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Due to dietary constraints (my family has Celiac disease, so we can't eat wheat, barley, rye, oats, or any derivatives thereof), my family has to make most of our own food. Since I'm the resident geek, I dug through my spartan computer stockpile and came up with a Compaq Concerto laptop. It's 486/33MHz, and it's unique in the fact that it was intended to be a tablet-type computer. The guts are behind the 256 greyscale 640x480 screen, and the keyboard is loosely hinged and can even be removed (when you remove it, you get another PS/2 port). The screen/guts section is held up by a sort of a stand that folds out. The screen is a inductive (I think that's the right term, it's not resistive) touch screen that needs a pen I don't have, but it's got a spare PS/2 port for a handy mouse. With a floppy drive, 4 (or 8, maybe) megs of memory, 300 megabyte-ish hard drive, and 2 PCMCIA slots, it's a rather slick piece of retro computing.

For software, I've got Windows 95a (it was hard enough to install that over floppies, and I don't have a linux compatible PCMCIA network card), and AbiWord for recipes. No fancy databases here, just a folder for the recipe files, and a naming convention for the files themselves. (Food category, food name. Ex: Pizza, thin crust. or Cake, Mayonaisse chocolate).

That little computer is the most complemented and congratulated computer in my house, and we have no lack of them. After making a recipe, just click the little switch to flip it to a quick standby, fold the keyboard up, and it's nearly footprint-free, due to it's easel type stand.

I say, think about what you want it to go, and don't over-estimate it. Do you really need it to be a big whiz-bang system? Or, would a simple little older computer like this one work better? (It could go online, over a network card. Phoenix, a web browser project related to Mozilla, would probably work. (Don't quote me on that, haven't tried, though I use Phoenix for my day-to-day browsing)
br? In summary, don't overestimate your needs, and don't be afraid to look for older, but viable, solutions. Plus, if you find a Compaq Concerto, either use it, or give it to me. :-)

There are XFT builds of Mozilla 1.2b already, here.

"...chance are, they'll be using Internet Explorer on their new Mac..."

Guess I'll just have to try it out at work then.
Everyone here uses Mozilla, right?

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^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Incredibly, Mozilla 1.2 is going to have built-in, enabled-by-default prefetching. The amount of bandwidth this will waste blows the mind. Imagine every single Joe on the Net suddenly using up 20 times as much bandwidth downloading stuff that he will *never see*. The intermitent activity on lines turning into constant load -- and ISPs rely on being able to oversell their lines.

Back in the day when the now-unpopular "web accelerators" were getting big, I always brushed them off as used by network abusers who didn't know what they were doing. Now this abuse has been legitimized.

The people who are going to be the real losers in all this are the techies, the ones who tend to have several browser windows loading at once, or a n ssh connection, or a server running. Up until now, they've been somewhat subsidized by the fact that ISPs can charge cheap prices because the other 98% of users only use their line 10% of the time. Now that everyone's lines are going to be under continuous load...goodbye Quake.

The entire idea of single window browsing is simply awful. It places extremely tight constraints on bandwidth and latency. When the user clicks a link, they want the new page there, now, and damn anything that has to be done to get it there. If you work with several windows downloading at once, so that you're reading one while another is coming in, you never run into this problem, since even a modem is easily enough to comfortably handle web browsing of nearly any site...as long as you're not waiting around staring at a progress bar while the image loads. Prefetching simply feeds this flawed single-window user-behavior model.

For once, a Microsoft program (IE) is actually less of a network abuser than its competitors. Awful.

Mozilla, the ultimate IE popup killer

It should be relatively easy to get people to start using PGP to encrypt all of their internal e-mails. So long as you can switch everyone to Mozilla or Netscape as their e-mail program of choice, then the Enigmail plugin makes using GPG or PGP encryption a breeze, and it can be easily set up to automatically ask for your password every time. That would be the only difficult part: Getting people to choose decent passwords and remembering them...but if you're in IT, you've faced that problem before.

Brian

I hate to break it to you, but OS X is so slow on the G3 that you might as well not bother.

