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Or at least a key part of it. See Bug #56301.

The APIs are *not* frozen yet -- that's precisely what 1.0 is for. They are attempting to freeze them now, but don't be surprised if there's a couple more changes in the last two months of pre-1.0 development.

According to mozilla.org's Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, there are three primary motives for 1.0, which basically are:

1. "1.0" is an important number
2. Freeze the APIs
3. Start a long-lived branch

If you read that manifesto, you'll see that these issues, as well as nearly everything else about the browser, have been given some very serious thought. In fact, this is one of the most fascinating things for me about the Mozilla project -- the bug tracking system is wide open (for example, the list of most frequently reported bugs -- aka dupes). You can read how various decisions evolved based on everybody's input, study and debate. The evolution of every single feature is documented in that system -- so if there's something that annoys you about Moz, there's a 99% chance that there's already been a lot of handwringing over it, and either they've (we've!) decided not to "fix" the behavior, or it's being worked on.

The APIs are *not* frozen yet -- that's precisely what 1.0 is for. They are attempting to freeze them now, but don't be surprised if there's a couple more changes in the last two months of pre-1.0 development.

According to mozilla.org's Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, there are three primary motives for 1.0, which basically are:

1. "1.0" is an important number
2. Freeze the APIs
3. Start a long-lived branch

If you read that manifesto, you'll see that these issues, as well as nearly everything else about the browser, have been given some very serious thought. In fact, this is one of the most fascinating things for me about the Mozilla project -- the bug tracking system is wide open (for example, the list of most frequently reported bugs -- aka dupes). You can read how various decisions evolved based on everybody's input, study and debate. The evolution of every single feature is documented in that system -- so if there's something that annoys you about Moz, there's a 99% chance that there's already been a lot of handwringing over it, and either they've (we've!) decided not to "fix" the behavior, or it's being worked on.

The APIs are *not* frozen yet -- that's precisely what 1.0 is for. They are attempting to freeze them now, but don't be surprised if there's a couple more changes in the last two months of pre-1.0 development.

According to mozilla.org's Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, there are three primary motives for 1.0, which basically are:

1. "1.0" is an important number
2. Freeze the APIs
3. Start a long-lived branch

If you read that manifesto, you'll see that these issues, as well as nearly everything else about the browser, have been given some very serious thought. In fact, this is one of the most fascinating things for me about the Mozilla project -- the bug tracking system is wide open (for example, the list of most frequently reported bugs -- aka dupes). You can read how various decisions evolved based on everybody's input, study and debate. The evolution of every single feature is documented in that system -- so if there's something that annoys you about Moz, there's a 99% chance that there's already been a lot of handwringing over it, and either they've (we've!) decided not to "fix" the behavior, or it's being worked on.

What I'd like to see them fix is the )(!@#*& mail and news client automatically rendering HTML mail messages - you get a spam, and there is no way to prevent Mozilla from rendering it when you select it to forward to Spamcop.

They are working on a pref to prevent Mozilla from hitting the network when rendering mail messages, but it's been pushed back.


http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showvotes.cgi?bug_id =2 8327

If anyone cares, vote for it.

This unavoidable viewing of a message when it is selected is almost as much of a security hole under Linux as LookOut(TM) is for Windows.

Mozilla does this pathetic obvious little nomark thing +5. IE has done it for years. -1 Flamebait. What is wrong with you people? Wait, don't answer that.

Maybe cause it's wrong info? (Then again, one can't count on moderators to have done that much research.)

According to comments in bug 112564, the standards say a browser SHOULD not refresh a page for forward/back history movement for no-cache pages, but all browsers do this except for Opera. Netscape was worried that banks come to expect this busted behavior because IE does it. Mozilla coders wanted it because it would follow standards and speed up the feel of the browser immensely. They ended up compromising and ignoring no-cache for http but following the IE method of refreshing for https pages.

Now, IE will remember relative scroll position in the page, which will get you close as long as the page content didn't change too much. So maybe that's what you are thinking about here. Mozilla never did that no matter what and that, I agree, was a horrible thing too. This fix just fixed both issues.

This is mozilla built with a Carbon front end and BSD backend. You'll find it's noticeably faster than the CFM (pure carbon) version. I found mozilla much more impressive in this version (though it has some glitches.

Prebuilt versions are available ... somewhere. Try searching the mozilla macosx groups. OTOH it isn't hard to build. Just slow.

The following bug fixes make it quite difficult to pitch Mozilla to other developers View source page bug Cookie Confirmation dialog should show all fields

The following bug fixes make it quite difficult to pitch Mozilla to other developers View source page bug Cookie Confirmation dialog should show all fields

This is much more interesting.

Man I'm glad these functions got their loving. Sex-starved team members could be catastrophic this close to the 1.0 release...

I don't mean this in a rude way, but if you're really concerned about how bad Mozilla is, get yourself a bugzilla account and try helping out a little! Just using Mozilla and posting your comments or problems to the appropriate bug page can help out a lot, and who knows, you might even find the answer to your question!

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

It's no use for us to stand around leaning on our shovels cursing that the hole isn't being dug fast enough. :)

I'll save you some trouble. The bugs in MNGs are bug 44866 - MNG dosn't support Chromaticity correction and ICC profiles and bug 116307 - MNG alpha partly broken.

I'll save you some trouble. The bugs in MNGs are bug 44866 - MNG dosn't support Chromaticity correction and ICC profiles and bug 116307 - MNG alpha partly broken.

What would be nice is getting the spellchecker integrated in the text entry controls, like this one with which we post to /.

