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Alternatively, Mozilla can submit XUL to W3C and *that* would protect all of us from the Redmond's evil.

By the way, if Mozilla is GPL, isn't it already protected from being hit by any patents?

Before anyone says anything about when they actually filed it being important, the patent was filed May 20, 1999 while that Mozilla page on Chrome says it was last modified April 7, 1999.

here's the lead developer. it will have to be a lot more standards compliant than the current html 4 version for me waste time downloading and installing and using.

The roadmap isn't trying to double-talk its way out of anything. It's out of date, plain and simple. They've chosen to focus on actually delivering a product, rather than making sure their roadmap is 100% accurate which as far as I am concerned is a reasonable choice. I really wish they'd update it though, because literally every time a Mozilla story hits Slashdot a post about "When will Firebird take over? Lying bastards!" gets modded to +5 and results in confusion ;).

Basically, as might be obvious by now, they have decided Firebird and Thunderbird are not ready to take over for SeaMonkey (codename for what we know as the Mozilla suite). There isn't an official word on when it will happen now, as far as I know. Logically, when Thunderbird and Firebird are deemed "1.0" releases would be a good time. If you're interested in all this, I direct you to the Firebird roadmap and to a lesser extent the Thunderbird roadmap, they're much more up-to-date and provide a concrete list of the steps remaining until they hit 1.0. I hope this clears things up a little, or at least helps explain why things are confusing at the moment in the first place.

Give them a break, this product IS 100% free to the end-user after all. And if anyone's interested in lending a much-needed hand, there are concrete things even non-programmers can do to help the projects along, like various QA tasks in Bugzilla.

The roadmap isn't trying to double-talk its way out of anything. It's out of date, plain and simple. They've chosen to focus on actually delivering a product, rather than making sure their roadmap is 100% accurate which as far as I am concerned is a reasonable choice. I really wish they'd update it though, because literally every time a Mozilla story hits Slashdot a post about "When will Firebird take over? Lying bastards!" gets modded to +5 and results in confusion ;).

Basically, as might be obvious by now, they have decided Firebird and Thunderbird are not ready to take over for SeaMonkey (codename for what we know as the Mozilla suite). There isn't an official word on when it will happen now, as far as I know. Logically, when Thunderbird and Firebird are deemed "1.0" releases would be a good time. If you're interested in all this, I direct you to the Firebird roadmap and to a lesser extent the Thunderbird roadmap, they're much more up-to-date and provide a concrete list of the steps remaining until they hit 1.0. I hope this clears things up a little, or at least helps explain why things are confusing at the moment in the first place.

Give them a break, this product IS 100% free to the end-user after all. And if anyone's interested in lending a much-needed hand, there are concrete things even non-programmers can do to help the projects along, like various QA tasks in Bugzilla.

The roadmap isn't trying to double-talk its way out of anything. It's out of date, plain and simple. They've chosen to focus on actually delivering a product, rather than making sure their roadmap is 100% accurate which as far as I am concerned is a reasonable choice. I really wish they'd update it though, because literally every time a Mozilla story hits Slashdot a post about "When will Firebird take over? Lying bastards!" gets modded to +5 and results in confusion ;).

Basically, as might be obvious by now, they have decided Firebird and Thunderbird are not ready to take over for SeaMonkey (codename for what we know as the Mozilla suite). There isn't an official word on when it will happen now, as far as I know. Logically, when Thunderbird and Firebird are deemed "1.0" releases would be a good time. If you're interested in all this, I direct you to the Firebird roadmap and to a lesser extent the Thunderbird roadmap, they're much more up-to-date and provide a concrete list of the steps remaining until they hit 1.0. I hope this clears things up a little, or at least helps explain why things are confusing at the moment in the first place.

Give them a break, this product IS 100% free to the end-user after all. And if anyone's interested in lending a much-needed hand, there are concrete things even non-programmers can do to help the projects along, like various QA tasks in Bugzilla.

here

copy and paste gave me a 404.

• FTP: upload is a part of the protocol, but Mozilla UI developers are ignoring it for the last 3 years;
• HTTP: WebDAV now is a part of the protocol, but Mozilla developers implemented it only in Composer (not in Browser, like IE);

Maybe at early 90s it was ok that that the web-browsing is a one-way communication when you only read and download the content. But it's not true anymore (perhaps since the dot-com bubble?). Today the web-browsing is almost always a two-way communication: people are answering web-forms and uploading files all the way.

I suggest Mozilla developers to wake-up, to free themselves from old AOL cultural traditions (remember? AOL still tinks that the internet access == dial-up 56K modems!), and to redistribute their resource accordingly to real priorities. Stop wasting your time on developing ChatZilla and Calendar (really useless components). Instead, devote those resources on FTP upload and HTTP WebDAV.