Not at all. Time to drop your FUD. I just recently aquired a used 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook with 256MB RAM, and things are running on it quite well. iTunes, iCal, Mozilla, AOL, etc all at once. I've even been doing a lot of remote work with OroborOSX running apps from my Linux box remotely, including Mozilla and full-bore developer stuff.

(I'm quite interested in looking into Rendezvous also, given that it's a Zeroconf implementation.)

I use Netscape v3.04 and the Microsoft browser v4.0. As much as I hate to abet the Microsoft juggernaut, this section looks a lot better with the MS browser.

I'm pretty sure both those browsers are grossly non-compliant with the HTML standards. If you'd like to view the web properly, get a browser that complies.

• Mozilla
• Opera

erghhh... hit me if I am blatantly off, but the famed internet explorer program is named IEXPLORE.EXE. The explorer.exe you refer to is the Windows explorer, or otherwise known as the one and only thing that holds the monstrosity together (the GUI, the Windows "shell" as they called it in system.ini). And if I remember correctly, that has been there since the Windows 95 days, when they added this thing called "Explore your computer"/"Windows Explorer" to the system.

I think with W2K, it depends lots on what your computer is aimed for doing. Right now my 192Mb 600MHz ThinkPad died to Daemon, I am running W2K on a 600MHz 64Mb Dell Inspiron, and have only occasional trouble with slowness. Right now my memory usages are (in order, the top five):
phoenix.exe with 16208k
IEXPLORE.exe with 11320k
wmplayer.exe with 4892k
explorer.exe with 3744k
taskmgr.exe with 2336k
(now why would taskmgr take that much memory is beyond me)

The only time I can remember this machine being painfully slow is when I wake it up every morning from hibernation, when it tries to spin up, and load everything into memory from disk again.

However, I do use to run a 166Mhz 64Mb (later 96Mb) Desktop with Windows 2000 at home. My theory is that Microsoft is absolutely correct in the minimum requirements for running the OS. But when they say minimum, they mean OS only. Nothing else. Once you start tagging on stuff like AOL, Microsoft Office, Corel Draw, etc, and try to run them at the same time, the system likes to just hang and ignore you. Ever since I have gotten my sisters hooked on TeX for word processing, and that really improved the memory usage on the desktop system at home.

So my suggestion is simple. Since you have a close to minimum machine, you should try to only run close to minimum apps. My friend ran Mandrake 8 on his 233Mhz 192Mb ran desktop. And Mozilla slows down X considerably in the pre-1 releases. (It doesn't help with his habit of hosting a NFS search engine, listening to music, browsing the web, while compiling the kernel at the same time q= ). The important thing is choice. You can choose to run simple and memory non-extensive programs in Linux, you also can choose to do so in Windows 2000, for example, you can use Mozilla or lynx in Windows if you choose (and save 10M ram from IEXPLORE), and Microsoft Office has always been less than necessary, and I am sure you can find another Office implementation with a much smaller footprint (or just use TeX like we normal people do q= )

W
--
Werd Smiler

It's something mozilla is missing, blocking based off of filters. It'd be nice if I can say, fine, take everything on this server except .swf files.

Bug 135511.

So how in the world do you turn it off?? I could not click through you link: bugzilla reports links from slashdot are disabled. WTF???

Warning if you are using mozilla 2.1b you probably want to switch prefetch off as mozilla does no checking whatsoever on what is automatically downlaoded. See... http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175118 ...it's like they didn't think at all before implementing it.

Read the FAQ 'n manual, please. It prefetches pages mentioned in the <link rel="next" tag also, which many pages have had for (internet) ages.

if you have redhat 8.0, and don't want to get your hands dirty,
here are Redhat 8.0 RPMS for binaries with Xft2 already compiled in

Prefetching does not send the HTTP Referrer header, so the site with the ad banner would not get credit from the advertiser for a supposed click-through.

See the Link Prefetching FAQ.

XFT2 support was only checked in last week, so there's no way you have it working with Mozilla 1.0.

Christopher Blizzard has been releasing xft2-patched binaries of Mozilla for some time. They are available here. You're absolutely right that the new XFT2 font-architecture renders better. I'm using it in a patched Mozilla 1.0 right now, and the font quality rivals Windows. The quality of the old FreeType code was not too great.

