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I've been using Opera 6.0 (for Windows) for a while, but now I switched to Mozilla. Mazilla and Opera are almost equally comfortable to use - as long as you install Optimoz for Mozilla. Also, if Mozilla wouldn't have tabs it would be far behind.

One great feature of Opera is that pop-ups don't ever get to your taskbar, and there is an option to force them behind all other windows. Even if Mozilla could open pop-ups in tabs behind all others, they would still occupy the whole window. Still, it would be have to have this in Mozilla. Also, when you start a download in Opera, it already is downloading the file when you are dealing with the "Save As..." dialog. Another thing I wish for Mozilla.

There are several reasons I switched to Mozilla. First, it seems to render IE-oriented pages better. In fact, I haven't seen one page I really needed to open IE for. Mozilla as fast in browsing (and as slow in startup ;( ) as Opera (or, seems so). It also has a much greater number of plugins for it (look at mozdev.org; my favourite after Optimoz is BannerBlind. Mozilla Mail is useful, while the mailer in Opera seems lame to me. Finally, no ads and adware on the computer...

So, Opera is great, but I like Mozilla better.

I've been using Opera 6.0 (for Windows) for a while, but now I switched to Mozilla. Mazilla and Opera are almost equally comfortable to use - as long as you install Optimoz for Mozilla. Also, if Mozilla wouldn't have tabs it would be far behind.

One great feature of Opera is that pop-ups don't ever get to your taskbar, and there is an option to force them behind all other windows. Even if Mozilla could open pop-ups in tabs behind all others, they would still occupy the whole window. Still, it would be have to have this in Mozilla. Also, when you start a download in Opera, it already is downloading the file when you are dealing with the "Save As..." dialog. Another thing I wish for Mozilla.

There are several reasons I switched to Mozilla. First, it seems to render IE-oriented pages better. In fact, I haven't seen one page I really needed to open IE for. Mozilla as fast in browsing (and as slow in startup ;( ) as Opera (or, seems so). It also has a much greater number of plugins for it (look at mozdev.org; my favourite after Optimoz is BannerBlind. Mozilla Mail is useful, while the mailer in Opera seems lame to me. Finally, no ads and adware on the computer...

So, Opera is great, but I like Mozilla better.

And how about those Big Annoying Slashdot Ads?

What Big Annoying Slashdot Ads?

And if you use moz you could use googlebar.

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/

I can't think of any links off hand, but mozilla hopefully should direct you to download sites for the appropriate plug-in if it encounters something it can't handle. Usually it's going to be a netscape plug in, and you might have to point it to mozilla's plugin directory yourself. I've been very happy with the behavior of those I've had installed with RC1, so hopefully things should go well. You might want to take a look at mozdev.org for some mozilla specific stuff. The spellchecker is my favorite of the projects there. I think it's fun though even just browsing through them all. I mean a rpg engine made with my favorite web browser is just plain nifty.

Try BannerBlind. Look at many other useful things at mozdev.org, too.

Use chimera.

0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 images.slashdot.org

Or, goto Plugindoc on mozdev and you can fix all your plugin problems in one shot.

This site is great for pointing to Mozilla newbies.

I've noticed that when fun projects reach a certain level of completeness on *nix, the Cocoa developers come out of the woodwork. Take a look at Chimera, a cocoa port of Mozilla.

I know that getting XDarwin is a hassle for lots of "vanilla" Mac users, but this is going to be a must download for bleeding-edge Unix weenies.

I predict a Cocoa version will be under weigh by the time this message is posted and we will see an alpha by Xmas (ten-mas!).

.

Yeah I like them too, which is why I use Mouse Gestures in Mozilla - both at home under Linux, and at work with Windows 2000.

You're right about a few of those features you mentioned in the first paragraph. Saving your current set of pages to be reopened on startup in case of a crash would be nice, as would easier user-agent modification. But if it's gestures that's worth a grand to you, mozilla's already got them.

The exploit is specific to IE for Windows, and Outlook and Outlook Express use IE as their HTML preview engine. IE on the Mac is immune (supposedly) but I would suspect that Microsoft pulls the same trick on the Mac with Entourage.

Hopefully, the object model for Entourage is different, and the extensions it uses (bat, pif, exe, cmd) aren't valid on OS X anyway, and you'd have the chmod the files to make them run.

