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With regard to your first question, Thunderbird keeps your mail folders/preferences separate from its installation directory. To install Tb0.2 you just need to delete your existing Thunderbird directory and put the new one in it's place. You can check out the installation instructions here.

With regards to your second question, generally speaking "bouncing" is something that only mail servers can do. What Thunderbird can do is identify spam and filter it to a "Junk" folder (or just delete it right away).

There's a bug, but it doesn't seem to get much traffic. Remember, bugzilla doesn't take referrals from slashdot.

This is not yet advertised on mozilla.org. Thunderbird 0.1 is still advertised.

Gnus has been handling threads in email for about a decade now, I believe. Part of the advantage of reading email as though 'twere news. Mutt attempts to thread emails; I'm not certain how successful it is, as it's been years since I've used that excellent mail reader.

What we really need is for someone to code up JWZ's Intertwingle, which would make life truly great. Not to mention that it'd be a perfect job for elisp, which means it'd be perfect for emacs, which means it'd be perfect for gnus, which means that it'd be perfect.

*POP UP WINDOW*?!?!

Dude, time to visit Mozilla.

As many people will probably point here, you should check out Evolution's "virtual folders".

JWZ once proposed a more sophisticated approach to store mail without the hierarchical folder structure limits. You can read about it here: Intertwingle

I don't what came out of that. I think it is a good idea still waiting to be implemented.

Do you think MS doesn't even use their own software?
Well, actually they don't, necessarily. I know this for a fact. True, they are bound to use some of their own software, but many tasks that could very well be done on MS software is done on other (superior) software. (Case in point: guess if they use MS FrontPage or Allaire HomeSite to manage and author their internet sites. You guessed Allaire? Correct you are!)
--JanGB

(What's dogfooding? See Mozilla's jargon file)

Does AOL really intend on being Mozilla's major financer for much longer

Perhaps you missed this announcement? There was also a slashdot story. I won't rehash the arguments made in that thread for Mozillas post-AOL survival, but a few other corporations continue to make hefty contributions in both manpower and cash to Mozilla.

Blockquoth the poster...

obligatory group photo (use mouse pointer and look at the status bar to see the names!)

But only in Internet Explorer, it would seem. Certainly not in Mozilla Firebird. It beggars belief that people who are trying to convince the world of the virtues of alternative and open systems can't even code cross-browser [d]HTML.

Well not the whole AOL network, but the former mozilla division blocked links from slashdot (and still does), (Example). Any sites that cause major bandwidth use should be blocked, I'm sure some frequest slashdotters get the infamous Pink page of death.

Regarding screen sizes: the same people who complain about small type will insist they need a small screen, that 18" is too large. They cannot coherently explain why smaller things are easier to see, but a large percentage of them insist on it, including almost everyone who wears bifocals. Many of them use 14" viewables and don't totally maximize the browser window.

In order to compensate for the small size of their screens, they will cut the resolution to 640x480, and I'm convinced they'd set it smaller than that if Windows would let them. Then on top of that they will only effectively use about half of the screen, saying that they can't see the top part, the bottom part, or whatever. The implication is that if this is your target market, your site needs to be usable at about 600x200. Whee. If you plan it right from the start, it is entirely possible to design a site that looks decent at that size and still scales and looks okay at much higher resolutions, but with bitmap-type graphics there are limits; it's going to look quite stretched at 1600x1200.

There are two ways around this: one is to make your graphics scale, and the other is to build your site mostly out of text, maybe using graphics for borders and backgrounds and stuff.

Making graphics scale *properly* means vector graphics. When you run across a vector graphics format with wide browser support please let me know, as I'd be very interested. As a kludge, you can use bitmapped graphics (PNG or whatever) and assign relative widths. I have done this once or twice (width="100%" in my case) in a pinch, but if you try it you will immediately see the problem. Depending on the graphic it might be okay for some things, but it's definitely not a general solution to the whole issue.

At this time, my recommendation for sites that need to scale well to different resolutions is to make heavy use of text and style sheets and use a few strategically-placed graphics to spruce things up without interfering too much with scalability. For example, a background graphic that can be tiled will accomodate different resolutions fairly well. Narrow borders that scale or repeat in one direction are another fine example. A medium-sized logo that can be centered at the top, above the rest of the content, may be designed such that it looks fine surrounded by varying amounts of whitespace. And so on.

