Slashdot Mirror

"What about the poor sods who have to use IE at work?"

If you have access to the internet, you have access to mozilla. It's the first thing you should do with a new computer after installing the operating system.

If you're not allowed to install mozilla at work, fine. Just let tech support fix anything that goes wrong, and make a note on your timesheets that you spent x hours removing a malicious program because of IE.

"What about technical neophytes?"
Install Mozilla for them. Or Galeon, or Konqueror, or Safari. If they're technical neophytes, then you've probably had to setup their entire computer for them anyway, so part of that involves providing a browser.

"Should nobody be allowed to use a computer until they've studied CS for a couple of years and know who RMS is?"

At home, I suppose we can allow such infidels. But to use computers professionally? Whoa! If their CV comes in with "User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express" at the top, bin it before they damage your company permanently.

Oh, and RMS didn't write mozilla, these people did, all credit to them.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but BSD^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

You can just install Mozilla. And don't even think about modding this as "Redundant", as long as people use are still using IE, it isn't.

If you don't use secure OS like Linux or Mac OS X at least Phoenix or Mozilla as your default browser.

Since I installed Mozilla on my work computer I haven't found any spyware. Before, when using IE I would find tons of it.

If you don't use secure OS like Linux or Mac OS X at least Phoenix or Mozilla as your default browser.

Since I installed Mozilla on my work computer I haven't found any spyware. Before, when using IE I would find tons of it.

On my Windows 98 SE box, I now browse with Phoenix almost all the time. I've discovered, though, that some browser downloads Internet Explorer asks me about, Phoenix installs automatically. (Phoenix seems a little too promiscuous about accepting Java, and doesn't remove .class files when it flushes the cache. Check the %WINDIR%/.jpi_cache/ directory structure.)

It's the kind of thing you might expect from a 0.5 release; unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing you should only expect from Microsoft.

ANOTHER reason to use Mozilla!

Solution?

- Don't use IE. Try browsers like Phoenix or Opera.

I use IE only on Windows Update on my Windows machine.

OK, perhaps I need more coffee this morning, but I cannot see how TRACE would be used to cause harm - perhaps somebody can post this in simple terms.

As I understand it:

1) My browser requests a page from www.evilhaxor.org.
2) ??????
3) My browser sends a TRACE request to slashdot.org.
4) slashdot.org sends back to my browser my cookie data.
5) ????
6) My browser sends ????? to www.evilhaxor.org.
7) ????
8) Profit!

OK, sorry, but having more than one ???? is sufficient to make a plan unworkable.

Besides, I run with Javascript off - so I guess the only real exploitable would be the Flash plugin (damn I will be glad when this bug is fixed!)

Mozilla.org distributes "RPMS for Red Hat Linux 8.x with Xft support", so you don't even have to worry about building yourself or setting hidden preferences. (see the releases page)

Here, download these RPMS from mozilla, and you'll be a happy camper.

redhat 8.0 does have some nice fonts but generally the fonts used in the mozilla browsing experience just suck!

Try installing the XFT version of Mozilla .

It's very easy to install, and looks amazing! It pains me to use any other browser on any platform. And I used to *hate* Mozilla's fonts.

At that point you can either cease use of the patented technology (which may still leave you open to licensing fees for prior sales, depending on how a judge rules - you're not supposed to be liable, but lawyers can make IP law dance a jig), pay the extortion money, or attempt to get the patent invalidated. Good luck on the latter - if they're doing it toward the end of the patent life then you'll have a hard time getting facts for prior work 15 years ago, and you'll probably wind up paying more in lawyer fees than you would have paid in extortion.

Some of us geeks (like me) are packrats. Several years ago, Wang hit Netscape and AOL with a look-and-feel related patent infringement suit, and Netscape appealed to the Mozilla development community for further evidence of prior art. Netscape's legal team was quite interested in, and I quite happy to lend them an old IBM RJE manual.

The suit was dismissed not long afterwards.