BTW, if you're using Moz on OS X, you should check out chimera the OS X native port. It's a beautiful browser.

Mozilla with enigmail works very nicely.

The first thing to do is learn how to build Mozilla under Mac OS X... it's rather a bitch, but well documented here. (Actually, it's a bitch to build under Linux too, and that's the easiest platform to build on.) Then apply the ATSUI rendering patch attached to bug 121540 (sorry, can't link to bugzilla from slashdot) and rebuild. Voila! As far as I can see, it looks like it may already be in the nightlies though, and possibly even in 1.0RC1... I haven't looked yet :-). If you find that it's not, I recommend grabbing the build from stevek's iDisk. It's a lot easier than building it if you're not already building mozilla. (I was, for other reasons. Quartz was a nice extra perk.)

As for leaving out all the composer and mail junk, I don't know of a way to do that. However, current builds of chimera are fast, have quartz rendering compiled in, and are browser only. As a bonus, it's got a nice native cocoa interface that gets better and better with every build. It's still got some bugs, but I find it pretty usable.

Hope this helps!

Mozilla is a tad bit faster but it is buty-ugly to look at compared to IE.

Try Chimera. It uses the Gecko engine but renders natively in Quartz, so it has nice fonts and all.

They're right. Almost. It feels a little slow to me, but not unbearably so. Perhaps my tolerance is too high, but I don't feel like I'm sitting around waiting for the system. Or perhaps (since I've been using Mac OS X since the first day of the public beta and Mac OS for several years!) I'm so impressed with the overall improvements to my "computing experience" that have come with Mac OS X that I don't notice *all* of the warts. Frankly, I've had my performance complaints, and the browser hasn't been one of them. Don't get me started on the Finder...

My system is an iMac DV G3/400MHz with 512MB RAM and a 27GB internal HD. Certainly not a performance champ... in fact, except for the RAM it's rather low-end. My point of reference for Wintel is my work PC, an IBM thinkpad 1GHZ, 392MB/32GB running RedHat 7.2 and occasionally booting into Win2k (when I need to edit someone else's MS Project or Visio files). For most operations (checking e-mail, running MS Office, browsing) I don't find that the iMac *feels* slower. Most days, I work from my home office with the two machines sitting side by side. I don't find myself turning to the Thinkpad for browsing; in fact, it's rather the opposite. I do much of my office correspondence on the iMac due to the superiority of the Office implementation for Mac OS X.

Perhaps the reason I don't find it so slow, though, is that I seldom use MSIE. I am not morally opposed to MSIE; I do use office after all, and actually like office V.X. (It's the first version I've liked since the version with Word 5 (Office 4.0?), though I found Office 98 tolerable.) MSIE is just not the best browser for Mac OS X. Its rendering engine is buggy, and it's *SLOW*. By that, I mean that it feels significantly slower than the other browsers I use. I find that I use 3 browsers:

1. Mozilla - It's reasonably fast. My main complaint is that it takes almost 15 seconds to launch! Once it's launched, I find page loading to be fast and stable. It takes a few seconds to open the preferences panel, but that's no different from Moz on my Linux box, which is faster than my Mac.
2. Omniweb - It's probably in fact slower than IE, but it feels faster because the threading is better. It doesn't block while it's loading a page, and pages look great because it uses Quartz rendering. It's still slower than Moz, though, even when I compile Quartz rendering into it, and Mozilla has less trouble rendering pages with CSS and Javascript.
3. Chimera - This one is going to be the best, hands down. It's fast as blazes, even on my hardware. It's the first browser I've used on any other platform that felt as fast as Galeon. It's in a very early dev version, though, and far from feature complete. I like it a lot, so far.

All that said, though, IE is the default, and it's IE that the Mac will be judged on. I think the Moz crew has proven that the performance hit is not all apple's fault, though. Even so, Apple and MS would be well served to ensure that IE and Office are really snappy on Apple's newest hardware and OS combinations. I don't doubt that they will, now that OS development seems to have stabilized somewhat.

Chimera is, according to these tests, the fastest MacOS Web browser by a factor of 2.

Chimera is, of course, based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. It's mainly the work of Mozilla uber-hacker Dave Hyatt.