As far as text, use the relative size attributes to make some text larger than the rest as necessary, but don't fix hard sizes, as some legacy browsers[1] then won't let the user scale the text; with relative sizes the browser will pick up and use the user's base font size.

Some of your layout problems can be lessened by use of alpha-channel transparency. This doesn't work with all browsers, though; it works with all browsers based on Mozilla.org code, recent versions of Opera, and possibly certain others, but not for example with old versions of Netscape. There is a kludge to make it work with some versions of MSIE, but this fails sometimes depending on the user's settings and in any case will not work with old versions of MSIE. If you are interested in pursuing alpha channel stuff, I have some examples up here: http://cgi.galion.lib.oh.us/test/ Especially see GPL-plus.html (for an example how how it helps layouts) and png-alpha/png-alpha-demo-hacked.html (for a demo of the transparency channel itself). There is also a really cool demo here, but that one has not been hacked to work with MSIE.

One final piece of advice: test your site at at least three resolutions, including 640x480 and 1280x1024.

[1] Notably Netscape 4 and all versions of MSIE.

I'll be happy to as soon as someone actually implements it.

There's a patch for that you know, available here.

bugzilla bug #217601

I'd like that big projects like Moz or KDE be modular in terms of speed vs. functionalities : if I have a powerful machine, I'll want the super 3D web-o-matic, and if I run it on an old machine, I have an option to do without and I can stay at a level of niceties and support corresponding to the speed of the machine.

As per the roadmap, the plan is to eventually to get a common runtime environment that all Mozilla-based apps can run within (Firebird, Thunderbird, Chatzilla, the Sunbird calendar, etc). This will eliminate the problem of all these programs sharing significant amounts of code and wasting memory/disk space. It'll take a while though, and to be fair neither of these programs is claiming to be at release quality anyway (Firebird is working toward version 0.7, and Thunderbird is closing in on 0.2). Give them a chance, I'm confident that once these changes get made we'll see a huge reduction in bloat.

Mod me down if you want, but IE still opens faster, renders pages better, and has built-in media features.

People who bitch and say "OMGWTF LOL!1!! IE SUXX!11!" are the same people who got hit with MSBLAST and never patch their systems.

Mozilla has it's own security issues just as any application nowadays.

Open source isn't the cure to cancer.

When the winds of change blow hard enough, even the most trivial of things can turn into deadly projectiles.

mozilla has come a long way. I began with version 0.5 and have used the mozilla browser almost exclusvely at work since

• Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
• Milestone 18 - Completed October 12, 2000

mozilla has come a long way. I began with version 0.5 and have used the mozilla browser almost exclusvely at work since

• Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
• Milestone 18 - Completed October 12, 2000

First : Check your links, linking to bugzilla from /. does not work.

second, look at the discussion of bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id= 94035

Also a very high voted bug. (360 votes i believe)

note this comment there:

"mozilla.org is not a corporation nor is it a democracry (there's actually text on mozilla.org that talks about democracy) and you aren't paying most of the developers who volunteer their time and effort to contribute to this project. now it might be the case that there are ways for you to hire someone to do work for this project, in which case you are welcome to seek out such avenues, but you will not find them in this bug.

Please read: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette. html, especially
the part about no obligation.

If you think that this bug is important (perhaps because it has so many votes) then you are welcome to and encoraged to create a solution. once you've written the code to solve the bug you can attach it to the bug and seek reviews. at that point your comments in the bug are valid and worthy of note. until then please consider that you might not have anything useful o say. for example, i shouldn't have to write this comment, it's a waste of everyone's time. but people asked. "

So put your money/time where your mouth is.

Mozilla 1.5b is not based on Phoenix (which was renamed to Mozilla Firebird). Mozilla 1.5b is still the old Seamonkey suite. I don't know when mozilla.org will declare fb+tb to be its main products or whether fb+tb will inherit seamonkey's version numbering when that happens.

In the meantime, development on Mozilla Firebird is still active. Recent Firebird nightlies have been great and 0.7 will probably be released within a week.

As for it being a Win 98 only bug, it's not. The bug appears whether you're running Win 98, 98 SE, ME, 2000, or XP. Many people probably assume it's exclusive to 98 since that's what most people appear to be still running.

you could be a troll, but what the hell, im being nice... if you dont want to use IE and/or OE then Mozilla.org is the best place to start. Good Luck!