I would like to thank everyone that responded to my question. Many of your responses were knowlegable and very helpful. Allow me to clarify a few things:

• After reading your opinions, I have solidified something I was considering: I should definetly make rolling Mozilla out a choise that each of my individual users makes. This would be best accomplished by a customized installer that takes some of the configuring head-aches out of getting used to Mozilla. Most of my desire to roll out Mozilla came from good ol' evangelism. Of course, we would benefit from the increased security, but, I would much rather have my users be happy.
• Customizing the installer seems more feasible now that I've read all your suggestions.
• There is a bug at bugzilla for this very subject that one studious reader pointed out. Thank you.
• Mozillazine.org has posted a follow-up thread to this Slashdot discussion.

Again, thank you to each of you for your help. Perhaps after a bit more spit and polish is put on Mozilla, I'll reconsider a network-wide roll-out.

I question whether Mozilla is ready for general use. See this Bugzilla report: 189778. Mozilla is wonderful software, but it crashes a lot when stressed under Windows XP.

Here's how challenge-response works:

1. If the sender is on the whitelist, accept the email. (Spammers can forge their addresses, but they then have to figure out who to forge as... and anti-fraud measures make this dangerous).
2. If the subject line includes a "password" set by the receiver, accept the message.
3. Otherwise, reply back to the sender a message that's configurable by the receiver-to-be, saying that they need to include the password in the subject line & here's how to figure it out. Spammers won't get the message, or won't read the responses. Real users will include the password.
4. Include various measures to prevent email loops: detect null senders, vacation messages, and remember who you sent replies to (and after a few tries, start dropping them).

This has already been suggested as a Mozilla mail enchancement, as Mozilla bug 187044. If you like the idea, by all means vote for it at Mozilla and/or encourage other email programs to add it.

The danger with filters is that even if they're based on good statistics or heuristics, they're just that - statistics and hueristics - and they can sometimes mistakenly throw away valuable email. A password email system, however, is deterministic - in particular, it always lets in email from those you trust and those able to respond to your challenge. I think challenge-response email passwords, combined with filters (which wouldn't have to be as selective), could go a long way to controlling spam.

Bug 158323: Mass Profile Migration Utility For Server Admins

If we could covert all of our Netscape Profiles from 4.x to 7.0 all at once it would be a real help in switching to mozilla.

Beonex is a consulting company working on this very issue. They have the start of roaming profile support working in mozilla, and create thier own browser Beonex communicator for this purpose.
Check out this bug on bugzilla where the start of roaming profile code exists for your compiling and testing pleasure. roaming profile setup IMHO is the way to go if folks use at different machines at different times. Outside of what's in the works...for now, I'd manually configure one for each platform and copy the folder over. Several different XPI's can be rolled into one, but it does take some hacking skills.
Later this year, Hopefully, roaming will be up and running in Mozilla and with that bwill likely come some nice deployment tools.

How about the mozilla.org CCK? Or if it isn't sufficiently advanced, use Netscape's CCK instead.

The CCKs exist to do exactly what you want - customize the browser. Why reinvent the wheel?

This is where some basic research could have helped you before posting yet another lame Ask Slashdot question. I find Google works well for that sort of thing. Perhaps you could also start at Mozilla.org's project pages. RTFM, etc, etc, etc. /mike

How about the mozilla.org CCK? Or if it isn't sufficiently advanced, use Netscape's CCK instead.

The CCKs exist to do exactly what you want - customize the browser. Why reinvent the wheel?

This is where some basic research could have helped you before posting yet another lame Ask Slashdot question. I find Google works well for that sort of thing. Perhaps you could also start at Mozilla.org's project pages. RTFM, etc, etc, etc. /mike

I would use its leaner & meaner cousin, Phoenix.

Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform.

I've heard nothing but good things about it, and you could even just leave a public folder with the executable in it and let everyone browse with ease.

Nothing beats a small lightweight browser that features tabbed browsing and automatic pop-up window blocking. IE can't come close, and your employees will thank you!

Mozilla team rejects libart (LGPL) and at the same time includes GTK (also LGPL). Strange, isn't it? But it doesn't look strange if you'll try to read some discussions in their bugzilla, like this one, where they buried out XFORMS b/c Why not just do it all in html and keep extending html. Basically, "we don't need any new standards, we need just some bugs to be fixed".

Look at other Mozilla projects having been promising and now dead. Look at their Roadmap - only version numbers, no info about any planned features (compare it with, for example PostgreSQL TODO list).

