Slashdot Mirror

Mozilla successfully switched to autoconf a few years ago, and it has made porting much easier. we have a very extensive autoconf system...check out all the ports we do now, thanks in part to autoconf Mozilla Ports

In this case, if you find it acceptable that people make changes to your code and distribute the result without sharing them, use the (new) , it is small, simple and give you the minimal legal protection against getting sued.

If not, I suggest the MPL/GPL/LGPL tripple license used by Mozilla for new code (actually the GPL part is unnecesary, but it is safest to use the text pointed to by the link, since it has been proffread by lawyers). The MPL part will make it useful for embedded and most other purposes, the (L)GPL for use in (L)GPL projects, and it still means changes to your files will be made public.

The Mozilla Project has a project on their website about migrating from their build system to autoconf. No Idea how far this got, but it fits your requirements of a huge project.
nikel

No need to go back that far, this page is linked to right at the top of the release notes of the post-0.9.4 versions.

For those of you who, like me, could only vaguely remember that Mozilla introduced some nifty popup-nuking setting but couldn't remember how to turn it on, here it is:

[From the Release Notes for Mozilla 0.9.4]

* It is now possible to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. When the dom.disable_open_during_load pref is set to "true", window.open will fail when called during an onload or onunload event, from top level script, or as part of a setTimeout or setInterval script. Setting this pref (instructions here) should turn off most pop-up and pop-under ads that appear when you load a new page. (Bug 92955)

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

For those of you who, like me, could only vaguely remember that Mozilla introduced some nifty popup-nuking setting but couldn't remember how to turn it on, here it is:

[From the Release Notes for Mozilla 0.9.4]

* It is now possible to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. When the dom.disable_open_during_load pref is set to "true", window.open will fail when called during an onload or onunload event, from top level script, or as part of a setTimeout or setInterval script. Setting this pref (instructions here) should turn off most pop-up and pop-under ads that appear when you load a new page. (Bug 92955)

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

For those of you who, like me, could only vaguely remember that Mozilla introduced some nifty popup-nuking setting but couldn't remember how to turn it on, here it is:

[From the Release Notes for Mozilla 0.9.4]

* It is now possible to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. When the dom.disable_open_during_load pref is set to "true", window.open will fail when called during an onload or onunload event, from top level script, or as part of a setTimeout or setInterval script. Setting this pref (instructions here) should turn off most pop-up and pop-under ads that appear when you load a new page. (Bug 92955)

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

Teach a man how to opt out of X10 ads and he'll be happy for the rest of the month. Teach a man how to use Mozilla and he'll be happy for the rest of his life.

To turn off the X10 ads for a month, click here:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

Currently I like using Mozilla to access my mail and news simultaniously, as well as have access to a MOO client (MOOzilla) and a web browser all with one package. It is, however, a tad buggy.. I find that some newsgroups consistantly cause the mailer to crash, and I haven't yet gotten a resolution for this bug.

I used to use a perl script I wrote, fetchnews, to read newsgroups and deposit them into mboxes for use with Mutt. Posting to USENET was done by sending to local nntp-alt.bitterness, or whatever newsgroup, which used a qmail wrapper script to send the mail out properly. It was a nice setup, but since I've lost most of the configuration, I've switched to Mozilla.

OVERDONE WEB PAGES:
I agree with your point. I always advocate simplistic, standards-compliant web pages (after all HTML is about content, not appearance!). To see how dependent recent web pages are on plugins, one only needs to spend a few minutes browsing with a vanilla Mozilla build. :-(

NETSCAPE ON IRIX:
Have you tried Mozilla for IRIX? Mozilla itself is somewhat bloated IMHO, but it is becoming quite stable and should easily run on the Indigo box you mention. Have a look at SGI Freeware for an inst package.

A DECENT BROWSER ON IRIX:
Maybe it's worth seeing whether Galeon will build on IRIX. (I expect this will require some work, as recent GNOME libraries don't seem to be readily available on IRIX.)

