers out there. Traditionally the browser makers have been just as bad. It seems Netscape has finally got a clue. Netscape was the pioneer in adding proprietary style based tags to HTML, if they get Gecko right, which they are, I may actually forgive them, even though thanks in part to them, the whole web is a mess.

So now, x years later, everyone finally learns HTML and runs across all these problems in browser compatibility and site management, and they start looking for a solution, can you say "What's a style sheet?". They discover that style sheets were supposed to be part of the web since day one, and that in fact they are much cooler than all the proprietary hacks they have been clamoring for from the browser makers. The sad thing being, even those web designers that knew about the One True Way from the beginning have not been able to do anything about it due to lack of browser support.

Enter Gecko, the first web browser to actually give a web designers the ability to design a page the way it was meant to be. Gecko is not about small. Gecko is not about fast. Gecko is about HTML, CSS, XML, and DOM. Gecko is actually including a real parser (Expat) for the first time. We should have been able to use SGML features for years now, if browser makers had actually done it right and included SGML parsers. Gecko is including real DOM support, so now we can write JavaScript that may actually work in more than one place, and not only that, but that does a hell of a lot more for creating dynamic content. Gecko includes XML support, the most important document format since ASCII, finally giving the world a standard for creating documents with actual structure, and a way for bringing those to the masses. Gecko includes full CSS1 and a good chunk of CSS2, so my documents can actually look clean for a change, and be 1/5 the size at the same time.

People who make comments how all the web pages don't load any faster, and how IE has better bookmarks or something like that, these people have obviously never tried any serious HTML work, browser programming, or managing a _large_ site. Gecko is not for the users, they will look at it and ask what it gives them over version 4. Gecko is for the designers, who will bow down at it's feet screaming FINALLY, and will now be able to die (mostly) happy. And for that, Gecko is the best piece of software to hit the web, _ever_.