Gecko is (or was?) the most promising GUI technology I see today. It allows much more than HTML browsing - it allows to build real applications on the web. And several non-browser projects have been developed (i.e. mail). But tell me the name of any Gecko project newborn in last 6 months? Or old one riched its v1.0 quality in last 12 months? Did I miss something or nobody cares about Gecko anymore?

I think that for a long term Mozilla as project is slowing down and it may eventually die. At least with its current development team.

Mozilla team rejects libart (LGPL) and at the same time includes GTK (also LGPL). Strange, isn't it? But it doesn't look strange if you'll try to read some discussions in their bugzilla, like this one, where they buried out XFORMS b/c Why not just do it all in html and keep extending html. Basically, "we don't need any new standards, we need just some bugs to be fixed".

Look at other Mozilla projects having been promising and now dead. Look at their Roadmap - only version numbers, no info about any planned features (compare it with, for example PostgreSQL TODO list).

Gecko is (or was?) the most promising GUI technology I see today. It allows much more than HTML browsing - it allows to build real applications on the web. And several non-browser projects have been developed (i.e. mail). But tell me the name of any Gecko project newborn in last 6 months? Or old one riched its v1.0 quality in last 12 months? Did I miss something or nobody cares about Gecko anymore?

I think that for a long term Mozilla as project is slowing down and it may eventually die. At least with its current development team.

I think SVG is the technology for the future.
Already open source project such as sodipodi is using SVG to store vector graphic format.

Here are some more information about SVG and comparsion with SWF:

Mozilla SVG Project
Comparing .SWF (Shockwave Flash) and .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format specifications
Flash and SVG

In theory, it is a good idea, but it is only "widely accepted" (pronounced: "anticipated") by programmers who have been talking trash about Flash usability and want to play with vector art without losing face.

SVG has wide usability and even popularity in tasks far beyond Flash's ability. For instance SVG is the standard display format for geographical applications. SVG is used for some scalable KDE icons. SVG can be natively produced using open source software on open source operating systems. SVG is going to be embedded in the next generation of cell phones. SVG is going to be embedded in upcoming printers as a page description language. It is possible to print to SVG as you might print to Postscript or PDF. It is also possible to directly render PDF to SVG. And you will soon be able to output Visio diagrams as SVG. I've even heard of an SVG front-end for NetHack.

The point is that SVG can achieve popularity much greater than Flash's without displacing a single Flash animation. And once it has done that, it will be a small additional step to wipe Macromedia's proprietary, binary crap off of the face of the earth. ;)

By all means, use Flash for the time being. It is the best tool for many jobs. But don't think that SVG is a "theory." It is used by thousands of people in practice, in both commercial and open source projects. There are many businesses dedicated to building SVG tools, and whole industries being re-imagined around SVG. Its recent growth curve is amazing and I'm convinced it will be remembered as being as important as other major W3C specs such as XML and HTML before it.

There is a Mozilla project working on SVG support, but it's not yet seriously usable.

It also suffers from a licensing problem: it uses libart, which is licensed under the LGPL, which (for some reason) means it can't be included as standard in mozilla builds.

There is also an Adobe plugin, which does claim to work with mozilla, but it crashes more often than not ...

Looks like Mozilla has a project to supoort SVG The Mozilla SVG Project.

While we are still a long way away from full SVG support, the subset currently implemented is already pretty useable. We have support for all basic shapes including beziers, stroking and filling with opacity and much of the DOM.

The samples at croczilla.com/svg/ should give you a good idea of the features currently implemented.

Big areas where we're still lacking include text, clipping, filters and declarative animations.

Also, a typical HTTP response header, which can't be compressed, is about 300 bytes (not including TCP/IP packet overhead, which we'll ignore hoping that HTTP/1.1 keepalives are putting it all in one connection...). There were 18 images (actually 20, but junkbuster filtered 2 out for me).

