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I don't mind reading a book in dead tree format, but I'm much more comfortable reading a book that I can get an online copy of for one reason: computers are much better at O(n) tasks like scanning a large amount of text for a specific word than humans are. Dead-tree publishers should be happy each time they see a recent book show up on Freenet, because it means there's one more book I can purchase and read without fear of not being able to find a passage I want to quote/rememeber/reread.

(*grumble* Mozilla find in page O(n^2) algorithm *grumble*)

The big deal with PNGs is that they offer an alpha channel for transparency. With this, you can have 256 levels of transparency instead of just one (like GIF has). So, a web designer only has to create an image once -- then, it can be used on any background, while still maintaining anti-aliasing.

The main problem, though, is browser support. Support is on the rise -- I mean, even the Sega Dreamcast's web browser fully supports PNG. And, Mozilla supports PNGs nicely (alpha transparency and all). But, IE 5 (on PC) doesn't cooperate (IE 5 on Mac supports PNG swimmingly). Hopefully, IE 6 will remedy this. Once the majority of web users are browsing with IE 6, Mozilla, or another PNG-supporing-browser, PNGs may be very enticing to web designers.

Sorry, you are mistaken. From the release notes: Install into a new empty directory. Installing on top of previously installed builds may cause problems.

Tim

By the looks of it mozilla now blocks off-site popup windows by default: "...by setting the Window.open policy back to its default value, sameOrigin"

I searched bugzilla for "localhost" and found this: bug 86449, Cannot browse http://localhost on some linux systems.

Your complaint about Mozilla not allowing you to simply hit Enter on forms that contain more than one field has already been submitted to Bugzilla as bug 87742.

I anyone able to browse http://localhost? I am not able to do so :-(. It just redirects me to Netscape search.

I'm running Suse 7.1 on Intel.

For the longest time, I couldn't stand looking at those crummy Netscape buttons. I like the themes option. Extremely customizable.(I realize this has been around for a while)

And it does seem to live up to the promise of "less crashes". (I've had it running a whole 15 minutes and it hasn't crashed yet ;)

But there are drawbacks. On Win32, running Mozilla wants 33MB from my heap. That's almost 3 times what IE wants for rendering the same page :P Not sure my RAM-poor laptop can handle that.....

A nice surprise: Mozilla properly handles true alpha-masked PNGs.

But hey, kudos to the mozilla folk for making a stable build!

Here's the BeOS port:
mozilla-i586-pc-beos.zip

You can always download the latest builds here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/

There, you can just download the full file, instead of having to deal with the network-install.

They're working on it, I'm guessing it'll show up 1 or 2 releases up the road. You can follow the progress in bugzilla.

• Bug 31296: "[rfe]Font anti-aliasing on Linux?" [vote for this bug]
• bug 82076: "add support for anti-aliased fonts (Render)" [vote for this bug]
• bug 90813: "anti-alias bitmap scaled fonts to make them less ugly" [vote for this bug]

• Bug 31296: "[rfe]Font anti-aliasing on Linux?" [vote for this bug]
• bug 82076: "add support for anti-aliased fonts (Render)" [vote for this bug]
• bug 90813: "anti-alias bitmap scaled fonts to make them less ugly" [vote for this bug]

• Bug 31296: "[rfe]Font anti-aliasing on Linux?" [vote for this bug]
• bug 82076: "add support for anti-aliased fonts (Render)" [vote for this bug]
• bug 90813: "anti-alias bitmap scaled fonts to make them less ugly" [vote for this bug]

• Bug 31296: "[rfe]Font anti-aliasing on Linux?" [vote for this bug]
• bug 82076: "add support for anti-aliased fonts (Render)" [vote for this bug]
• bug 90813: "anti-alias bitmap scaled fonts to make them less ugly" [vote for this bug]

• Bug 31296: "[rfe]Font anti-aliasing on Linux?" [vote for this bug]
• bug 82076: "add support for anti-aliased fonts (Render)" [vote for this bug]
• bug 90813: "anti-alias bitmap scaled fonts to make them less ugly" [vote for this bug]

• Bug 31296: "[rfe]Font anti-aliasing on Linux?" [vote for this bug]
• bug 82076: "add support for anti-aliased fonts (Render)" [vote for this bug]
• bug 90813: "anti-alias bitmap scaled fonts to make them less ugly" [vote for this bug]

Very good. Now go RTFM: The first line says "Install into a new empty directory. Installing on top of previously installed builds may cause problems. "

That would be bug 46029 ("[RFE] Multiple user_agent prefs like in Opera."). Feel free to vote for the bug if that issue is important to you.

That would be bug 46029 ("[RFE] Multiple user_agent prefs like in Opera."). Feel free to vote for the bug if that issue is important to you.

