Mozilla 1.0 has been released and it's good. It's good enough to replace IE for my daily browsing but being good enough wouldn't make me (and probably most other people) switch. The good part is that it's better than IE in many respects. The biggest thing for me was tabbed browsing - an excellent feature I can no longer live without. Another good part is good pop-ups supression out of the box. And they have Google Toolbar as well (this one was a love at first sight for me when I installed it in IE for the first time).

A couple of reflections. First, it's very hard to convince users to replace their software if they already have something adequate. Even a computer geek like me is weary of tracking and installing new software or new versions of the software. I imagine most users just don't care, especially given that IE is a good enough tool. So that's going to be an uphill battle for Mozilla and I don't think it will ever regain dominant status (or even become a significant player). Microsoft won this round but that doesn't matter. What matters is that it's great to finally have a competition in the browser market because Microsoft stopped innovating and Mozilla will force it to add features. Tabbed browsing is probably neutral for Microsoft so not having that could just be a sin of omission but I bet anihilating pop-ups would be a controversial thing to implement because Microsoft is also a serious web player and msn.com uses pop-ups to generate revenue. Microsoft has a conflict of interest here and if faced with zero competition they would probably rather protect their advertising revenue than make users of IE happy. But it's a very useful feature and the word will finally get out: Mozilla does it better. And if IE doesn't do it, more people will switch to Mozilla so Microsoft will be more pressured to put in IE as well, just to match the competitive pressure. Finally, Mozilla has a chance of being a fertile ground for innovation. Maybe not as big innovation as Mosaic was but Mozilla guys put a lot of effort to make it platform for building apps on top of rather than just a browser. That resulted in disastrous slipping of the ship date but let's hope that this effort will result in better app in the future.

   

There are evil reasons to use packet capturing programs but there are also legitimate ones, like learning protocols and debugging web applications. For example today I was trying to write python script to grab a main page for Yahoo!Groups but Yahoo was rudely responding with 302. So I captured the traffic for the same page generated by Mozilla, looked at HTTP request it sends, compared with what my script sends, modified the script to send something similiar and voila! The thing worked.

There are two Windows programs I know to capture packets: Ethereal (which is a cross-platform tool based on Gtk+, which is a reason for it looking so ugly on Windows) and Analyzer. They are both free and based on WinPcap library. Ethereal is open-source and Analyzer public-domain but the source is not publically available (although it seems you can get it if you're willing to work on it).

In short, Analyzer looks much better but Ethereal has a crucial (for me) feature: it can reconstruct the TCP/IP stream (i.e. I can easily see the whole exchange between HTTP client and server) while in Analyzer I can only inspect single packets.

The conclusion I had was that the UI of those programs could be greately improved but that's a story for another day.