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It will be a very good thing if minotaur fix the mozilla mail client and get the fixes back into the mozilla tree.

bugzilla.mozilla.org lists bugs where the mail client fails to retreive mail which have been open for years. I stopped using mozilla as a mail client due to bug 58301 which has been open for nearly three years.

WineX

Nothing quite matches the power of a direct, pithy answer to whip the carpet out from under a troll's feet... but WineX is only part of the answer. Win4Lin is also only part of the answer. Whole-of-machine emulators like Bochs and VMWare are not the answer. WINE seems to be close to the right the answer, and WineX is an intgeresting side-branch of it.

The real right answer, however, is World Domination for Linux - even if you're a BSD fan.

Why?

Because once your favourite app is ported to Linux, it's ported to anywhere. Linux is a damn sight easier for another Unix (thinking specifically of *BSD here) to emulate even in binary than Windows is.The difference between Linux and, say, NetBSD for most applications is completely buried in automake or any similar portability tool. Of course, wrapping it in something like SDL or Qt wipes out a lot of the interface differences as well. Once an application is portable (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Konqueror, The GIMP, KOffice), it can compete on its merits rather than its application burden.

As Bill and his buddies well know, that means `Goodbye, Microsoft'. Which is why they're working their little asses off trying to meld all of their apps into one inscrutible, indivisible, Palladium-wrapped, Microsoft-certified unmanageable blob while they still have the market share to force it down their users' throats.

Rapid World Domination by Libre software is the only way available to us to stop this.

I care more about...stability...which is I why I use Netscape 4.7


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

<gasp>

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You may not be aware of this, but Netscape crashing only once a day isn't something to brag about anymore. Practically every recent mainstream browser is more stable than Netscape 4.7x. Some of them are faster too.

Why can't there be an "insert cursor(insertion point, that flashing vertical line)" command/keycombo so as to avoid having to use the mouse in the first place.

Well, actually, that's what caret browsing does in Mozilla/Phoenix. Press F7 and you get a cursor that you can move around with the keyboard. You can highlight text with it and click on links, etc. Personally I don't use this feature as it tends to be a bit quirky, but is nice (especially combined with type-ahead find) if you want to do keyboard-only browsing.

If you have to leave the keyboard to grab the mouse to to insert the cursor you might as well stay with the mouse for click and drag.

For me my mouse accuracy tends to make click and drag kind of a pain, especially with a trackball. So I like the click and then keyboard to highlight text (e.g. shift-ctrl-right arrow). But that's just personal preference and also depends on the situation as to which is quicker.

Re: two stories ago

This + This = Open Source IE

This + This = Open Source IE

Wanna party like it's 1993? Just: Use mozilla to disable pop-ups and nosy cookies. Use the proximitron or filterproxy, depending on your OS. Use a big-ass hosts file and edexter (or eDexterJavaDog for non-windows users) if you want.

I use nt at work, linux at home, and I don't do ads. Bottom line, WE control what happens on our computers. Let's not forget that we have this power, or that we're going to have to fight to keep it.

Your problem about keyboard mapping was just answered this month in Sys Admin Magazine. Check out the first Q&A here.

You might also check out the Customizing Mozilla page at Mozilla.org.

Your problem about keyboard mapping was just answered this month in Sys Admin Magazine. Check out the first Q&A here.

You might also check out the Customizing Mozilla page at Mozilla.org.

If there was a search tool akin to Google for searching accurately through large bug databases where users could easily find bugs then the issue of duplicates would be solved almost entirely.

There is an alternative to the overcomplicated "Search for bugs" page. It's called Bugzilla QuickSearch. I use it for the vast majority of my bugzilla searches. I even have a Bugzilla QuickSearch textbox on my start page (along with a Google search box, etc).

I think "Search for bugs" should be renamed to "Advanced search" and QuickSearch should be made more prominent.

If there was a search tool akin to Google for searching accurately through large bug databases where users could easily find bugs then the issue of duplicates would be solved almost entirely.

There is an alternative to the overcomplicated "Search for bugs" page. It's called Bugzilla QuickSearch. I use it for the vast majority of my bugzilla searches. I even have a Bugzilla QuickSearch textbox on my start page (along with a Google search box, etc).

I think "Search for bugs" should be renamed to "Advanced search" and QuickSearch should be made more prominent.

Respect is a two way street. It would be nice if the Mozilla Developers would show the same respect they desire from bug reporters to bug reporters. The fact is you can get rude and dismissive comments from the Mozilla developers even if you do your absolute best to be as respectful to them as possible. In fact you can get the attitude from the Mozilla developers even before you make a comment see here.