• Encryption support for PGP, GPG, SMIME, or whatever ... I don't care which one. I'll use the first that makes it into the build (yeah, I would definitely switch back to the nightlies if they had encryption support)
• I want to be able to embed remote URL document in my mails as a reference, not as a mime-encoded object. Especially images. That's Bug 59535 for those who want to know, or vote!

Mozilla doesn't currently have spellchecking (it used to be that you could install Netscape 6's spellchecking into Mozilla, but that no longer works). So, if you're interested in spellchecking, please vote for bug 56301 (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

Mozilla doesn't currently have spellchecking (it used to be that you could install Netscape 6's spellchecking into Mozilla, but that no longer works). So, if you're interested in spellchecking, please vote for bug 56301 (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

Mozilla doesn't currently have spellchecking (it used to be that you could install Netscape 6's spellchecking into Mozilla, but that no longer works). So, if you're interested in spellchecking, please vote for bug 56301 (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

Mozilla doesn't currently have spellchecking (it used to be that you could install Netscape 6's spellchecking into Mozilla, but that no longer works). So, if you're interested in spellchecking, please vote for bug 56301 (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

Bugzilla 44787 has been marked as a Won't Fix. It was originally entered as a bug (as in Bugzilla) and has been established as a minimum requirement. "The linux builds are built on RedHat 6.0 systems which use glibc 2.1. Therefore, the minimum required version of glibc is 2.1. Builds have been known to work (occassionally) when built under glibc 2.0.7 but they aren't officially built nor supported (due to known race problems with the 2.0 dynamic loader). "

Well, you could go to the Roadmap and see for yourself. The number of bugs left before they're ready to call it 1.0 is declining quite nicely.

The only one left that bothers me is ATM smoothing. Total deal-breaker for anyone using postscript fonts. Luckily the bug is now understood and is scheduled (hopefully) for 0.9.4

Well, you could go to the Roadmap and see for yourself. The number of bugs left before they're ready to call it 1.0 is declining quite nicely.

The only one left that bothers me is ATM smoothing. Total deal-breaker for anyone using postscript fonts. Luckily the bug is now understood and is scheduled (hopefully) for 0.9.4

Its just you ;)

Seriously, they have a detailed Roadmap outlining their plans. Their dates have slipped some but they've been holding pretty well to teh schedule. Currently plans call for Mozilla to go 1.0 with what WOULD be 0.9.5 if it is deemed ready . They are just using a differnet scheme for release, vs the beta to release candidate to release. Its all in teh naming. So if all goes well (and it sure seem to be finally) I'd bet they'll make v1.0 in the beginning of the fourth quarter. But even if they don't make it till 0.9.7 which is December timeframe it'll still be a huge accomplishment.

While I have Mozilla 0.9 installed I've found myself dropping back to using Netscape 4.77 most of the time. So I jumped at the chance to try out the new 0.9.3 build, maybe it puts right all the things that make me uncomfortable with Mozilla!?

So I have a look at mozilla.org and see that there are some nice spiffy new binary RPMs available for RH7.x, excellent, don't even have to bother compiling it. Download and install, open a new window, rehash, and, err...

% mozilla
/usr/bin/mozilla: line 156: 3018 Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$MOZ_PROGRAM -remote "openurl(about:blank,new-window)" 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
Error sending command.
%

Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to compile it after all...

While I have Mozilla 0.9 installed I've found myself dropping back to using Netscape 4.77 most of the time. So I jumped at the chance to try out the new 0.9.3 build, maybe it puts right all the things that make me uncomfortable with Mozilla!?

So I have a look at mozilla.org and see that there are some nice spiffy new binary RPMs available for RH7.x, excellent, don't even have to bother compiling it. Download and install, open a new window, rehash, and, err...

% mozilla
/usr/bin/mozilla: line 156: 3018 Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$MOZ_PROGRAM -remote "openurl(about:blank,new-window)" 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
Error sending command.
%

Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to compile it after all...

While I have Mozilla 0.9 installed I've found myself dropping back to using Netscape 4.77 most of the time. So I jumped at the chance to try out the new 0.9.3 build, maybe it puts right all the things that make me uncomfortable with Mozilla!?

So I have a look at mozilla.org and see that there are some nice spiffy new binary RPMs available for RH7.x, excellent, don't even have to bother compiling it. Download and install, open a new window, rehash, and, err...

% mozilla
/usr/bin/mozilla: line 156: 3018 Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$MOZ_PROGRAM -remote "openurl(about:blank,new-window)" 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
Error sending command.
%

Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to compile it after all...

Looks like this guy just doesn't get it.

1: Free software (& 'open source') is not about killing Microsoft. Microsoft is bent on screwing the user over for as much cash as they can take. Free software is about freeing the user from that domination, and giving the user control of their own software destiny.