• FTP: upload is a part of the protocol, but Mozilla UI developers are ignoring it for the last 3 years;
• HTTP: WebDAV now is a part of the protocol, but Mozilla developers implemented it only in Composer (not in Browser, like IE);

Maybe at early 90s it was ok that that the web-browsing is a one-way communication when you only read and download the content. But it's not true anymore (perhaps since the dot-com bubble?). Today the web-browsing is almost always a two-way communication: people are answering web-forms and uploading files all the way.

I suggest Mozilla developers to wake-up, to free themselves from old AOL cultural traditions (remember? AOL still tinks that the internet access == dial-up 56K modems!), and to redistribute their resource accordingly to real priorities. Stop wasting your time on developing ChatZilla and Calendar (really useless components). Instead, devote those resources on FTP upload and HTTP WebDAV.

I remember the glory days of NS, back before IE was even a player on the market.

So do I. Though only as an event in history. Netscape Communicator is gone. Dead. Arising from its ashes, however, is a top class browser that leaves netscape communicator and internet explorer coughing in its dust. Let go of netscape. AOL had no problem doing so.

ibhear

My guess is they will wait till Firebird 1.0. According to the Firebird Roadmap, that may take a while.

• Big areas of the SVG specification where we're still lacking include clipping, filters and declarative animations.

You can see screenshots of what the patched Mozilla is capable of here. It can do basic drawing of shapes. However, without filters (eg. embossing, shadows, etc) or animation (eg. smoothly interpolate a color or shape from one state to another), much of the really sexy parts of SVG aren't available. And if you have a stock browser, none of SVG will be available until the code's good enough to bring in.

The quirks/strict standards modes are triggered by these doctypes respectively:

Quiks mode:

HTML 3.2
HTML 4.01 Transitional
HTML 4.01 Frameset
XHTML 1.0 Transitional
XHTML 1.0 Frameset

Wrong. XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01 Transitional/Frameset have never explicitly triggered quirks mode. They once triggered Standards mode, but somewhere along the way they were added to a new, intermediate stage, "almost standards mode." I recommend you read Mozilla's doctype switching documentation.

I'd advise everyone to write (X)HTML to the strict versions and make the www a better place to be for all of us.

"It's not that hard" has been a key strategic advantage in compelling people to embrace Web Standards. Please try to keep it that way.

1.5.1 exists only for Mac OS X. The latest stable version for all other platforms is 1.5.

Bittorrent or not, I'm not downloading 12.5 MB if Mozilla still has fat icons for the navigation toolbar and a tiny location bar in its default theme.

No
fucking
screenshot?

Bittorrent or not, I'm not downloading 12.5 MB if Mozilla still has fat icons for the navigation toolbar and a tiny location bar in its default theme.

No
fucking
screenshot?

Bittorrent or not, I'm not downloading 12.5 MB if Mozilla still has fat icons for the navigation toolbar and a tiny location bar in its default theme.

No
fucking
screenshot?

You can get expiremental SVG support in Mozilla. I am not aware of any licensing issues.
here's the link

You shouldn't. Good thing they provide MD5 sums.

What's the deal? It really looks like the new roadmap is "build in all the features people REALLY bitch about into XPFE Mozilla, then once Firebird/Thunderbird is more stable, we'll transition to those". I'm fine with that, but shouldn't they just come out and say it?

I've seen pop-up blockers in just about every shape and form, whether it comes from ISP software or a third party (like the kinds you see advertised in banners). My favorite pop-up blocker is Mozilla, but I know it will be a very long time until everyone else I know catches on. What's even more sad is how many self-proclaimed *nix "fans" I see using Internet Explorer.

I don't know how to reliably detect when you're "ignoring" email; if you figure out a way, that would be handy. In the meantime, Mozilla Firebird now has a patch to apply Bayesian learning to moving emails from the main folder to any other folder -- so spam classification is just a subset of email classification, and training is just as simple as what you'd have to do anyways -- just move the message into the folder you'd want messages like it to appear in.

Check out my feature request on Bugzilla, bug 181866, for more information. And vote for it!

-Billy

I also agree the it would be nice to have a separate Gnome calendar (i.e KDE's Organizer, or whatever it was called) but in the mean while Mozilla Calendar looks quite good...

Have you looked at Mozilla Calendar?

You can still download the integrated package.
In the Mozilla Homepage, click the download links for Mozilla 1.5 or 1.6a.

Paul Graham's ideas have undergone a lot of improvements. Some of the best improvements and tweaks have been implemented by the SpamBayes project. Their Outlook plugin makes Outlook the best spam solution that I have seen (better than SpamAssasin).

I don't know if it will help, but you can vote for the bug to improve Mozilla's spam algorithm.