So, is there any documentation describing what each and every preference setting in these files is supposed to do? Alas, at the present, no. However, a good reference (for the time being, at least), would be the Netscape developer docs at DevEdge Online. They might not all be exactly identical to the settings used in Mozilla or Netscape 6, since they're primarily written for Communicator 4.x, but it's somewhere to start.

If you're a bold person you should give the experimental XFT nightly builds a shot. They have been working great here for a couple of weeks with TTFonts and RH 8. There's also RPM's for RedHat 7.x

Then again, I guess that's the way these things get started. Don't get me wrong, I still think its a great idea I'd just like to see an innovative solution like this not go to waste.

The stuff Pinkerton and the other Mac guys are doing is really great, but i'm very disappointed that Mozilla has decided to not offer TalkBack support (crash reporting) under OS X.

Now, every time the browser crashes (not very often, mind you), i just say, "Well, that will never be fixed." and restart it.

Bleh. :-/

Maybe I'm missing the standard for it (I'm not on the bleeding edge of things), but I was looking at the HTML 4.01 link rel types and can't find "preload". Fortunately, according to the FAQ, "next" will do just fine.

This is a not nit-pick, but with all the touting of how 100% standards compliant Mozilla is, I'm wondering what the philosophy is on extending the standard, if "preload" isn't in some later HTML standard that I don't yet know about us.

That's been outstanding for most of a year now, which is inexcusable for a major bug that causes data loss and crashes. The Mozilla team still has way too many "don't do that" items in the release notes.

Unless this thing gets cleaned up, it's never going to get market share. Adding additional features of very marginal utility won't help. Could AOL use Mozilla as their standard browser? No way. It's got to just work.

That's been outstanding for most of a year now, which is inexcusable for a major bug that causes data loss and crashes. The Mozilla team still has way too many "don't do that" items in the release notes.

Unless this thing gets cleaned up, it's never going to get market share. Adding additional features of very marginal utility won't help. Could AOL use Mozilla as their standard browser? No way. It's got to just work.

Well, this is almost true,
please vote for this bug (99 votes so-far, lets make it 100)

so that me and anyone else who uses microsoft proxy server 2 or any NTLM authenticating proxy can use mozilla. (this is probably a few million people, and a lot of corporations)

This bug has been there since 2000-01-11, and won't make 1.2, hopefully it'll make 1.3 alpha 1!!!

If you try and install 98, you are shut out of the Microsoft Update site, so you can't get MSIE 6. I know how to upgrade MSIE 4.0 that comes with 98 to a newer version, so I can get into Windows Update. There is a trick to that;-).

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ is where you download the installer...that page even works with Mozilla. (Tried looking for a full-download installer instead of a network installer, but didn't see one.) For other Win98 updates, you might try http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/corpo rate.asp.

Then again, you really should be using Mozilla as your browser. As for updates, I only use Windows Update to see what updates need to be applied to my Win2K systems...and then use the knowledgebase numbers (Qxxxxxx) to manually download the updates. I save them to CD for future use, so that when Microsoft pulls the plug on Win2K, I'll still have all of the available updates for it. Since you want to keep using Win98, it'd be even more essential to squirrel away all the updates someplace. (Having this stuff on CD also keeps you from having to download a few hundred megs of patches every time you need to nuke-and-reinstall your system.)

Alright alright, if you really want to disable it, the way to do it is described here. Requires some prefs.js entry though.

The link in the story has instructions on how to deactivate it.

Here are the instructions

I have it working with Mandrake 9 and Mozilla 1.0.

remember that's a BETA. Let them implement the functionality. You will get your UI in time
See the bug dependencies

Plus you can be sure someone at mozilladev will add a litle checkbox for easy access in a mozilla/phoenix extension. (reminder typeahead find is broken in phoenix for the moment)

Phoenix is adding something for this. It's not fully operational yet - you can't remove extensions, but you can disable them. FAQ

Look this Bugzilla Bug 70812 [meta] mozilla stops accepting keyboard input...
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70812

Its Target Milestone is 1.0.1, but nothing has changed in 1.2 beta. What a mess.

