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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.

12. Okay, so where's the phoenix source?

cvs.mozilla.org. Mozilla trunk + mozilla/browser + mozilla/toolkit.

I'm just going to walk through this post point by point because I think you've either completely misunderstood Moz/Phoenix or you just haven't given it a solid try.

I like my browser to mesh with my operating system. Not so far to where the OS doesn't let you uninstall it, but to where it blends in with the look of my OS. I use Windows XP, and Mozilla does not look like XP. Sure the GUI is nice, but it looks odd with my Luna style. In addition, IE meshes with Explorer. So I can easily switch between Explorer and Internet explorer. Try typing "C:\Program Files" in Mozilla/Phoenix. Very different.
Can't speak for Phoenix but in Mozilla if you choose your skin to be Classic all the GUI widgets will be drawn natively in your OS style and colours. Also Typing in 'C:\Program Files' works just fine, not sure what you did to make it not work but it works.

In addition, there are many usability issues. Click on the address bar, while it's highlighted, click, hold and drag towards the left or right. It attempts to drag the entire address, maybe to drag and drop in the bookmarks menu. Now try it in IE, it's different. It will highlight the portion and allow you to edit it etc. That is very annoying in Phoenix/Mozilla.
Don't call something a usability issue when it doesn't work the way you expect it to. As much as its convenient to say that Mozilla is made by a bunch of engineers and geeks so usability is ignored, surprisingly its not. Have a look at this bug to see how much the Mozilla community argued before settling on a solution. Also I tried doing exactly what you said and it works for me. Click once on address bar and full URL is highlighted, click again to edit via keyboard and or highlight.

Another usability problem is the placement of the Address bar. Why is it at the same layer as the toolbar? (Back, Forward buttons). I believe there is a Bug reported in BugZilla about this in Mozilla, but of course... nobody cares about Usability issues.
Once again don't be so quick to judge. Have you even tried to file a bug or put your comments into a bug or reopen a bug? As I said even though the Mozilla community is primarily geeks and engineers its not a community that "doesn't care" about usability. Don't mock it till you've actually tried to make a change happen.

Why can't I have "Selective Text on Right". And that "Toolbar Customizer" with the drag and drop has bad usability problems. It's very confusing to use. And having to "Name" your toolbars?? Err..
I needn't repeat this enough, Phoenix is at iteration 0.3. The developers are very one-to-one with comments and feedback. Did you even attempt to try to talk to them via email or to the Phoenix/Mozilla community newgroups?

Also, the Bookmark Management is very sloppy. They need sidebar management for bookmarks.
Yet again you're just spewing opinion that has no basis in reality. Mozilla has had Sidebar based bookmark management for more builds that I can even remember now. Also don't say something as if its fact. In my opinion IE's bookmark system...well its not really much of a system because it uses the windows file system to just throw a bunch of files and folders in a another folder...is pretty damn sloppy. Furthermore Mozilla's "sloppy" bookmark system has features that let you keyword certain bookmarks so for example i can go to my Address bar and type in 'g something i am searching for' and have that taken straight to Google.

You've based Mozilla wholeheartedly while giving it at best a half assed chance. Also while you were so quick to bash this "non-usability caring" community did you once stop to think that when you have a problem with IE you've got no where to go other than the crash reporting now featured in XP? Atleast with Mozilla you can directly look into the guts of the program and see exactly why things work the way the work.
Don't give up too quickly my friend, Mozilla is a good friend. Like a pet 60' foot monster on your own leash eating HTML faster than any blue 'e' even could!

But try this page...

I think it's amazing that every +0.1 release of Phoenix makes it to the frontpage of Slashdot, when the Mozilla project aren't even announcing it on their own frontpage. Is it really significant enough to let 250.000 people know about every change???
-- Henrik

This is from the first question of the FAQ entitled "What you can do to help"

What can I do to help?
We need all the distribution we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you're a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!