... The other integrated components of the Mozilla application suite, Calendar, Chatzilla, and Composer (the HTML editor application), are not going away, either. We're not sure yet how they'll evolve -- whether they'll become standalone toolkit applications (and if so, based on which XUL toolkit), or popular add-ons to Mozilla Firebird (if so, they will need to use its new XUL toolkit). But we're committed to supporting them to the fullest extent required by their owners, including providing daily and milestone builds of them for community testing and feedback ...

Recently Fixed Bugs
[..]
If you configure a mail server to use secure authentication but the server does not support it, Thunderbird no longer silently falls back to insecure authentication. Thunderbird brings up an error dialog and refuse to connect to the server.

Once GRE comes out, this problem will hopefully be solved because any application based on Gecko/XUL/XPCOM will be sharing a single instance of GRE installed on the machine.

Agreed. Vote for bug 215883.

Vote for bug 23114. If it's fixed, clicking the X-POPFile-Link header will open up a browser window with the relevant message options shown.

This was being worked on as an extension to Thunderbird. It uses the Mozilla Calendar as the basis for adding a calendar in to Thunderbird.

...unfortunately November 19 was the last time the site was updated and it is not even workable on 0.4.

How about this one? It uses the open iCalendar (RFC-2445) format used in Apple's iCal, and can share and subscribe to calendars using WebDAV (RFC 2518). I don't personally use it any more (I use iCal), but I am able to read calendars published by users of it, and publish calendars readable by it (ah, the joys of open standards). I have never used Outlook, so I don't know if this will provide all of the features you need. Oh, and last time I looked (0.4 versions ago) it was unable to sync with my mobile phone's calendar (one of the reasons I switched to iCal).

Does anyone know if or when Thunderbird will support either an Emacs mode or configurable bindings without editing the source code? I seem to recall somewhere in some Mozilla manifesto that Emacs bindings were supposed to take precedence. Thunderbird has a fine set of keybindings, but it's nothing like Emacs.

Yeah, here it is:

When these two bindings conflict (as in ctrl-A or ctrl-H), the emacs binding wins.

Not that I'm saying they should necessarily make this the default, but the above implies they recognize how large the Emacs userbase is; it would be nice to at least be able to configure it myself without having to recompile.

Thunderbird 0.4 finally adds an optional extension to sync the Thunderbird address book with your PalmOS based handheld. Grab it from here.

but i still don't see how some dumb Electricbird is gonna beat a dinosaur....and the one on fire is already dead as far as i can tell.... heh its like naming a mail client after a squirrel...

but i still don't see how some dumb Electricbird is gonna beat a dinosaur....and the one on fire is already dead as far as i can tell.... heh its like naming a mail client after a squirrel...

Even though I don't use Thunderbird (I use Firebird and hotmail as it's simpler) this is definitely a step forward for Mozilla.org and the open source community as a whole.

I see too many companies take something that has been in an open-source product (like a Linux window manager) for years, and rewrite it, add a few features, and release it on Windows, for money. Probably the simplest example is popup blocking, even though most of them are free -- Mozilla and Firebird supported popup blocking long before even the first freeware plugin for Internet Explorer.

So the way to do this right is to do your homework. Before you even start planning on a project, make sure it is a unique project, and not something that could be a 3 kilobyte plugin to an existing project. If you want to try to sell 3 kilobyte plugins, it has to really be a killer app -- the only company I've seen do that successfully is CrossOver.

I realize that you could make an entirely new product with one killer feature, but if that feature could be implemented as a plugin to an existing product, it would take much less work for your competitor to do that, and it would annoy customers who don't want to have to use three different programs that do the same thing because each one has its own killer feature.

Next, if you think you can do it right and still make money, release your source code. Namesys has done this right, and though they make less money than they would otherwise, if you believe in good karma, they must be basking in it. A somewhat less successful way is to do what Netscape did with Mozilla and Sun did with StarOffice, which is based on OpenOffice -- create an open project, then make and sell a product based on that, possibly with a few added killer features (Netscape had spell checking before Mozilla did).

Perhaps the best way to do this is to make an open product and give it away, but charge for techsupport. I believe Mozilla has telephone techsupport now.

If you can't do that, at least be open about your development process. Release early and often. Document everything. Allow people to extend your product somehow, even if it's not with source code -- Half-life does this extremely well. Only charge for the really major updates, and charge less for an update. Listen to your community, and make them a community, not just a consumer base. You want a dialog with that community.

And remember that it's software, and that while there are real costs to developing it, the cost of distributing it (and making new copies) can be very close to 0, so charge appropriately.

Be independent. By that, I mean don't leech off of other companies -- particularly their weaknesses. For example, Symantec and many others sell products that would not exist if Windows was better, and ultimately make a worse experience for the consumer. There's a lot of websites out there that sell products designed to erase your internet history -- do NOT make a product like that. If people really cared so much about their history, they would use a product other than Microsoft Internet Explorer -- a product that deletes your history when you tell it to.