Gerv

Chimera is, according to these tests, the fastest MacOS Web browser by a factor of 2.

Chimera is, of course, based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. It's mainly the work of Mozilla uber-hacker Dave Hyatt.

Gerv

Optimoz: add gestures to Mozilla.

Enigmail: add PGP/GPG support in Mozilla Mail.

Googlebar: the cool Googlebar for Mozilla too.

And if you want more just look in MozDev and you'll find something interesting.

Andrea

Optimoz: add gestures to Mozilla.

Enigmail: add PGP/GPG support in Mozilla Mail.

Googlebar: the cool Googlebar for Mozilla too.

And if you want more just look in MozDev and you'll find something interesting.

Andrea

Optimoz: add gestures to Mozilla.

Enigmail: add PGP/GPG support in Mozilla Mail.

Googlebar: the cool Googlebar for Mozilla too.

And if you want more just look in MozDev and you'll find something interesting.

Andrea

Optimoz: add gestures to Mozilla.

Enigmail: add PGP/GPG support in Mozilla Mail.

Googlebar: the cool Googlebar for Mozilla too.

And if you want more just look in MozDev and you'll find something interesting.

Andrea

Optimoz: add gestures to Mozilla.

Enigmail: add PGP/GPG support in Mozilla Mail.

Googlebar: the cool Googlebar for Mozilla too.

And if you want more just look in MozDev and you'll find something interesting.

Andrea

The only thing really holding me back from using this in my current project (front end management console for the build and test scripts used to QA $AntiVirus_app) in XUL is the lack of a nice drag and drop formbuilder. There's a project to build one - XULMaker - but it seems to be making pretty slow progress and be short of people working on it. Anyway, what I was wondering was, where's the Perl bindings? Being able to say :


my $g = XUL->new();
$g->set_window(
title=> 'Hello world',
geometry => ([500, 200]),
...
)

...and so on would be verrrrry cool. And then we could ALL build our own window managers, using Perl. And this post would be on-topic ;)

I believe you're referring to the Chimera browser, info on which (and download thereof) can be found here. They just released version 0.2.0 a few days ago. Plugins still don't work yet, but they have Quartz rendering and native UI widgets, so they're already ahead of Mozilla. :)

It supports tabbed browsing (a must as far as I'm concerned nowadays), and lots of other spiffyness. It's not crash-proof, as I've managed to do it a couple of times, but it's stable, quick, and full of Cocoa-goodness.

After you have installed mouse gestures from Optimoz simply edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js to modify gestures as you like.

However, there's a bug that causes install to fail partially in some of the latest nightly builds. After install you have to edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/ pref/mozgestPrefOverlay.xul and replace all occurrences of "outliner" with "tree" to make preferences work (pref should be the in the advanced preferences branch, after editing you need to restart Mozilla). Do this only if you cannot see "Mouse Gestures" pref in the Advanced preferences brach.

After you have installed mouse gestures from Optimoz simply edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js to modify gestures as you like.

However, there's a bug that causes install to fail partially in some of the latest nightly builds. After install you have to edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/ pref/mozgestPrefOverlay.xul and replace all occurrences of "outliner" with "tree" to make preferences work (pref should be the in the advanced preferences branch, after editing you need to restart Mozilla). Do this only if you cannot see "Mouse Gestures" pref in the Advanced preferences brach.

After you have installed mouse gestures from Optimoz simply edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js to modify gestures as you like.

However, there's a bug that causes install to fail partially in some of the latest nightly builds. After install you have to edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/ pref/mozgestPrefOverlay.xul and replace all occurrences of "outliner" with "tree" to make preferences work (pref should be the in the advanced preferences branch, after editing you need to restart Mozilla). Do this only if you cannot see "Mouse Gestures" pref in the Advanced preferences brach.

there's also uabar, the UserAgent toolbar. Allows you to change your UA String while browsing and gives you a nice selection of common choices.

Tried Optimoz?

Mozilla itself is pretty awful, IMHO, due to it not looking or working like any other Mac OS X (or OS 9 for that matter) application. The weird differences aren't beneficial either. However, Chimera, based on Mozilla but sporting a Mac OS X Quartz UI and page rendering is looking to be a really great thing. I'm very excited about what happens with Chimera but don't forsee installing another version of Mozilla itself.