Well David Tansey (submitter of story).. the Phoenix team must like you now! :)

JOhn

• Speed: Phoenix loads in around 2-5 secs on my PII 366M w/128 MB RAM. Mozilla takes a leisurely 20-30 seconds. Hmmm...
• Standards compliance: Since Phoenix has the same Gecko rendering engine from Moz, I am assured that it renders properly-coded sites very well [extensive support for CSS2 and DOM helps here]. This vastly improves rendering times [more on that later]. Lesser sites still come out quite proper with its Quirks rendering mode.
• Rendering speed: It may not be evident to Moz users on slower machines, but Gecko can be blazingly fast given the right environment. Phoenix is fscking fast. Just as fast as IE, if not faster. Only Opera can claim to do one better, especially loading pages from cache. Opera is truly King in this arena.
• Excellent XUL implementation: Phoenix has shown that XUL can be a viable alternative to using native widgets. Try it for yourself - it's much more responsive and fluid. And the customisable toolbar is a real treat. Worth downloading it for that feature alone. Hopefully Mozilla will pick up a few pointers here and merge them into its own codebase.
• Satchel: a replacement for Moz's form manager, it works in a manner similar to IE, which IMO is more usable. Plus, Satchel is intended as a full replacement for the older, "bloated" form manager and eventually will cut down installer size and boost speed. One more boon for Mozilla.
• Peace of mind: I refuse to use IE online for reasons of privacy. I do not know what it does with the info it gathers while one uses it. I have no idea if there are backdoors in it. Ad-aware detects at least one spyware component [Alexa] in default installs of IE 5.x and 6.0. The recent Sendmail and OpenSS? exploits notwithstanding, I feel much more comfortable using an open-source program when connected to the net.

• Speed: Phoenix loads in around 2-5 secs on my PII 366M w/128 MB RAM. Mozilla takes a leisurely 20-30 seconds. Hmmm...
• Standards compliance: Since Phoenix has the same Gecko rendering engine from Moz, I am assured that it renders properly-coded sites very well [extensive support for CSS2 and DOM helps here]. This vastly improves rendering times [more on that later]. Lesser sites still come out quite proper with its Quirks rendering mode.
• Rendering speed: It may not be evident to Moz users on slower machines, but Gecko can be blazingly fast given the right environment. Phoenix is fscking fast. Just as fast as IE, if not faster. Only Opera can claim to do one better, especially loading pages from cache. Opera is truly King in this arena.
• Excellent XUL implementation: Phoenix has shown that XUL can be a viable alternative to using native widgets. Try it for yourself - it's much more responsive and fluid. And the customisable toolbar is a real treat. Worth downloading it for that feature alone. Hopefully Mozilla will pick up a few pointers here and merge them into its own codebase.
• Satchel: a replacement for Moz's form manager, it works in a manner similar to IE, which IMO is more usable. Plus, Satchel is intended as a full replacement for the older, "bloated" form manager and eventually will cut down installer size and boost speed. One more boon for Mozilla.
• Peace of mind: I refuse to use IE online for reasons of privacy. I do not know what it does with the info it gathers while one uses it. I have no idea if there are backdoors in it. Ad-aware detects at least one spyware component [Alexa] in default installs of IE 5.x and 6.0. The recent Sendmail and OpenSS? exploits notwithstanding, I feel much more comfortable using an open-source program when connected to the net.

I'm was pulling down a whoppering 1.0kb/sec from ftp.mozilla.org, thanks to slashdot linking directly to the master server. PLEASE use a mirror, there's a full list of them here. Not all mirrors carry phoenix, and some that do don't have 0.3, but at least this one does (and probably others too).

- Phoenix is neither in alpha, nor beta stages AFAIK. Note it just says "Phoenix 0.3". I could be wrong here though if I missed anything saying it was alpha/beta.

- Phoenix doesn't follow the Microsoft/AOL-style version inflation. If it would, we would have version 3.0 final by now. Bug fixing and polish will start in the next version. See also the roadmap.