More interestingly, Mozilla is largely hooked up using COM (well, they call it XPCOM, but it's extremely similar in the fundamentals), and there are mappings to JavaScript and Python. Maybe more people will expose applications/components using XPCOM in the future; isn't the web browser supposed to be the operating system anyway?... or maybe I'm out of date :)

Anyway, I agree, OLE/ActiveX/COM are great, and hopefully linux (or I guess more probably KDE/Gnome) will eventually incorporate some or all of the functionality they provide. But better, with less stupid gotchas, and less bloat (as a user I love OLE, as a developer I loath it:)

More interestingly, Mozilla is largely hooked up using COM (well, they call it XPCOM, but it's extremely similar in the fundamentals), and there are mappings to JavaScript and Python. Maybe more people will expose applications/components using XPCOM in the future; isn't the web browser supposed to be the operating system anyway?... or maybe I'm out of date :)

Anyway, I agree, OLE/ActiveX/COM are great, and hopefully linux (or I guess more probably KDE/Gnome) will eventually incorporate some or all of the functionality they provide. But better, with less stupid gotchas, and less bloat (as a user I love OLE, as a developer I loath it:)

More interestingly, Mozilla is largely hooked up using COM (well, they call it XPCOM, but it's extremely similar in the fundamentals), and there are mappings to JavaScript and Python. Maybe more people will expose applications/components using XPCOM in the future; isn't the web browser supposed to be the operating system anyway?... or maybe I'm out of date :)

Anyway, I agree, OLE/ActiveX/COM are great, and hopefully linux (or I guess more probably KDE/Gnome) will eventually incorporate some or all of the functionality they provide. But better, with less stupid gotchas, and less bloat (as a user I love OLE, as a developer I loath it:)

(flash game) [happyworm.com]

Warning for people using a real browser with popups disabled, this game requires a popup and you will have to disable it to play it.

First off, CSS support has been around since IE4 NS4.

Limited yes, but it is there.

Second, if you have Windows 98, you have IE4.

Sorry, not everyone does.

Third, Mozilla simply doesn't follow all CSS properties.

And neither does any other browser on the market at this time. However, aside from the horible float bugs in Mozilla, it does have the best CSS in any browser right now.

Please, please, please, PLEASE try to remember - Chimera is NOT Mozilla.

Yes, but the argument is over rendering engines, not browsers. Mozilla and Chimera both used Gecko. More specifically, Chimera uses CHBrowserView, which wraps Gecko as a Cocoa NSView sublcass. Safari uses WebCore.

It's a side project, associated with mozilla.org in a similar fashion as Phoenix.

Yes, and Phoenix uses Gecko. Your point?

When comparing Safari to Mozilla, please do it properly, and compare it with the actual Mozilla OS X builds.


A comparison of the Mac OS X build of Mozilla vs. Safari makes Mozilla look even worse. The problem is that it's an apples to oranges comparison because Mozilla includes a chat program, mail & news modules, and all the other X* components. Chimera on the other hand (which may support parts of XPCOM, XUL, etc.--i'm not entirely sure) trims away these parts of the application and provides itself for better comparison. Chimera vs. Safari is as close to Gecko vs. WebCore as you're going to get.

Thanks.

Your welcome.

Not sure how Apple's decision to release a KHTML browser really hurts Mozilla. Especially when you consider the default browser in Mac OS X has been Internet Explorer so far (hopefully to change when Safari gets out of beta?). If anything, it should serve as incentive to improve Mozilla.

Personally, I still prefer Mozilla on Mac OS X to Safari, but as Safari becomes more full featured, we'll see how they compare. There's one particularly annoying problem with Mozilla on Mac OS X (acknowledged in the release notes, but I don't think yet, as a "bug"):

Mozilla will not run when the application is installed on a UFS partition. The workaround is to move the application folder to an HFS+ partition and it will run correctly.

I do use Mozilla on Mac OS X fairly regularly, but until this problem is fixed, Chimera is my favorite browser. Runs on a UFS volume, cocoa, decidedly un-bloated.

Not sure how Apple's decision to release a KHTML browser really hurts Mozilla. Especially when you consider the default browser in Mac OS X has been Internet Explorer so far (hopefully to change when Safari gets out of beta?). If anything, it should serve as incentive to improve Mozilla.

Personally, I still prefer Mozilla on Mac OS X to Safari, but as Safari becomes more full featured, we'll see how they compare. There's one particularly annoying problem with Mozilla on Mac OS X (acknowledged in the release notes, but I don't think yet, as a "bug"):

Mozilla will not run when the application is installed on a UFS partition. The workaround is to move the application folder to an HFS+ partition and it will run correctly.