That said, I think the Mozilla developers are doing a GREAT job and I have a ton of respect for them. I just woouldn't ever want to work with them.

If you need people to write better bug reports, teach them how.

That would be what the Bug Writing Guidelines are for. This document serves a different purpose.

Gerv
(document author)

How much longer until they finally get around to fixing the 4000-characters cut-n-paste bug that's been around for THREE YEARS?

- A.P.

He hasn't been involved with the project in any way at all during the last four years.

Actually, he's submitted 82 bugs in the last year (although if you really want to confirm I'm telling the truth, you'll have to cut and paste the link.)

Gerv
(document author)

Have you seen the Bug Writing Guidelines? They may be a more appropriate document to point your users to.

Gerv
(document author)

The first thing is use the bugzilla helper it will help you create a good bug that includes: what you did, what you thought should happen, and what happened instead. It will also include what your platform is.

Duplicate bug reports are discouraged on bugzilla but they are useful. They give the developers an idea of how many people are seeing a given bug. This is especially important for triage, deciding which bug to fix first. Even better, is to find the relevant bug that's already open on the issue, and to add your bug report to that one (give all the details). That will save the developers a bit of time and provide useful contextual information that can help narrow down (or expand) the focus for a bug.

simon

An interesting example illustrating many of these bad practices over and over and over can be found in the comment section of bug 22274, a not-quite-valid-but-frequently-reported-"bug" involving tabled images, alignment, descenders, and Quirks mode.

The first time I noticed that functionality in Moz I found my way to the above page and spent a good hour or two reading through all the comments. Aside from gaining an education in some of the nitty gritties of html and css standards, I was struck by how frequently the bug was re-reported and by how abusive the commenters became (especially when their bug was labeled "invalid"). It's nice to see a page with explicit etiquette standards. Lets hope the bugzillians abide by them.

There's a number of faux pas you can commit when using Bugzilla. At the very least, these will make Mozilla contributors upset at you; if committed enough times they will cause those contributors to demand the disabling of your Bugzilla account. So, ignore this advice at your peril.

That said, Mozilla developers are generally a friendly bunch, and will be towards you as long as you follow these guidelines.

This is the most important section.

1. No pointless comments. Unless you have something constructive and helpful to say, do not add a comment to a bug. In bugs where there is a heated debate going on, you should be even more inclined not to add a comment. Unless you have something new to contribute, then the bug owner is aware of all the issues, and will make a judgement as to what to do. If you agree the bug should be fixed, vote for it. Additional "I see this too" or "It works for me" comments are unnecessary unless they are on a different platform or a significantly different build.
2. No obligation. "Open Source" is not the same as "the developers must do my bidding." The only person who has any obligation to fix the bugs you want fixed is you. Never act as if you expect someone to fix a bug by a particular date or release. This is merely obnoxious, and is likely to get the bug ignored.
3. No personal abuse. Bugzilla is a window into the world of Mozilla development. The fact that we permit anyone with an account to add a comment does not mean you may harass, harangue or otherwise hassle contributors. Do not make weak threats like "I won't use Mozilla until this bug is fixed!" If a respected project contributor complains about your Bugzilla attitude, then you may have your account disabled. If you don't like this possibility, become a respected project contributor.

1. No messing with other people's bugs. Unless you are the bug assignee, or have some say over the use of their time, never change the Priority or Target Milestone fields. If in doubt, do not change the fields of bugs you do not own - add a comment instead, suggesting the change.
2. No whining about decisions. If a respected project contributor has marked a bug as INVALID, then it is invalid. Someone filing another duplicate of it does not change this. Unless you have further important evidence, do not post a comment arguing that an INVALID or WONTFIX bug should be reopened.

1. Some of these rules may not apply to you. If they do not, you will know exactly which ones do not, and why they do not apply. If you are not sure, then they definitely all apply to you.

If you see someone not following these rules, the first step is to point this out by private mail. They may well not be aware of this document. Flaming people publically in bugs just causes resentment. In the case of persistent offending you should report the matter to Gerv.

This entire document can be summed up in one sentence: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

What you really need to be asking is, how can participating in Open Source help my business? As an example, it's been said many times, but bear repeating: most of the lines of code written in the world are written for internal projects within a company and never see the light of day. Many companies don't release such code because it's a one-way operation. You release it, your competition uses it and you get nothing in return.

There are really two questions embedded in your comment:

1. How do open source projects get started?
2. Why would a company using an open source product participate in its development?