It only takes a short time to add a bug report, etc.

I think everyone here should know about the most voted for bug in Bugzilla.

In the 1.4 release of Mozilla, the previously complete support for the open MNG image format was removed in order to shave a 100-300 kilobytes from the Mozilla download.

MNG is an extension to PNG, a W3C-backed standard, that adds animation capabilities equal or superior to those in GIF. For example, the Phoenix MNG throbber was about 30 kilobytes smaller and looked far better than any GIF alternative due to alpha transparency and 24-bit colour.

Despite a great reduction in size and optimization of the main library, the authorities have only agreed to put in the MNG-VLC subset back into the 1.5 release.

MNG-VLC is basically useless because it doesn't even support offsets. Putting it back in does not help any of the early MNG adopters at all because their images won't display.

I highly encourage Mozilla maintainers to put the full MNG back in. The code is being actively supported and the feature is something that cutting-edge web developers are eyeing with great enthusiam for eventual adoption.

Note: Further discussion of that particular bug in Bugzilla is discouraged, but every vote helps.;)

Ever since the 1.4a OS X builds were patched to work again with profiles on NFS volumes, there has been a severe dataloss bug (it eats bookmarks.html) Please see bug 215089 for details and how to reproduce it. Some bugzilla searching will reveal LOTS of similar reports, which are being similarly ignored (some were tracked in meta-bug 203343).

This is a SEVERE problem - a browser that can't maintain bookmarks from one launch to the next is pretty useless, especially for corporate use, where home directories are likely to be on non-local volumes. Requests for blocking 1.4b, 1.4 and now 1.5b were all denied, and no one seems willing to investigate where exactly the problem lies.

While I appreciate speed, bloat reduction and fixes for really obscure bits of CSS in order to make someone's 'blog render nicely, I feel that data loss is a more critical issue. If I could code, I'd help do that. Instead, I'm happy to work with any developer to rest and resolve this. If voting carries any weight, please vote for bug 215089. Thanks...

Ever since the 1.4a OS X builds were patched to work again with profiles on NFS volumes, there has been a severe dataloss bug (it eats bookmarks.html) Please see bug 215089 for details and how to reproduce it. Some bugzilla searching will reveal LOTS of similar reports, which are being similarly ignored (some were tracked in meta-bug 203343).

This is a SEVERE problem - a browser that can't maintain bookmarks from one launch to the next is pretty useless, especially for corporate use, where home directories are likely to be on non-local volumes. Requests for blocking 1.4b, 1.4 and now 1.5b were all denied, and no one seems willing to investigate where exactly the problem lies.

While I appreciate speed, bloat reduction and fixes for really obscure bits of CSS in order to make someone's 'blog render nicely, I feel that data loss is a more critical issue. If I could code, I'd help do that. Instead, I'm happy to work with any developer to rest and resolve this. If voting carries any weight, please vote for bug 215089. Thanks...

The sad, sad news is that Firebird and Thunderbird will not made it into 1.5 :-(

In the new roadmap they clearly specified that Firebird in Thunderbird must have been included in 1.5, but then, they patched the roadmap to say that 1.5 will be the standard AppSuite.

I was having high hopes on 1.5, but now, is just another release for me. Meantime, I using Firebird every day and will start using Thunderbird too soon. Since MailNews is my primary mailreader, I want it more support in Thunderbird from mozilla developers before I switch.

So what does this story have to do with Apple!?

Mozilla runs on Mac OS X. Duh! Here's even a friendly link to download it!

0.2 Release Candidate is out.

Also, see why people are switching to Mozilla Firebird.

Have you tried Mozilla Firebird? http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/

Thunderbird 0.2 RC1 is available now (for Windows, other builds should follow shortly). It's had a good size reduction and speed increase.

I'm glad to see that they are still making headway with Mozilla. However, I recently installed MozillaFirebird, and I won't be looking back anytime soon. I suggest you give it a try. Also, check out MozillaThunderbird for your mail needs.

http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/
http://mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

I'm glad to see that they are still making headway with Mozilla. However, I recently installed MozillaFirebird, and I won't be looking back anytime soon. I suggest you give it a try. Also, check out MozillaThunderbird for your mail needs.

http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/
http://mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

When it gets a version number a little higher than 0.1.