From the Phoenix FAQ:

1. What can I do to help?

We need all the distribution we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you're a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!

Well, what jumps out at me is that, already, Phoenix is taking up 2/3 of the memory that Mozilla does. I just installed the 0.3 release, and it resides in 90M of RAM as opposed to ~140M for Mozilla.

While I like/use some of the extras that Mozilla incorporates, I'm going to be keeping an eye on the progress of Phoenix, because I definitely don't need all of them. The concept of a lightweight browser with the power of Mozilla and more configurability options has a lot of appeal to myself and presumably others. As far as the rendering speed, I don't suspect there would be a noticable difference for anyone, unless they were strapped for RAM. Phoenix is built on the Mozilla core, so both browsers would logically both incorporate the Gecko engine for rendering.

My only other suggestion would be to read the release notes for 0.3, they might shed some insight as to why the Phoenix people are doing what they're doing.

Minotaur is being developed as a Phoenix-style replacement for Mozilla Mail and News, except with the same UI as Mozilla. Eventually, Thunderbird will be developed from Minotaur, only with a Phoenix based UI.

too bad that Mozilla doesn't have close to the amount of success that IE does w/the web (including speed of loading tables, program, and support)

This does not cause the code abuse and forking that might be expected. Simply put, if companies were to fork Blender, they would lose most of the benefits of being part of the Open Source community. Subsequent changes to the core project would not be able to be be rolled into their project without extensive work, checking, etc.

Generally, it's far more productive to submit your own changes to the core project, and get them incorporated. After that, you not only have the features you wanted, but you get all the new features contributed by others.

Look at the Mozilla licensing scheme -- it is not GPL either. Instead, it is a combination of up to four licenses -- the GPL, LGPL, MPL and NPL.

I was on www.foxnews.com and if you leave it up for 5 min or so with javascript turned on it pops up. I think its just an add that looks like a windows message.

But seriously, this NetBIOS messenger problem is quite real, and is (almost) entirely the fault of the end-user. Putting a Windows machine on the Internet without some form of firewall (software or hardware) is an invitation to get violated in some way or another. All I have to say is, these people are already once lucky - their file and print shares are exposed to the world, so with a bit of password trickery (or exposing one of the many NETBIOS vulnerabilities that exist at various patch levels of each of the Windows OS variants) one can easily access the data and/or send malicious print jobs (hint: MS Paint, black background, 100 copies. Else, SPAM)

There are also cases of people who actually run/administer a firewall that's obviously mis-configured to the point of being futile, so don't expect the mere presence of such a thing to protect you. One individual on the Security Focus Incidents mailing list is reporting this very same 'problem' on his network running Microsoft ISA firewall.

If you're unable (for whatever reason) to install a software firewall, obtain and configure an Internet router. There are dozens (hundreds) on the market, and the vast majority of them (that we've dealt with/sold) come with port forwarding to the internal machines disabled per default. For single-computer owners, SMC makes a one-port Internet router that could simply be installed inline with the users' cable/DSL 'modem' for security and peace of mind. Moreover, it saves the user from having to install annoying PPPoE client software on their machines.

Like the poster before alluded (rather amusingly) to; if you leave your door ajar, don't be surprised when you come home to find people roosting in your house, or that some of your things are missing. Sure, the person may have broken the law, but putting out the welcome mat is just asking for trouble.

Mozilla Is licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL, and MPL is a copyleft-type license.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the exception is you speak of in reference to Linux. Could you post a link explaining?

FYI.

The Phoenix 0.3 release has been delayed for a week "to give the developers more time to implement the features they want for that release."

Yes JOhn you dolt. Simply check out Bug #104184 on Bugzilla for details. It states that you can add a line similar to

user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "D:\\My Docs\\bookmarks.html");

Notice the double slashes... on Unix your mileage may vary...

JOhn

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57805

Would be a front-end for remapping keyboard shortcuts.