My take on the first question is that, so far, viable open source projects have come from three sources:

• Grassroots efforts among developers to "scratch an itch". Examples: Linux, the GNU utilities, Apache
• Software companies trying to boost market share for products with significant external competition. Examples: Mozilla, Darwin
• Software companies trying to create a platform for selling services/support (the loss leader approach). Examples: Compiere

Other avenues might be possible. For example, a company might open internally-developed code if it felt that the benefit of externally-developed improvements would outweigh the harm of giving the code to its competitors.

The second question is more straightforward. As a company, I want to participate in OSS projects so that I can steer them. And if I don't release my developments back into the main development tree, my cost of maintaining a proprietary version will grow over time. Cost control in SW development is all about achieving and maintaining scale; splintering off is counter-productive unless there's a very good reason.

Well, mozilla's GUI is witten with XML.

Quote from mozilla.org: Warning: A Slashdot article published on 3/13/03 incorrectly stated that the Mozilla 1.3 final release is applying machine learning to autocomplete. Please keep in mind that Mozilla 1.3 does NOT contain the data collection or the learning code that we talk about on this page. That code only shipped with 1.3 BETA and was taken out in time for the 1.3 final release. Data collection and learning will only work with the 1.3 BETA builds.

it's not mozilla per se, but your url handler. Here's mine:

phoenix -remote "openURL(%s,new-tab)"

Take a look at this helpful page.

So file this as a "bug" (enhancement)! Slashdot isn't Bugzilla, you know. :)

Actually, I've been awaiting it's arrival for quite some time.

Perhaps it's just IE's implementation of smoothscroll that annoys you.

I haven't seen what the smooth scrolling for Mozilla will look like, but it shouldn't be too far away. I would hope that the Mozilla guys have thought it out a little better than the IE team. We shall see.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=smooth scroll
With the above, right click and copy-paste it into another browser window. Also, note that the bug has an alias "smoothscroll" so you don't have to remember it's number.

It's only a minor annoyance, but Mozilla doesn't yet snap to the default button in Windows if that setting is configured in Control Panel (when set, the mouse cursor should automatically move to the default button in dialog boxes). You might think it wouldn't be such a tough fix, but it's apparently ellusive :-/.

If you like, you can vote for the bug (you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote). You'll probably need to copy-n-paste the URL, as Bugzilla doesn't accept referers from Slashdot.

It's only a minor annoyance, but Mozilla doesn't yet snap to the default button in Windows if that setting is configured in Control Panel (when set, the mouse cursor should automatically move to the default button in dialog boxes). You might think it wouldn't be such a tough fix, but it's apparently ellusive :-/.

If you like, you can vote for the bug (you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote). You'll probably need to copy-n-paste the URL, as Bugzilla doesn't accept referers from Slashdot.

It's only a minor annoyance, but Mozilla doesn't yet snap to the default button in Windows if that setting is configured in Control Panel (when set, the mouse cursor should automatically move to the default button in dialog boxes). You might think it wouldn't be such a tough fix, but it's apparently ellusive :-/.

If you like, you can vote for the bug (you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote). You'll probably need to copy-n-paste the URL, as Bugzilla doesn't accept referers from Slashdot.

Am I the only person who noticed that they cravenly removed the Mozilla mascot from the splash screen?

This will sound stupid to the Slashdot Crowd, but many of the people that I've switched to Mozilla really, really liked the mascott. I've even had several of the women comment that they used Mozilla because they thought the logo was cute; the guys though it looked cool (these people are not technical types).

Why they would switch to the current bland and antiseptic splash screen is beyond me. I mean, I'm not going to switch browsers or anything, but they do risk alienating at least a fraction of their "joe six-pack" user base. Plus it's just dumb from a marketing standpoint.

Bring back the fire-breathing lizard!!!!

If you agree with me, vote for the bug I submitted to Bugzilla.

Until recently add-ons could only be installed in the Mozilla application directory, where they get deleted every time you upgrade to a newer version.

A bug was recently fixed that makes it possible to install add-ons into the user profile directory, where they persist through upgrades.

Note that until 1.4alpha comes out, this fix will only be available on the nightly builds. Also, add-on authors have to modify their add-ons to install into the profile directory. If you are an add-on author, see the bug for an example of how to do this:

you can enable it by going to about:config (which seemingly must be typed into the address bar, not clicked on in a link) and changing browser.urlbar.autocomplete.learning.mode to 2. it's mentioned at the autocomplete page (but the data collection phase appears to be over, so don't bother following the data collection steps). i've been using the maching learning autocomplete in 1.3b for a few weeks and it's better than the default.

yes they do.
kitchen sink
There is also a plug-in under work, which displays this sink when you type about:kitchensink

here's the link, ass.