Googlebar

Super AI

For gestures, check out Optimoz. I tried it in an early stage and it seemed to work well, though I never got used to it.

For quick access to preferences, look at Preferences Toolbar. I seem to remember that MultiZilla also has quick access to common prefs.

Hope that helps!

For gestures, check out Optimoz. I tried it in an early stage and it seemed to work well, though I never got used to it.

For quick access to preferences, look at Preferences Toolbar. I seem to remember that MultiZilla also has quick access to common prefs.

Hope that helps!

This "middleware" aspect to Netscape -- a platform on the platform -- was what frightened Microsoft (according to Netscape, mind you), causing Bill and company to come after Netscape with chains and knives.

This will only become worse (from billg's perspective) as the mozdev projects mature.

Omniweb has been much praised for its elegant interface and superb antialiasing of text, and its support for Unicode and international character sets is unparalleled (only Mozilla comes close).
Unfortunately, Omniweb's support for important web standards like CSS1 and the DOM is so poor as to make it unusable.

If you want elegance and superb antialiasing and standards compliance, consider Chimera.

F6 works for me under Linux. Same key works in IE 5. I have no idea if that works in Moz under Win32.

I'm sure Mozilla supports them, but there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences.

Optimoz does this. I don't think Mozilla has it natively.

You can get mouse gestures for Mozilla here.

jesser has covered keyboard access to the address bar. Thanks! I was wondering about that one myself.

As for speed, the UI chrome can be a little sluggish on a slower machine, but I find the HTML renderer to be quite swift.

rather slow loadup time

I use QuickLaunch and find startup quite reasonable. You can turn it on under Preferences->Advanced, or during installation.

there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences

For now gesture navigation is an optional module that you need to install yourself by visiting the OptiMoz site. The installation is really painless, and you can configure or uninstall optimoz through the prefs panel. One caveat: the latest nightly builds seem to have changed some interfaces that OptiMoz uses, so the prefs are no longer visible, though I expect the OptiMoz project to have an updated release available soon.

And while it doesn't have mouse-wheel window switching...

...it does however allow you to configure the mouse wheel with a modifier key to scroll pages at a time, line at a time, change text size or go back and forward through history.

All the UI people are already screaming that Moz has too many prefs. I guess I wouldn't be hired for UI design since I like lots of configurability. I don't see a RFE bug in bugzilla to add switching windows using the mouse wheel, but you can search bugzilla yourself and if you're sure such an RFE doesn't exist, then add a bug.

Of course, RFE's are low on the totem pole right now...

Christopher

I agree that there's a strong argument to be made for the "back" menu to appear in the context menus everywhere. In fact, a few months ago, this would have been infuriating.

But I've switched to using gestures, and I no longer ever use the context menu for "back"; just a quick flick of the wrist and I'm where I want to be. It's so cool, I'm going to use two syllables here to pronounce the word "sweet": Sah-Weet!

I suspect that the "back" menu item will reappear in mozilla shortly, but in the meanwhile, take this opportunity to try out the gestures feature. You might end up preferring it.

-who can beat the damn mouse gestures? thats something worth implementing in mozilla if you ask me..

See here.

Since 0.9.4, mozilla users have had the ability to block onload and unload pop-ups/unders. I've had zero problems with this. It doesn't block pop-ups you request, just the ones you don't.

If I interpreted the article correctly, it's not talking about pop-up ads, but rather ActiveX dialogs. The huge dialogs that say "Do you want to install and run this program from foo corp?". Mozilla doesn't support ActiveX, but it supports XPI, and like IE it allows sites to bring up dialogs asking if you want to install something. To see an example of Mozilla's XPI dialog, try installing the half-working Google Toolbar for Mozilla.

You see fewer XPI dialogs than ActiveX dialogs are that fewer people use Mozilla, and those that do are slightly less likely to blindly click "yes" to install something from a porn site than IE users.

Mozilla is quickly becoming my preferred choice of mail client. You can now use pgp with it seamlessly with Enigmail and its filtering and message coloring is approaching Eudora's. It also has message threading, which is incredibly useful. It handles HTML mail better than Eudora, and is less buggy than Eudora.

What is really great about Mozilla is that people can add what they need to it, in the way that Enigmail has been created. If you need better filters, you can write an extension for Mozilla Mail that does what you need.