What would be nice is getting the spellchecker integrated in the text entry controls, like this one with which we post to /.

What would be nice is getting the spellchecker integrated in the text entry controls, like this one with which we post to /.

Actually, typing y, down-arrow, enter gets me to yahoo.com in just three keystrokes in Mozilla. But if you really want the Ctrl+Enter feature you describe, just vote for bug 37867.

Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.

In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.

In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.

In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.

In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.

In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.

In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

The compromise was to ignore no-cache for speed purposes on http requests but don't ignore it for https requests.

The full gritty details is in big 112564.

For the link-impaired, Mozillazine tracks the progress on Mozilla and, for each nightly, gives comments on the day's build. Of course, using the nightlies can be bleeding edge, but the Build Comments can help to ensure smooth sailing.

• Hebrew is now supported on Solaris. Hebrew and Arabic now supported on Mac OS ...

To save everyone some time in common questions and answers, there's a FAQ on Mozilla's spellchecker (or lack thereof).

However, there's a new development. As you may know, bug 56301 tracks the progress on the Mozilla spellchecker. And, for a while, progress had become stagnant. Then, David Einstein stepped up to the plate and started working on a spellchecker for Mozilla. His latest work is available at spellchecker.mozdev.org.

To save everyone some time in common questions and answers, there's a FAQ on Mozilla's spellchecker (or lack thereof).

However, there's a new development. As you may know, bug 56301 tracks the progress on the Mozilla spellchecker. And, for a while, progress had become stagnant. Then, David Einstein stepped up to the plate and started working on a spellchecker for Mozilla. His latest work is available at spellchecker.mozdev.org.

To save everyone some time in common questions and answers, there's a FAQ on Mozilla's spellchecker (or lack thereof).

However, there's a new development. As you may know, bug 56301 tracks the progress on the Mozilla spellchecker. And, for a while, progress had become stagnant. Then, David Einstein stepped up to the plate and started working on a spellchecker for Mozilla. His latest work is available at spellchecker.mozdev.org.

According to the roadmap, Mozilla 1.0 will be released on or shortly after April 5.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.

I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.

* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

I've never seen a truly stable version of Netscape under any *nix.

Mozilla Mail

I can't be bothered to check up on some feature that I don't use personally, but I'm fairly sure that it'll do it.. I know it does IMAP and I know it does SSL. The beauty of Moz is that if it doesn't currently support it, all you have to do is plop in a Bugzilla report and it'll likely get implemented sooner or later.

One question remains, though: which standard stylesheet should I use for XHTML documents?

Before I commence my rant, let me offer what I do know. In XML documents, stylesheets are never optional. This includes XHTML. I assume the HTML Working Group has documented a set of standard style sheets, but I lack any inclination to research the matter. Judging from the Mozilla IRS XML demo (which also works in IE), there are at least two.

Why am I so indifferent to XHTML? Because it's just not very important. Before XML came along, HTML was the only way to do rich text in a web browser. But now (well, not right now -- neither IE nor Mozilla fully implement CSS or XSL, and we need both) you can use any XML application you want. And there are some very nice ones out there. Docbook is well established and has all the features you could want. (A web-compatible stylesheet would be a pain to write, but I think there will be several available soon enough.) DITA is a very promising XML app for API documents, my own particular interest. Many, many more are currently available or under development. As XML becomes more widely accepted, there will be schemas and stylesheets to suit every interest.

XHTML has to compete with all of these. Even if I had fonder memories of the the HTML Working Group's past efforts, I'd be sceptical that it can. Where's the call for a complex one-size-fits-all XML app?

The HTML Working Group claims that XHTML has two important features. It will work with older browsers that don't support XML, and it will make it easy for HTML hackers to learn XML. But neither claim makes sense. Most older browsers, with their hacked up little features, will just choke on XHTML. And HTML people who can't deal with the paradigm shift are not going to be helped by yet another over-complex spec.

I really hope Mozilla will soon compile with Intel to see how it compares with GCC as we cannot compare yet OS/compiler (Win32 builds uses Visual C++, Unix use GCC most of the time):
evaluate Intel's C Compiler

It should take a few hours only to fix this one

Check out http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/m ozkeyplan.html. It's got the exaustive list of keyboard shortcuts for Mozilla. (Works with mozilla, though).

Yea, the tree closed for 0.9.8 like a week ago. Tree Closes for 0.9.8. For those that don't want to click the link, here's what it says...

...0.9.8 will have a variety of new items including new natively drawn widgets on WindowsXP, Mac OS X, and GTK, when you are in the classic skin (We will have more on this later, including screenshots)...

If you're really interested in what's going on with the project, try the latest Build Comments

Yesterday was the last of the frozen trunk builds. And if that's not enough, the Tree Is Opened for 0.9.9 checkins.

And there's now a Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto that lays down precisely what Mozilla 1.0 should be (which will come right after 0.9.9).

Of course, it's nice to see a change in SlashDot change its view of the project. But, then again, maybe I was right all along. :)

It IS open source... well Netscape 6.2 at least... it's an open source browser. It's based almost entirely on mozilla.org code ( www.mozilla.org ) with a few Netscape tweaks.

Do people really not know that?

Yahoo not evil? But they have the Closed Directory Project! And at least AOL has some open source things, like Mozilla and DMOZ. AOL may have a crappy ISP service and a closed instant messaging system but they have other good stuff like WinAmp and whatnot.

I think you'll find that Netscape's browser is STILL a useless piece of shit, even with the whole WORLD working on it.

Of course, because AOL / Time Warner is run by Jews, they would rather line their lawyer's pockets than produce a quality product.