• CVSWeb
• Bonsai
• LXR
• TortoiseCVS

GTK:
GTK

QT:
QT
Excellent QT Tutorial

wxWindows:
wxWindows
wxPython

Mozilla:
Mozilla
Cross-platform implementation of COM
develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL

Others:
FLTK
Fox Toolkit

Side-by-side comparison of GUI Toolkits:
The GUI Toolkit and Framework Page

I needed this list for my own use. Maybe it will be of interest to you.

GTK:
GTK

QT:
QT
Excellent QT Tutorial

wxWindows:
wxWindows
wxPython

Mozilla:
Mozilla
Cross-platform implementation of COM
develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL

Others:
FLTK
Fox Toolkit

Side-by-side comparison of GUI Toolkits:
The GUI Toolkit and Framework Page

I needed this list for my own use. Maybe it will be of interest to you.

GTK:
GTK

QT:
QT
Excellent QT Tutorial

wxWindows:
wxWindows
wxPython

Mozilla:
Mozilla
Cross-platform implementation of COM
develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL

Others:
FLTK
Fox Toolkit

Side-by-side comparison of GUI Toolkits:
The GUI Toolkit and Framework Page

I needed this list for my own use. Maybe it will be of interest to you.

I'm not trying to sound stupid or off-topic here, but have you considered Mozilla? Beyond ther browser, they've developed a really interesting cross-platform C++ (and JavaScript) development platform. For a start there's a cross platform implementation of COM and you can develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL.

I'm not trying to sound stupid or off-topic here, but have you considered Mozilla? Beyond ther browser, they've developed a really interesting cross-platform C++ (and JavaScript) development platform. For a start there's a cross platform implementation of COM and you can develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL.

I'm not trying to sound stupid or off-topic here, but have you considered Mozilla? Beyond ther browser, they've developed a really interesting cross-platform C++ (and JavaScript) development platform. For a start there's a cross platform implementation of COM and you can develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL.

An example is the Komodo IDE by ActiveState, which uses XUL.

XUL is the next generation browser application platform. Simply speaking, the Mozilla team chose an approach very similiar to JAVA to come closer to a platform independent graphical user interface:

• implement a set of base compenents on the most popular platforms (Win32, Mac, UNIX, ..), that render your JAVA specific widgets in terms of the native GUI.
• implement your applications in your JAVA language
• compile application
• distribute JAVA binaries

XUL goes one step farther, as there is no compilation step.

The XUL application implementation language is a XML language that together with cascading style sheets and JavaScript glue will yield an application one starts in the browser by opening the .xul document.

A possible advantage of XUL might become the relative ease of application development, change and distribution.

Possible problems will be similiar to the ones known from JAVA. The qualitiy of XUL applications will stand and fall with the quality of the XUL implementation for a specific platform, which right now means the quality of its Mozilla or Netscape implementation.

Of course, compared to JAVA, which has underwent several larger development cycles and now features mighty libraries, XUL is a bleeding edge technology at its beginnings.

However it is still possible to make direct use of the various Mozilla widgets as well from C++.

I'll explain this process in terms of the popular Bugzilla tracking system.

First a secretary or intern will be assigned to read the bug mail and sort out the legitimate problems from the lunatics writing in that your product just SUCKS.

The user enters the bug into the bug tracking system, and the system marks it UNCONFIRMED. If it is a legitimate bug report and it includes all the information necessary to reproduce it then it gets entered in the bug tracking/administration system. An email or memo will be sent to the manager of the division that handles testing.

And the bug becomes NEW.

The manager will assign the bug to a tester who will try to reproduce it. That is after he has worked on all the other items in his queue that have a higher priority.

Bugathon. Also note that this step may be less necessary if an experienced user attaches a reproducible test case to the bug report.

Once he has reproduced it he identifys what component causes the problem (or guesses). And add adds the item as a reproduced bug to the bug tracking system.

In the process, he adds keywords to the 'summary' and 'keywords' fields and more description such as a stack trace. He also "triages" the bug, marking it as high, medium, or low priority.

The manager in charge of the division that handles that system or component will get the notice and eventually get around (depending on priority) to assigning the bug to an engineer. The engineer will then start working on the bug

ASSIGNED.

but only after he has already completed what he was working on at the time, and cleared any higher priority items out of his queue as well.