I do use Mozilla on Mac OS X fairly regularly, but until this problem is fixed, Chimera is my favorite browser. Runs on a UFS volume, cocoa, decidedly un-bloated.

The Mozilla 1.2.1 installer and/or ZIP Win32 download is about 12MB with no option to use a stub installer.

Here's a stub installer for Mozilla 1.2.1 (214 KB).

-jfedor

Since Phoenix is a Gecko browser, it's actually the Win32 equivalent of Chimera.

We should be comparing to Chimera, which is the OS X version of the trimmed-down Mozilla-based browser. My copy is about 21M.

Wouldn't a comparison with the Phoenix project be somewhat fairer?

4. Chimera (Mozilla based) is still a better browser than Safari on MacOS X.

I've been using Chimera nearly exclusively for months. The Dec. 20 release (vers. 0.6 + a few features) is the nicest so far. What a development curve in the past year compared to the much older Opera and iCab!

I think it's interesting that Chimera is related to NS and Mozilla (Gecko) yet is soooo much cleaner and faster. Unfortunately it gets tarred with the same brush by people who haven't used it much.

Chimera's a lot more Aqua than Safari, too! I think Safari is stunningly ugly for an Apple product.

I agree and don't see why both open source projects can't continue. Competition is not just healthier than bloated monopoly, it's essential when we don't even know precisely what we're after. And our shared mission must be to kill IE, or at least beat it back....

Chimera is 20.6 megs.

Safari weighs in at 7.2 megs, Mozilla is 38.3 megs.

In all fairness, Mozilla has a full-blown email client, news reader, etc., included in that size.

Actually there is a browser-only implementation using the Gecko engine called Phoenix (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/) and it's ~6.1MB. At 7.2MB I guess it is Safari that has some bloat to get rid of.

Actually there is a browser that meats most of those requirements here. I think it includes XUL, but it close and small..

Q: You said this was designed to be cross-platform. Where's the mac version?

A: Designed to be cross-platform doesn't mean we offer a build on every platform, it just means the code itself works anywhere. We don't officially offer Phoenix for Mac, but some people have already begun experimenting with mac versions (see this page). We may consider officially releasing Phoenix for Mac in the future, but we want to focus on Windows and Linux for now.

I seriously dig the Phoenix project. Mozilla is way too big and way more than I would ever use. Phoenix is just right (and getting better with every release).

Unfortunately for Mozilla, Phoenix isn't mature enough yet to be Mac's choice of browser. Give it a year or so and we'll probably see a Mac version of Phoenix which will rival Safari in speed and size.

I've heard of tools in the past that claim to speed up browsing by cacheing ahead.

So have I. Mozilla 1.2 actually does this.

Isn't there a way in Moz to fix this? I did a search at Mozilla.org on browser sniff, which led me to general.useragent.override and user agent strings. The documentation says the user can redefine the user-agent string and make a Mozilla browser tell websites that it is IE, but it doesn't tell how to do this.

This could be a cool Mozilla hack - a sidebar panel where you can choose what web browser you want Mozilla to pretend to be, and see how the pages are rendered differently. It could also get around the stupidity of some webmasters.

It looks like they are working on something like this, but it's hard to get right.

Isn't there a way in Moz to fix this? I did a search at Mozilla.org on browser sniff, which led me to general.useragent.override and user agent strings. The documentation says the user can redefine the user-agent string and make a Mozilla browser tell websites that it is IE, but it doesn't tell how to do this.

This could be a cool Mozilla hack - a sidebar panel where you can choose what web browser you want Mozilla to pretend to be, and see how the pages are rendered differently. It could also get around the stupidity of some webmasters.

It looks like they are working on something like this, but it's hard to get right.

Isn't there a way in Moz to fix this? I did a search at Mozilla.org on browser sniff, which led me to general.useragent.override and user agent strings. The documentation says the user can redefine the user-agent string and make a Mozilla browser tell websites that it is IE, but it doesn't tell how to do this.

This could be a cool Mozilla hack - a sidebar panel where you can choose what web browser you want Mozilla to pretend to be, and see how the pages are rendered differently. It could also get around the stupidity of some webmasters.

It looks like they are working on something like this, but it's hard to get right.