I've used Eurora since 1996; its about time that we have a robust alternative to it, beacuse its development is very slow, its buggy, the filters are not sane, and its performance is not what it should be. Also, its not available for Linux, and we are not doing any more windoze in our operation, so unless Qualcomm ports Eudora to Linux and improves it dramatically before Mozilla 1.0 comes out, we are bailing.

What I would like is a migration utility so that I can move all of my messages and setings to Mozilla Mail in one operation, and then move that bundle to my Linux installation, or any other Mozilla installation.

Something for the Mozilla evangelists to think about.

Frankly no. The majority of the features they list I would turn off (they would have that option, right?) Some are good but obvious (integrate PGP - no-one's said *that* before)

Yes, Mozilla can already do this. I am convinced that Mozilla can do anything at this point. It has become the Emacs of web browsers (MozillaOS anyone ;-))

I think they've done a pretty good job, actually. I particularly like the integrated encryption

There's Enigmail a plugin that allows users to access the authentication and encryption features provided by GPG and PGP.

and spam-reporting tools

For this one you can vote or work on this bug.

That said, I'd settle for just having the colour-coded "new mail" icon with the ability to hover over it and see the sender/title. At the office, where we use Outlook/Exchange Server, one of our guys tried to write a tool that hooked into Outlook and did that a while back. Unfortunately, he found insurmountable problems with the way Outlook's automation and new mail reporting features work. Too bad, as the rest of us were looking forward to him finishing it!

Hacking Mozilla should be fairly easier and that feature would be handy... why don't you tell him to start working on that feature for Mozilla? ;)

Andrea

• Fast IMAP performance (roughly twice as fast as OE, Kmail, Evo, and Sylpheed)
• Internationalisation (so that the rest of the world can also use it)
• Quick search bar (in both mail and address book)
• LDAP auto-completion (rocks for a (li|u)n(u|i)x-based mail server running something like OpenLDAP)
• Drag-and-drop of mail folders to and from an IMAP server
• The fact that it has sane operation in a network, for example, in windows you can have your mozilla profile on a network drive (home dir on a samba server for example), so that your mail client doens't put your mail in your windows profile to be dragged around the network if you log into different machines (OE sucks in this regard, it caches ALL your mail from IMAP servers in your message store, and you can't set it to put it's message store on a network drive).
• You can use it cross-platform. My dad runs Win2k/Mandrake 8.2 dual boot, and has his mail and address book accessible from both sides. How cool is that?
  

• Fast IMAP performance (roughly twice as fast as OE, Kmail, Evo, and Sylpheed)
• Internationalisation (so that the rest of the world can also use it)
• Quick search bar (in both mail and address book)
• LDAP auto-completion (rocks for a (li|u)n(u|i)x-based mail server running something like OpenLDAP)
• Drag-and-drop of mail folders to and from an IMAP server
• The fact that it has sane operation in a network, for example, in windows you can have your mozilla profile on a network drive (home dir on a samba server for example), so that your mail client doens't put your mail in your windows profile to be dragged around the network if you log into different machines (OE sucks in this regard, it caches ALL your mail from IMAP servers in your message store, and you can't set it to put it's message store on a network drive).
• You can use it cross-platform. My dad runs Win2k/Mandrake 8.2 dual boot, and has his mail and address book accessible from both sides. How cool is that?
  

• Fast IMAP performance (roughly twice as fast as OE, Kmail, Evo, and Sylpheed)
• Internationalisation (so that the rest of the world can also use it)
• Quick search bar (in both mail and address book)
• LDAP auto-completion (rocks for a (li|u)n(u|i)x-based mail server running something like OpenLDAP)
• Drag-and-drop of mail folders to and from an IMAP server
• The fact that it has sane operation in a network, for example, in windows you can have your mozilla profile on a network drive (home dir on a samba server for example), so that your mail client doens't put your mail in your windows profile to be dragged around the network if you log into different machines (OE sucks in this regard, it caches ALL your mail from IMAP servers in your message store, and you can't set it to put it's message store on a network drive).
• You can use it cross-platform. My dad runs Win2k/Mandrake 8.2 dual boot, and has his mail and address book accessible from both sides. How cool is that?