Bugzilla sometimes calls its queues "plates" or "radars".

Once a patch gets r= and sr= (two types of approval from two different groups of code reviewers), somebody with write access to the CVS tree checks it in and marks the issue RESOLVED.

Sound more familiar? In other words, the primary difference between Microsoft's bug tracking system and Bugzilla is that Bugzilla work happens in a public forum as opposed to a private forum.

Direct quote from the downloads page for the new 0.9.6 release...

We do not guarantee that any source code or executable code available from the mozilla.org domain is Year 2000 compliant.

Does this mean I have to set my clock to 197x again?

When does the Mac OS X build come out? Every time there's a milestone build they instantly post the OS9 version, and several days later we see the OS X build. It seems logical to me to reverse this if possibble.

A lot of will get iBooks this fall and christmas, pre-loaded with OS X. Many people buy Macs because they don't like the quality of Microsft software, and they will seek out products like Mozilla. It would make sense then to set our best foot forward.

How do you build the concept of project management into an open-source project? How do you get volunteers to focus their work? The Salvation Army gives ranks and has a formal heirarchy...Maybe it's time...Can I be a Captain of TCP/IP?

I tried a few more sites, and it worked on one of them.

A slashdot comment form: Ctrl+Z works.
A bugzilla bug comment form: Ctrl+Z doesn't work. The form also loses focus, but putting focus back in the form doesn't make Ctrl+Z work.
My start page (Google search form): Ctrl+Z doesn't work.

I wish it had a few more features, like the ability to disable javascript per site (like konqueror can do).

Aren't these nightly rpms optimized?

If the Mozilla team can straighten out some of the plug in problems (for example, it takes some voodoo before java actually works), or at least come up with a definitive install procedure, we'll be rockin'.

With Java it's simple. You just copy all the .dll files from your JavaSoft directory in Windows to the Mozilla plug-ins directory. For Linux, you just do a symlink to the java2/plugin/i386/ns600/libjava.oji.so directory in the mozilla plugins directory. For all other plug-ins, just copy and paste all the files in your Netscape 4.7x directory to the Mozilla plugins directory (Windows AND Linux).

For Java installation instructions, go to:

Release Notes: Known Problems: Java

It seems all these problems have already been solved in Netscape 6.2, at least for the Windows version.

on every first page visit to a site it requests favicon.ico

Take a look at the release notes for 0.9.6. They say that to define an icon for a page you need to use the <LINK REL="icon"> tag in your document and I don't see anything that would indicate that Mozilla will be requesting icons automatically as you have implied. To me, it sounds like Mozilla will only request an icon if the page defines the <LINK> tag (which would indicate that's what the author intended) or if the user bookmarks a page (coming in 0.9.7). That seems like a pretty non-intrusive way to handle things and doesn't sound like it will skew stats at all.

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

which disables all Javascript popups, or you can say:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

which disables opening windows on page open and close.
Both of these examples are from the excellent Mozilla Customization page.

that not all users use RPM or have access to CVS ? It's not the first time they release src.rpm and not tar.[bz2|gz]. Is it so hard to 'make dist' ?

Hm? I downloaded a tar.gz:ed 0.9.6for Linux just a few hours ago from the Mozilla site. The source seems also be available in tar.gz:ed form.

that not all users use RPM or have access to CVS ? It's not the first time they release src.rpm and not tar.[bz2|gz]. Is it so hard to 'make dist' ?

Hm? I downloaded a tar.gz:ed 0.9.6for Linux just a few hours ago from the Mozilla site. The source seems also be available in tar.gz:ed form.

A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

I'm working on this one, see bug 24651

I've got a patch which works on a nightly build from about a month ago, but 0.9.6 segfaults on this. I'll look into it ASAP.

The patch essentially places a small button left of the location bar (much smaller than in the attached screenshot). This button needs some graphic designing, so if anybody can work the Gimp, please visit the bug and download the blank buttons.

Yes, it's pretty sad the he invented a new language. This will now need to get validation tools and processing libraries, etc, whereas something XML-based would have that for free.
Not to mention the learning curve.
I wish he used XUL from mozilla instead:
http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xptoolkit/xulintro.htm l
Then you could display make xconfig directly in moziila...