Get the latest nightly build here!

Get the latest nightly build here!

This kind of link crawling isn't new at all, but is useful under certain conditions.

I can imagine my 50 users just SATURATING the T1 when their web browsers start automatically following links from CNN, Webshots, Nascar.com, Weather.com, and other work-related web sites.

Mozilla's FAQ on pre-fetching

It competes for bandwith against other non-Moz apps... But it isn't as if you can't turn it off.

Anyone have a link/info to the old programs that used to do this under Windows?

This only works if the page you're viewing is specifically set up so that Mozilla can prefetch. So sayeth the FAQ:

A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache.
...
The browser looks for a HTML tag or HTTP Link: header with a relation type of either next or prefetch.

seems to mean that if you're reading page 1 of a multi-page article, page 2 will be loaded in the background. nice!

> all mozilla needs now is support for more than just Javascript.

Oh, I see you are talking about Mozilla's XPCOM:

C++
Perl
Python
Ruby

Also see http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/ library/co-xpcom.html

I am surprised that almost nobody has mentioned Mozilla. Take a look at the Cross Platform Tk documentation and its architecture. They must have a discussion group as well, search for it.

Dude, somebody even put out a DOS prompt :)

I am surprised that almost nobody has mentioned Mozilla. Take a look at the Cross Platform Tk documentation and its architecture. They must have a discussion group as well, search for it.

Dude, somebody even put out a DOS prompt :)

Actually, the article on 10/7 was a review of 0.2, the release was on 10/1.

Check the roadmap.

0.3 was scheduled to be released the 8th, but was delayed because what was going on with the Mozilla codebase for the 1.2beta release.

by eliminating the ability of popups and auto install worms like Gator and the others out there

I must continue to point out that the Mozilla team still refuses to fix their anti-popup engine, because it's not a part of Netscape: shown here on bug 122927.

It really makes you wonder why noone implemented it before.

FYI: Type Ahead Find is inherited from Mozilla. Under Mozilla you need to activate it by editing a preferences file.

I'm willing to wager that your god Linus can write a program that will crash every version of linux ever released

Type ahead find... Interesting...

Yes, I know you CAN navigate a web page in Mozilla using the keyboard, but scroll down seven pages until you see a link you're interested in, press "TAB" and notice how it scrolls all the way back to the top where the first link is. F--king brain-dead. Useless.

Check out Phoenix's Type Ahead feature, which allows you to type the text of the URL you want to go to. It really makes you wonder why noone implemented it before.

(Type Ahead is disabled in Phoenix 0.3 for some reason; use 0.2 to try it out.)

One of the big updates being done for embedding purposes in the big 1.2 push is to get a basic installation prepared which can be used for all sorts of Gecko/Mozilla-based applications. See it coming to an application near you soon!

This is a very important development as it means that the full Mozilla suite will no longer need to be packaged with your custom application. The basic installation may even be installed on the system already - and can then be discovered and used by your system without installing a second copy!

This miraculous beast is the GRE, and its webpage is here.

Ewww grosss. Get away from me.

How could you possible admit to preferring either of those over vi?

Once the mozilla email client lets me choose what editor to use (like mutt has for years), I'll consider using it.

The same thing applies to their html editor. I will never subject myself to preforming menial tasks (like changing height and width values on 926 images by hand) again.

One of the strong points of Open Source software is the value of choice. Mozilla needs to allow different choices of editors before it becomes my browser of choice. Vote for this bug!!

Bringing it back on topic: Phoenix will be popular to many geeks who use vi, simply because all the "broken" editor parts of Mozilla are removed. But, chopping off functionality just treats the symptoms. Fixing bug 8589 is the solution.

The headline should be corrected to read:
In lieu of fixing Mozilla bug 8589, Phoenix 0.3 is released.

For mail purposes, there is the Thunderbird (formerly known as Minotaur) project. According to mozilla.org, it is expected around the time of Phoenix 0.5.

As a Mozilla Mail user (on Windows), I personally can't wait to give it a try.