No, it doesn't. Also, Messenger doesn't have a calendar.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Looks like a calendar to me.

How did this turn into a OS discussion anyway? I thought we were talking about breakfast, it's 6:30am, and all anyone can talk about are OSs and HAM.

We could easily say Windows rules in every aspect, as it dose; properly secured and used. But, GNU/Linux rules in every aspect, as it dose; properly secured and used.

This is true on every system. If someone wanted, a Palm Pilot could be made into a perfect HAMtasticle tool.

I personally think all HAMs need to run Windows 98se. Never change it, only develope on/for it. If an exploit is found, hack the problem and fix it. Then all ham development could be focused on one point. Be it a bad point, but an easy point.

The same goes for BSDs, stop forking, unfork, and make an easy OS. How many people are writing something for NetBSD, that the OpenBSD people are allready finished. It's a waste of time.

Don't make 3 HAMical tools that do the same thing, make 1 that dose it 3 times better!

Change is bad, now where is breakfast? Look ma', my first post, and it sucks.

How did this turn into a OS discussion anyway? I thought we were talking about breakfast, it's 6:30am, and all anyone can talk about are OSs and HAM.

We could easily say Windows rules in every aspect, as it dose; properly secured and used. But, GNU/Linux rules in every aspect, as it dose; properly secured and used.

This is true on every system. If someone wanted, a Palm Pilot could be made into a perfect HAMtasticle tool.

I personally think all HAMs need to run Windows 98se. Never change it, only develope on/for it. If an exploit is found, hack the problem and fix it. Then all ham development could be focused on one point. Be it a bad point, but an easy point.

The same goes for BSDs, stop forking, unfork, and make an easy OS. How many people are writing something for NetBSD, that the OpenBSD people are allready finished. It's a waste of time.

Don't make 3 HAMical tools that do the same thing, make 1 that dose it 3 times better!

Change is bad, now where is breakfast? Look ma', my first post, and it sucks.

Or better yet, install firebird

try firebird (has native popup blocking):
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/

...and add the the google toolbar extension:
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

Man, I cant drink that mozilla coffee. It bloats me up.

Maybe they should have a Mozilla Firebird coffee.

Indeed. If you agree with this smart fellow, buy coffee you like, where you like, and Give money directly to mozilla

Who cares? Buy a bag and give it to someone who does

If you want money to go to Mozilla. GIVE IT. Give it directly to Mozilla. Why give them only half the profit from coffee (assuming they ever actually see it) when you could give them the whole thing?

On second thought, it's miles ahead of what most of these leeches who can't fathom why anybody would PAY for a Slashdot subscription yet visit this site throughout the day to bitch about it.

does this version of mozilla coffee come with a coffeemaker? or the kitchen sink?

Then again, you could buy your coffee elsewhere, at less RIDICULOUS prices, and instead donate directly to mozilla.org.

OSS innovate on the UI and not copy Apple? Highly unlikely.

So, I guess you think Apple came up with tabbed browsing, type ahead and the integration of popup blocking control in the status bar.

You don't need a huge team of people to develop good interfaces. You just need a few smart people who can implement the things they would like to see in their programs.

OpenOffice, mozilla don't make good use of the hardware, especially with >1Ghz and >128Mb of ram, Openoffice just slows to a halt or crash and burn. Yes we have tried OpenOffice 1.1, but its still too slow, just because they changed the bootstrap sequence to make the initial window appeear faster, dosent means its fast now.. Mozilla is not so bad if you don't use the XUL front end (use a front end such as jan6, thunderbird (which is the browser we use), or konqueror).
Our company runs Microsoft office 2000 on our 300 gentoo workstations that have 128 Mb. We can't afford the $150,000 to upgrade the RAM (and the hard drives) so we can use OpenOffice (and then face the horrible fonts it uses as it uses its own propeitry font handling system)

My company outsources about 15% of its programming work to taiwan and the poor support for the Chinese character set means we have to run the Chinese version of Microsoft Office on a dedicated windows 98 box to read the documents from the taiwanese office. (no, crossover office dosen't work on non english versions of Microsoft Office).

So to summurize, for our company to be to completey Linuxized, we need a unbloated version of openoffice that can work with >128 Mb of ram and a version of crossover office that supports the Chinese edition of microsoft office.

You can ALWAYS use a faster CPU if you're compiling big stuff like OpenOffice or Mozilla from source...