A quick check of the HTML indicates that CSS positioning was used; Nutscrape...doesn't know how to implement CSS positioning. Internet Explorer works properly; Mozilla and Opera should work too

So, you're in agreement: It was a braindead web design. "Use my browser or don't view my webpage" is braindead web design. Period.

It's worth noting that a properly-designed page should render reasonably well in any browser, to the limit of the browser's capabilities. Try calling up the page given here in Lynx, for instance; I wouldn't be surprised if it renders properly in Lynx (sans images, of course).

If your browser doesn't render pages properly, you might want to consider upgrading to a better browser, one that properly implements the published standards.

WHY?

What's the point in using netscape 6.anything on linux? What advantages does it have over Mozilla 0.95? None that I can see, however Mozilla has E6(that's a million) more features more than Nutscrape, erm, Netscape.

Silly boy. the dragon breathes fire

I'm a professional developer who has been involved with high availability server architectures for the last two years. The group I was a part of was considering the exact same question, finding a cross platform library that supports a variety of sys call abstractions, when a friend who worked on Sun's Streaming Media server told us that they had used Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR). Since then I've used NSPR extensively for my work, as well as my hobbies. During the last two years it has grown into a very mature library.

NSPR has a simple unix-like API which supports a large number of system calls, including threads, process initialization, locks, conditional variables, monitors, file and network I/O, pipes, timers and time functions, memory management, string operations, floating point routines, long long integers, dynamic linking, IPC, Multi-wait I/O, environmental variables, logging, semaphores, and error handling.

Porting between platforms is nearly seamless (at least for the platforms I've tried). It works well with autoconf and gcc, M$ Visual Studio 6.0, cygwin, and Sun's C compiler (probably others but this is all I?ve used). I've used it personally on FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, WinNT, and Win2k, and been very satisfied. Also, unlike some of the more notoriously slow Mozilla technologies, such as XUL, NSPR has decently low memory and processor overhead.

Check out for a project overview
http://mozilla.org/projects/nspr/

and the reference for a list of technical capablities
http://mozilla.org/projects/nspr/reference/html/in dex.html

I'm a professional developer who has been involved with high availability server architectures for the last two years. The group I was a part of was considering the exact same question, finding a cross platform library that supports a variety of sys call abstractions, when a friend who worked on Sun's Streaming Media server told us that they had used Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR). Since then I've used NSPR extensively for my work, as well as my hobbies. During the last two years it has grown into a very mature library.

NSPR has a simple unix-like API which supports a large number of system calls, including threads, process initialization, locks, conditional variables, monitors, file and network I/O, pipes, timers and time functions, memory management, string operations, floating point routines, long long integers, dynamic linking, IPC, Multi-wait I/O, environmental variables, logging, semaphores, and error handling.

Porting between platforms is nearly seamless (at least for the platforms I've tried). It works well with autoconf and gcc, M$ Visual Studio 6.0, cygwin, and Sun's C compiler (probably others but this is all I?ve used). I've used it personally on FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, WinNT, and Win2k, and been very satisfied. Also, unlike some of the more notoriously slow Mozilla technologies, such as XUL, NSPR has decently low memory and processor overhead.

Check out for a project overview
http://mozilla.org/projects/nspr/

and the reference for a list of technical capablities
http://mozilla.org/projects/nspr/reference/html/in dex.html

As a whole, the CommonC++ design is pretty messy, relying on massive amounts of kludgy ifdefs and macros in the header files. I believe they are working on cleaning it up.

Other libraries I would consider:

• ACE: threads, synchronization, sockets. ACE's design is not very object-oriented, but its probably the most extensively portability layer you will find.

• IOLib, portable I/O (also includes identical ports for C and Objective-C).

• ZThread for threads.

• Nescape Portable Runtime (NSPR), a C library: sockets/IPC, threads, synchronization primitives, layered I/O, ADTs/algorithms, portable shared libraries, logging, etc.