IE has the ability to insert arbitrary HTML which makes table insertion much easier. We had to use DOM manipulation for our demo. I haven't added IE specific code for table insertion yet.

As far as the API goes, we worked very hard to make the API compatible with IE.

If you want to understand how we differ from IE, see:

http://www.mozilla.org/editor/ie2midas.html

I have on my todo list to make the demo work better in IE. In particular, I'd love to get the button look and feel working better in IE.

http://download.aaltonen.us/mozilla-1.3/

I grabbed everything from here that seemed important... the server is at UMASS on a dual-OC3 connection, so it should be sufficient.

Check out the Progress and Future of Mozilla-the-application-suite for information on what's coming up in the next few months.

Since all previous releases were late, this naturally made this one late as well. OS X was moving to Mach O builds and thus dropping OS 9 support from the main tree, and a lot of work with Junk E-mail filtering was going on. Plus, this nasty OS X bug crept up and stumped everyone, till about about 4 hours after Asa moved it from blocking 1.3 to blocking 1.4a ( and incidently it made it in time for 1.3 after all ).

How about this ?

Autocomplete doesn't use machine learning in 1.3. It was an experimental, disabled-by-default, feature in 1.3beta for data-collection.

...you can now use a version of Galeon later than 1.2.7 without worrying about a dodgy beta copy of Mozilla. In the past if I'd wanted 1.2.8 I'd have to download and use the possibly unstable Mozilla 1.3 beta.

Get Mozilla 1.3 here and here.

Not really. You may use the Radio Context just for gestures.

Set the radialcontext.dragonly preference to true in your prefs.js (or browse to about:config in Mozilla 1.3b to change it there) and your old school context menus will be there. The radial context will be called only for drag movements.

If this is the same MozillaQuest as once was on http://www.mozillaquest.com, it was originally run by a troll who thrived on badly written articles misinterpreting statistics from bugzilla.mozilla.org and submitting links to NewsForge, Slashdot and elsewhere.
It's nice if they have grown since then.

I'm using the Phoenix Web Browser right now, build number 20020308 for Linux, and it's very nice. For those of you that want a browser still under active development, that has a "dial-up-friendly" download size of about 8 MB for each release, then try Phoenix. I really love the "nuke images" extension, so I can get rid of advertisements in web pages that flash at you, etc. so I can just read the text. Of course Phoenix also blocks popups by default, unlike "popup-friendly" Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Moz on faster linux and windows machines, and Phoenix on slower linux and windows machines

Speaking of Phoenix, where is 0.6? According to the Phoenix Roadmap 0.6 was due in January and 0.7 was due in February.

You would think that implementing the Box Model would be straightforward, but try to name two major browsers that do it exactly the same way

Sure! In fact, here are a dozen.

Fix CSS implementations first!

I see the point you are trying to make, but you are really comparing apples to oranges. I think the original poster meant "innovations" in the context of user interface elements: tabbed browsing, popup blocking, gestures, things of that nature. Things with the potential to make Mozilla, Netscape, Chimera, et. al. more competetive with IE.

"Innovate" UI widgets on different browsers all you want; as long as they all use the Gecko rendering engine, as a developer, I don't have to care. Indeed, this freedom to not care is the whole idea behind web standards, but we aren't quite there yet.

Optimoz (for Mozilla has mouse gestures, too, you ignorant clod.

You obviously need a more standard compliant browser, such as Mozilla, which supports the blink tag in its full goodness.

While I do agree with the AC, you deserve an explenation.

... or why is there only one word per line on the very right side of the page?

I stopped reading somewhere in the middle because it's just too unreadable this way.

You see, Netscape 4.7 has poor support for Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets are a technology we webdesigners use to exercise greater control over the look and feel of a website. Sadly, during the first browser war, CSS and other standards were ignored. Companies thought they could win the war by providing proprietary functionality. Netscape 4.7 was the last version of Netscape before standards became their priority.

If you're looking for a similar browser, download Netscape 7, If you have not upgraded due to concern of CPU load and memory, you'll probably like Phoenix. Of course, there are other browsers out there. I just tend to ignore anything that isn't based on mozilla (which the new netscape and phoenix are).

I'm a big fan of tabs. I wish the folks at Mozilla could get their act together and define some way that Javascript can be used to open a new tab. They seem to be bogged down in an endless discussion on what is really the right thing to do.

For example, I would like to be able to make Jon Udell's Library Lookup bookmarklet create a new tab.

Check out Phoenix on Linux, Solaris and Win32 but not OS X. They are leaving Chimera to OS X. I don't know of one for OS X but Phoenix is very nice on the other platforms. I have 4 pages open when I fire it up.