Kinda off topic, but regarding rh 8's great font rendering, a new extension called RandR has been included to XFree's, allowing you to change resolution on the fly (not virtual res) and XFT support/gtk2 support for mozilla is almost ready!

Check out here

Q8: What about OS X?
Chimera is the top gecko-based browser for OS X.
We do not intend to compete on that platform.

If you guys are weeting your pants over this, you have to be trying Chimera on Mac... no XUL, so that overhead is spared; you do get a feel for how quick the Gecko engine can be.

IE is a good browser, but as a web developer for web development, shame on you for not using Mozilla. :)

Jason.

IE is a good browser, but as a web developer for web development, shame on you for not using Mozilla. :)

Jason.

And with such colorful language, what Bugs have you opened/fixed?

I didn't say it is bug free, stable and usable are completely different.

Stable - Doesn't crash all of the time (pretty much an opinion)

Usable - Also opinion

Bug Free - See Fantasy

Phoenix doesn't include the kitchen sink and it never will. But that doesn't mean that you can't bolt the kitchen sink onto Phoenix and have it work wonderfully. Phoenix developers have implemented a new Extensions panel in preferences which will allow you selectively enable and disable specific extensions. Some popular extensions -- like mozgestures and prefsbar -- already work with Phoenix, and can be downloaded here. It's easy to make other add-ons work with phoenix, and we're working with developers to expedite this.

The extensions "manager" (really just a tab in a pref panel) is not bloat -- in fact, we're working so hard to support extensions to reduce bloat. Without extensions support, we'd be pressured to include the add-ons in the default build. And, finally, Satchel replaces Mozilla's bloated and complicated form manager.

In the README there is the following:

Q8: What about OS X?
Chimera is the top gecko-based browser for OS X. We do not intend to compete on that platform.

Mozilla is slower in some areas. I use Mozilla daily. :)

Loading large tables and large quanity of images (thumbnails) are slower than IE. Download pre-buffering actually becomes a problem when you download large files, due to it downloading in your temp dir, then moving the file after its completed. Boris Zbarsky said a fix might land in around 1.3'ish http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129923

There are a few other slow downs in mozilla, but most are thread releated. 1 active tab can freeze mozilla, etc.. (I would like to see downloads spawn into a seperate process...)

That being said, the Mozilla developers are top notch in fixing bugs and user interaction. They have always been kind in replying and educating the users.

Unfortunately, there is no version for Mac OS X yet.

The nightly builds can be downloaded here.

There is only one thing missing that may force me back to mozilla: the inability to "block images from this server," i.e., to get rid of ads.

That feature is targeted for the 0.3 release (October 8th) according to this (search on page for 'Image blocking').

Here is the link to the roadmap: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-ro admap.html

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.

>. What is needed are many, many, focus group sessions to create an OSS interface guidlines document that everyone can refer to (or not) when they build thier applications. Arent Gnome doing something approaching this?

Focus groups themselves don't necessarily give you clear vision. First you have to agree on what problems you're looking to solve then go from there.

Regarding design-by-dictatorship vs. design-by-committee, look at the Phoenix project and Chimera which were started as a reaction to the designed-by-committee state of Mozilla's UI.

I've been using Mozilla 1.2alpha and I'm already addicted to Typeahead Find-- land on a page, type / then a search string, and moz scrolls right to the first match on the page. No Ctrl-F, no dialog box!

Typeahead Find: the best thing to happen to browsers since the scroll wheel.

Yes, install Mozilla or Phoenix.

Yes, install Mozilla or Phoenix.

You mean that you are using IE instead of Mozilla to view slashdot? I'd say its not that ironic. :-P Pretty common around here.

Why do people think they need to be modded up just for getting a VS.Net ad on their slashdot pages and announcing it? People have been mentioning the VS.Net ads for weeks, if not months.

You mean that you are using IE instead of Mozilla to view slashdot? I'd say its not that ironic. :-P Pretty common around here.

