MozOO.org in the News

Featuring Firefox 1.0.1, Thunderbird 1.0, Nvu 0.81 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4

We are happy to note that the Mozilla and OpenOffice.org projects are converging1 on the exact track that MozOO.org developed. We are now working together to take this initiative to the next level.

Featuring Mozilla 1.7 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2

... MozOO.org is a direct shot at Microsoft - it provides Open Office, Mozilla and related products on a single CD-ROM that installs on any Windows PC with minimal fuss. Better, it is intended for ordinary users, not geeks. The CD is a free equivalent to Microsoft's flagship, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer.

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Related News

These can be news items directly about Mozilla and OpenOffice.org (like large-scale migrations by big companies), or relevant background stories.

The Mozilla Foundation is cutting off development of its flagship Mozilla browser suite with the current 1.7.x line
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The Foundation made it clear in 2003 that it would be shifting most of its resources away from the suite towards the stand-alone Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client
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After an initial surge in market share gains that followed the release of Firefox 1.0 in November, the pace at which the open-source Web browser is winning market share has slowed down, new research shows.
At the same time, Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer (IE) browser has dipped below the 90 percent level in market share, according to two tracking surveys released on Monday.
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Several security vulnerabilities in Firefox and the Mozilla Suite of Internet software put users of the open source products at risk of hacker attacks, the Mozilla Foundation warned Thursday. The organization released Firefox 1.0.1, which fixes 17 security flaws in the popular Web browser. The most serious flaws could allow an attacker to gain full control over a victim's PC, the Mozilla Foundation said in a statement. Firefox 1.0 was released in November and has since been downloaded more than 27 million times.
Firefox update http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2005-02-24.html
(Note: MozOO.org 502 already contains the updated Firefox 1.0.1)