Not really... Netscape Portable Runtime is at version 4.1. The APR came about with the development of Apache 2.0 (still not out of beta yet). NSPR had been tested and used since before Mozilla started development. It's been the cross-platform glue that put Netscape Communicator on so many different kinds of computer.

Not to slight the APR, it's a well engineering library. However I still think that the ASF would have been better served by reusing (and improving) the NSPR than making their own.

So much for code reuse in free software... :-/

This really doensn't answer your cross platform library question, as there have already been a number of good answers to that (I'd suggest checking out NSPR; it's open source, free, heavily tested/stable (Mozilla/Netscape/Netscape's server products/etc. use it), and does all of the cross platform stuff you need, and does it on 30-some odd platforms.

As for cross platform programming practices, check out Mozilla's C++ Portability Guide. Porting the browser to 28 different operating systems, each with their own compilers and each of those compilers with their own quirks has given the Mozilla build engineering team some insight into what to do and what not to do when writing portable code.

This document tells you what those do's and don'ts are, and (more importantly) why.

This really doensn't answer your cross platform library question, as there have already been a number of good answers to that (I'd suggest checking out NSPR; it's open source, free, heavily tested/stable (Mozilla/Netscape/Netscape's server products/etc. use it), and does all of the cross platform stuff you need, and does it on 30-some odd platforms.

As for cross platform programming practices, check out Mozilla's C++ Portability Guide. Porting the browser to 28 different operating systems, each with their own compilers and each of those compilers with their own quirks has given the Mozilla build engineering team some insight into what to do and what not to do when writing portable code.

This document tells you what those do's and don'ts are, and (more importantly) why.

Mozilla.org uses NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime)
From the about page
NSPR provides platform independence for non-GUI operating system facilities. These facilities include threads, thread synchronization, normal file and network I/O, interval timing and calendar time, basic memory management (malloc and free) and shared library linking.
You can find more information here http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/index.html

Check Netscape Portable Runtime, (just one of the many projects that are part of Mozilla. This library provide cross-platform threading, IPC, network/file IO, and dynamic linking, among other things.

Check Netscape Portable Runtime, (just one of the many projects that are part of Mozilla. This library provide cross-platform threading, IPC, network/file IO, and dynamic linking, among other things.

Does that mean the Mozilla team doesn't have to fix bug 2586, "Print Preview animates GIFs"? Here's the original bug report:

In Print Preview, animated GIFs are still animated. I would love to say
that it is not a bug, but unless the printing code can then back the
preview up by animating the printed copy, I suggest the Print Preview
should show a static image.

This also applies to applets, Javascript, "hover" and "active" pseudo
classes, and so on.

time to abandon the old 4.x ....and run Mozilla it seems to load just fine..(and yes I'm running it on Linux)

Windows Mozilla and Netscape users wanting QuickTime support should vote for bug 74327 on Bugzilla.

6.2 now... you should, because it's really a great browser, and if you're feeling particularly adventurous, give Mozilla a try. You won't regret it.

As it's already been said, Opera in Linux dows not show it at all. :-) Mozilla seems just fine (as there is not point of comparisson to me, I can't say). Konqy hangs (after showing "XML parser error" or something, too bad...

But you don't need to look much to test CSS. Just look at the source: W3C CSS Page. *No* browser shows it correctly... Mozilla (and Netscape after 6.1) are almost there (look at the rounded corners)... Konqy does a good job also. Opera too, but no trasnparent PNGs (at least in Linux).

The only problem with that page is that it kills the performance of older Mozilla browsers (and Netscape 6.2 also). Newer Mozilla builds have a workaround for that in Linux (I don't think they fixed in windows yet). The bug is 98252.

Is bug 66054 what you're talking about?

I haven't looked extensively at RDF yet, other than the possibility of using RSS. It seems cool though. Maybe, like with <link>, I just need to see one good implementation to open my eyes to the possibilities.

No offense, but that's just not true. An interactive element is not an empty DIV. It has a content area. That content area contains a button.

The goal there is to be able to use system default appearances, not to get away from system default appearances.

Again, for those who have trouble reading spec language, that says that CSS3 is meant to use default system widget appearances, and that Mozilla is not going to be able to support CSS3 because it uses its own non-standard widget appearances.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86449