Why do people think they need to be modded up just for getting a VS.Net ad on their slashdot pages and announcing it? People have been mentioning the VS.Net ads for weeks, if not months.

are available here. Grab one today and enjoy the latest features!

-rimdo

I'm using Phoenix right now, and seriously, I'm blown away by it. Not only is it lightning fast in comparison to Mozilla, but it already has the things I've been trying to get in the Mozilla trunk for a long time now. (For those of you who browse Bugzilla, you know how frustrating getting something into the trunk can be sometimes!) Some of the notable features of Phoenix are:

1) Customizable Toolbars

2) Home button where it SHOULD BE!

3) Inline form management (Mozilla's form manager is all but worthless unless you've already filled out 20+ pages of forms.)

4) Theme that respects my system colors! (Go ahead, change your system colors, Phoenix changes with them!)

5) No bundled on software--I just want a browser! And if you use Mozilla for the mail, don't worry, the Mail client will be getting the same overhaul as the browser. It's a project called Minotaur, and will be started on roughly when Phoenix hits .5

There are tons of other things to mention here like the extensions manager, default popup blocking, tabs, worthwhile sidebars, ability to remove the throbber, a clean statusbar that actually works, etc., but it's best if you just see it for yourself! Go grab a copy, and then while you're enjoying it, thank Asa Dotzler, Blake Ross, Dave Hyatt, and the other guys who are making this a reality!

Thanks guys!

As others have noted, FIPS 140-x validation is not a panacea; however it does add some additional (and IMO useful) product review beyond what you'd get with standard internal QA plus public review (for open source crypto products). I think it would be great if some vendor or vendors stepped up and sponsored FIPS 140-x validation for OpenSSL and other popular open source crypto implementations.

The guide I use relevant to mozilla.

Fonts that look nice.

All this stuff is general, but I doubt there is any redhat-specific issues, unless they disabled freetype in their build, which would be very stupid in this day and age...

Not everyone uses a real browser. Go easy on them.

You need mozilla mail & news.

> Mozilla is not owned by AOL.

AFAIK, much of Mozilla would be copyrighted by AOLtw since they pay many of the full time hackers who work on Mozilla.

> Mozilla is a entirely separate browser which was built on the GPL'd code from Netscape Navigator buy people who had no connectionn to AOL.

Uh, the source released wasn't GPL'd at all. I beleive it was originally NPL'd. And it was released with people with definite connections to AOL: Netscape employees who work on Mozilla for *gasp* AOL!

> You're probably one of those idiots that thinks Apple is now owned by Microsoft, too.

Congratualations, you're now an idiot who knows nothing about Mozilla's history.

In January 1998, the Netscape Browser source code will be made available for free on the Internet. In November 1998, NS was bought by AOL. Most of the current Mozilla was written after that, under AOL. AOL is actually quite supportive of Mozilla. Check out an email sent by Steve Case after AOL bought Netscape.

"I dont like time warner, but they give us Netscape / Mozilla, Winamp and ICQ for free. "

You do realize you can get these four programs without relying on Time Warner at all?

How are you set up that you would have to pay for them in the first place? They're all free for anyone to have, and have been for months/years.

One of the problems I always had using pgp/gpg was client support. Getting it to work with outlook/outlook express, then finding something under Linux that would support it, having to scrap together a bunch of tools, all of which were half-written...

I've found a solution. Mozilla and Enigmail. Yes, Mozilla/Netscape mail used to be putrid. It's better with Mozilla 1.0+, honestly. It has progressed to a competitive state, and I switched over totally about a month ago.

Enigmail is a plugin for Mozilla that handles signing, encrypting, decrypting and verifying mail for you.

GnuPG, Mozilla and Enigmail all work on Windows as well as Linux, so I have the same tools no matter what I'm running.

You still need a key manager, but getting what mozilla+enigmail provides is a great step forward.