Although Microsoft still dominates the Web browser space, its Internet Explorer continues to lose market share to open-source rival Mozilla.
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Benefiting from high-profile security vulnerabilities in the Microsoft browser and recommendations by experts to switch, the Mozilla Foundation saw its market share rise. The Mozilla Suite, Netscape and Firefox held 6 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 3.5 percent in June, according to WebSideStory.
"It is not a fast drop for Internet Explorer, but it might be considered a fast gain for Mozilla," said Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory.
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Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MinDef) has moved away from a predominantly Microsoft desktop policy by installing the open-source OpenOffice productivity software on 5,000 desktop computers. OpenOffice will not replace Microsoft Office 97 on those PCs but will exist alongside it, allowing users to choose which package to use, MinDef said in an e-mail reply to questions.
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Internet Explorer has been used by approximately 95 percent of Web surfers since June 2002, according to WebSideStory, a Web metrics company. Recently, however, its dominance has begun to erode slightly, due in part to a number of well-publicized IE security vulnerabilities and a generally favorable reception to Firefox, a slimmed-down browser developed as part of the open-source Mozilla project.
Increasing pressure from alternative browsers such as Firefox and Opera will ultimately cause Microsoft to take a second look at the browser and how it can better be used to leverage Microsoft's monopoly, Andreessen said.
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The debate between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox has intensified in recent months.
Media columnists have put forth the merits of their case; an overwhelming number believe the time is right to bury Internet Explorer.
The security flaws plaguing Internet Explorer has led to a renewed interest in other browser options, with market research pointing to Firefox as the leading choice.
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Best Office Suite: OpenOffice.org 1.1.1
OpenOffice.org remains the only serious contender to replace Microsoft Office on Windows or GNU/Linux desktops. There are some competitors, such as Abiword on Windows and GNU/Linux as well as Corel WordPerfect? Office on Windows; OpenOffice.org seems to have a unique hold on progress toward offering comprehensive compatibility with Microsoft Office in an interface that should minimize adjustment time for users migrating to it.
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Best Web Browser: Firefox 1.0 Preview Release
The last year has been the year of Firefox in the browser wars. For the first time since 1999, a browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer made significant gains in the market. Firefox has continued its confident stride and the Mozilla project has proven its ability to respond quickly to security issues while continuing to bring additional useful features, most recently, a brilliant integration of RSS feeds into the bookmark management of the browser.
It is Firefox’s excellent compatibility, cross-platform availability and continual pushing of the envelope on features that improve the browsing experience of users that takes it above other browsers. With its one-point-oh release just around the corner, it would appear that the upcoming year should be an excellent one for this browser.
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I concluded that the program is out of control and needs to be scrapped. Users should all be given some new program for an upgrade charge of $10 — just to get everyone on the same page.
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But six years later, the surviving members of the Mozilla insurgency are staging a comeback. The latest version of Firefox, released this Monday, has a more professional look, online help, and a tool that automatically imports your bookmarks, history, site passwords, and other settings from Explorer.
Meanwhile, all-conquering Internet Explorer has been stuck in the mud for the past year, as Microsoft stopped delivering new versions. The company now rolls out only an occasional fix as part of its Windows updates. Gates and company won the browser war, so why keep fighting it?
The problem is that hackers continue to find and exploit security holes in Explorer.
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For actual Web surfing, Firefox's interface is familiar enough to Explorer users. There's hardly anything to say about it, which is a compliment.
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Firefox also adds a productivity feature that Explorer has never gotten around to: tabbed browsing. You can open several Web pages in the same window and flip through them as tabs, similar to those used in some of Windows' dialog boxes. It's tough to understand why tabbed browsing is such an improvement until you've tried it. But if you're in the habit of opening a barrage of news and blog links every morning and then reading them afterward, or clicking on several Google results from the same search, tabbed browsing is an order of magnitude more efficient and organized than popping up a whole new window for each link.
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The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority -- traditionally a big Microsoft user -- is tipping savings of $2 million a year from the rollout of Sun Microsystems' Star Office package to registry managers and the Mozilla browser and email client to 1500 computers used by the authority's front counter staff in vehicle registries across the state.
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Bad Arguments for Microsoft
A lot of people argue that schools should be using Microsoft products, since that's what students are likely to use in the "real world." That may well be true, though we can hope that someday it will not be a fait accompli. But, do we really want our schools teaching kids how to use Microsoft products, or do we want to teach them how to use computers in general?
Take Microsoft Word, for example. If you're teaching a kid how to use a word processor, does it have to be Word? They could learn the same concepts just as easily -- and much more cheaply -- using OpenOffice or AbiWord. If students are taught the concepts properly -- how to navigate a GUI interface and how to use an online help system, for starters -- they will be able to transition to any word processor once they've gotten a job.
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There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites.
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Microsoft has in the last few months both discontinued IE for the Macintosh altogether, and let it be known there will be no new IE for today's generation of Windows based computers. The next iteration of IE will be solely for "Longhorn" based systems (Longhorn being the code name for the successor to Windows XP).
Any such systems are unlikely before 2006, leaving a hiatus of several years between major upgrades for IE, the single most pervasive web platform by a long way. And, at present, the platform with the most web standards "issues".
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Around 90 per cent all of the company's 350 Asia-Pacific staff, half of whom are based in Australia, have started using OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft's Office suite.
Reaction so far has been positive. "There always tends to be some pushback from users, but there's a sense of willingness to embrace the new technology," Gennaoui said. The local operation is "way ahead of the movement" in the rest of Novell, he added. "We have a smaller base of users and we're more flexible."
Novell has also developed a number of custom enhancements to OpenOffice to help migrate common internal document templates. The source code for those enhancements will be made available to the broader OpenOffice community.
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Superficially, the new browser war is still about web browsers. On one side is the aging but popular Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. On the other side is a range of highly polished but less frequently used tools. These tools are effectively led by the Mozilla Foundation, whose technology now appears in many different browser and non-browser products.
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Mozilla is responsible for most of the early shots in this new war:
- The Mozilla browser is technically better than IE. That is plain fact.
- Mozilla has innovative and polished user-centric features -that IE doesn't have- such as tab-based browsing.
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We are still using Office 97 because we have no need to use the features on Microsoft's newer Office products.
Daniel Bray: Using Office 97 causes some problems, as some people are exporting spreadsheets out to Office 2000 and some external incoming e-mails will have an Office 2000-formatted file attached. So, we did see the need to upgrade, and we thought OpenOffice would be a good choice.
We did a presentation on what OpenOffice can do, stressing that it can read many different file formats and that it is a viable and obviously inexpensive alternative to the extremely expensive Microsoft platform. We showed that some departments could easily get transferred from Microsoft Office platform to OpenOffice. For example, a lot of our nurses and secretaries use Office mainly for viewing attachments and writing a letter now and then. They would be our first target.
The major plus was obviously the cost. The financial difference between Office and OpenOffice was our foot in the door.
They liked the fact that OpenOffice can export directly out to a PDF file. That capability eliminates yet another cost factor: We don't have to have Adobe Acrobat in-house anymore because we dissolved that licensing issue by just using OpenOffice to export out to a .pdf file.
The same thing applies for Macromedia Flash, another costly feature. We don't need to buy or license the Macromedia Flash utility because, again, OpenOffice can natively export out to a Flash file that can be read by any browser.
So, those are some of the technical abilities they really like, and they also add to the financial advantages of OpenOffice.
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In recent years, open-source alternatives to Office have matured to the point where IT managers are beginning to investigate the viability of moving from the Microsoft Corp. suite to a license-free alternative. So when eWEEK Corporate Partner Ed Benincasa shared his desire to perform a user-based comparison between the OpenOffice.org project's OpenOffice.org suite and Microsoft's Office 2003, we saw a perfect opportunity to compare the suites under real-world conditions.
... "I'm not an anti-Microsoft person, and I think Office is a good product," said Benincasa. "However, we are cautious with our IT budget, and I'd prefer to spend money that directly relates to our business, like investing in things like hardware. Office 97 does everything we want it to do, and we would stay on that suite if we could. It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
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