Whatever else your website is, don't just make it a brochure. Make it informative. Even redhat has, as long as I can remember, made their homepage in a way that's designed to hype rather than inform. I should be able to go to your site and click on "about" or "overview" for a description of what your product does -- if not in technical terms, at least not in marketing terms. I don't want to hear about a product that "enhances productivity" but won't say how it "enhances productivity". I should also be able to click on something like "contact" to send you an email.

An open bug database and a forum are also very useful things. Make sure they are open. Don't censor the forum based on content, and for the love of God don't censor the bug database! Good rea

ever since the support was pulled for Netscape, things have rather been free floating

I'm sure the 100+ contributors who fixed over 1,000 bugs for Mozilla 1.5 and the 70+ people who have already fixed 950 bugs in the Mozilla 1.6 Alpha and Beta cycles all enjoy your oh so informed commentary.

There's little doubt that the thousands of bug reporters that have filed more than 15,000 issues in the last 5 months, and the hundreds of active bug investigators, testcase writers, and other helpful folk are all pleased to have their work characterized as "free floating".

I know that people like me who have spent literally thousands of hours working to make recent Mozilla releases the best we've ever had really, really appreciate your valuable commentary contribution here at slashdot.

I submitted a feature request to Bugzilla to allow bounties within bug reports.

This is already being done for thunderbird (the stripped down mozilla mail equivelet of firebird)
Check out Bug 181866

There should be a windows build you can try out.
Cheerio

Mozilla has a built-in, basic WYSIWYG editor.

Have her use this for basic layout and content and then view source/experiment with the HTML using (free) HTML-Kit to get a grasp of what's going on.

install Mozilla, take a really, really deep breath, go to goatse, hit stop before you are exposed to the full harshness of that gaping ass, right click on the little bit of the goatse man that has appeared, choose "Block Images From This Server", and voila! no more goatse man - even if you are redirected or click a misleading link and end up at the aforelinked domain.

Doesn't help with the increasingly popular mirroring of goatse, but it blocks enough dodgy goatse troll links to stuff his ass full of them.

There may be ways to block images with IE/your browser of choice, but I wouldn't know how to do that.

Actually, according to the linked page, "if you write Free software (Open Source software covered by the GPL) you are welcome to download and use the Free Edition of Qt,"...

Actually, if you read what the submitter wrote, he said "free multi-platform" software. OK, I'll grant that X/11 and Mac are "multi-platform", but when those platforms make up ~7% of the market, it's nothing to brag about. Trolltech continues to aggresively deny Qt developers the ability to distribute their works to the vast majority of the computing product. After all, cross-platform Open Source software can't possibly succeed, can it?

...and Trolltech points out that one can buy the current edition of Qt -- seems fair enough.

MSRP of Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition: US$109. MSRP of Qt/Windows Professional Edition: US$1550. <sarcasm>Oh, yeah. That's fair.</sarcasm> It's really discriminatory and punitive. And it's still not Open Source. What makes them think that taking the low road like that will convince Windows devlopers to consider Qt?

I've been on a campaign lately trying to get people to switch from IE. I've been pushing Netscape 7.x instead of Mozilla though, as I find explaining the difference is tedious to say the least. I'd prefer if they used the AOL-brand free version, but Netscape is better than nothing.

There is an online petition for AOL to release the Netscape brand, perhaps some readers of Slashdot should consider signing it.

In the mean time, I suggest any advocacy should be towards Mozilla 1.4.1, which is functionally superior to any current version of IE while being far more stable and having far fewer known vulnerabilities.

Seriously, we need more marketing people, artists, and UI designers helping out with open source. They did a good job with Firebird.

I feel I should point out that Mozilla Firebird does not need to be installed, and doesn't occupy that much space (less than 20Mb anyway). A good alternative, even for people "forced" to use IE. I've been using it for a while, and it's great.

I use Mozilla Firebird, myself, and like you, I've tried to encourage my friends to switch.
Doesn't help much when I'm forced to use a university workstation (like today), but I find it's a better quality browser than IE. Renders faster, blocks pop-ups, and I find tabbed browsing to be pretty much invaluable.
Of course, the best thing about Firebird is, I can still watch Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka ;-)

There are, of course, some times when you have to use IE (like Windows Update, though I guess I could always just download each update manually).

The big problem I've hit is that, even with all these MSIE vulnerabilities that come out on a near-weekly basis - not to mention annoying pop-ups and pop-unders, and other little security-related issues - I don't seem to have any success.
So what's your persuasive technique for getting people onto pre-1.0, non-MS, reliable-but-not-100%-complete software?

Wow, I can't believe I'm the first to make this joke ..... today.