2: Leader? We don't need to steenking leader! This is a grassroots movement in what is probably the most egalitarian forum ever devised. If you can write good code, people respect that. What's a leader going to do? Enforce project timelines? Talk to the press? We've already got lots of people doing that e.g.: RMS & ESR.

3: Left to themselves, the people writing the code will go through their own darwinian selection process. Some projects will gain at the expense of others, some will merge, some will die, some will co-exist. This process takes time, (sometimes _too_long_), but so what? If you want something to move faster, contribute to it! With so many good coders contributing to the community, the richness and quality of Free Software accretes over time. At some point, the sheer mass of high-quality free software will overwhelm the ability of proprietary software to compete. This is already starting to happen with Linux vs. proprietary Unix, and will likely happen in other areas in the next few years.

You mean like when Netscape and IE were competing?

Were?

HTML rendering between the two browsers haven't exactly meshed.

Most sites are designed around IE 5, but I see very few problems with Mozilla 0.9.x aka Netscape 6.1, except for some Really Stupid Sites(tm) that use VBS instead of ECMAScript. HTML is not designed to be a pixel-perfect layout language; it's a structural markup language. For layout use CSS, which supports pixel-perfect positioning and is supported in current versions of IE (5+) and Netscape (6+). Except for a few glitches in IE such as inserting an extra 3px of left and right margins into the CSS box property float: and treating a newline before </div> as whitespace (contrary to the SGML spec), Mozilla and IE look pretty much the same.

I agree that Netscape 4.x is sucks. Users can't turn off CSS (cascading stylesheets) without turning off CSS (client-side scripting), and the buggy implementations of the parts of CSS it does support will only make sites look ugly.

I might recommend Mozilla rather than Netscape 6. I've got a 32 Mb Pentium 166 sitting next to me, and for quite a while the nightly builds have run faster than Netscape 4.x. But maybe that's just me.

Or, try Opera. Sure, if you don't want ads, you have to pay for it, and if you're used to the generic IE/Netscape/Mozilla/etc interface, it'll take some time to get used to, but it's *incredibly* fast. It loads in only a few seconds on that same Pentium 150, and the speed it renders pages at compared to my Athlon 950 is only barely noticeable.
--

How do you disable the popup sidebar in mozilla?

Are you talking about the way the Search sidebar opens when you do a Google search? That's bug 56969.

"All advertising is annoying to a certain extent, and the effectiveness of the pop-unders is driven by their ability to generate sales, not by their branding or traffic-driving effect," he said.

This article misses a fundamental difference between tranditional ads (banner ads and interstitials) and pop-up ads. If a site is covered with banner ads, you can leave the site. If a television station shows 50% ads, you can change the channel. But with pop-up ads, you have to go through extra effort to close the advertisements. To make things worse, it's often difficult to find out which of the many windows you have open triggered the ad, so it's hard to avoid the ads in the future.

That's why I'm trying to come up with a spec for Mozilla to block annoying pop-ups without breaking sites that use window.open for links, and without breaking bookmarklets. I threw this proposal around the mozilla newsgroups (n.p.m.security and n.p.m.ui) last week, and it met a mixed response, so I'm curious what the slashdot crowd thinks. The bug numbers referenced can be looked up on Bugzilla.

Most current browsers, including Mozilla, allow a class of profitable denial of service attacks. These attacks involve opening a large number of ad windows, or opening a new ad window each time the user tries to close an open one. Unlike most other forms of advertisement in any medium, these ads do not even give the user a chance to leave the site rather than view the ads, and cannot be ignored because they're in your way. Most of the sites using this type of DoS are adult sites, but there are are others, such as exitfuel.com partners (see bug 84749 for an example).

Somewhat less annoying are ordinary pop-up and pop-under ads. Some users think of them as interstitials, no more annoying than television ads. Some users are confused by them because they're used to having only one browser window open at a time. Some users are annoyed by them to the point where they'll immediately stop visiting a site that uses them or advertises in them.

The solution we come up with should:

a. Not be vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks such as "hydras" and cascading pop-up ads, at least with the default settings.

b. Not force Netscape to choose between (not being able to show pop-ups on netscape.com) and (being vulnerable to a widely exploited denial of service attack).

c. Have a user-interface simple enough that mpt won't complain about the number of prefs added.

d. Not break a large number of existing sites. Breaking a few sites is ok: pop-ups annoy a lot more people than browsers using alt text for tooltips, and we changed that at the expense of breaking more than several sites.

e. Make it possible to use bookmarklets and benign javascript in web pages while disallowing pop-up ads.

Here's my proposed plan:

1. Provide a pref:

Web pages may open new browser windows:
( ) Always
(*) Only when I click on the page or select "open in new window"
( ) Only when I select "open in new window"

See bug 55696 for some ideas about how the third option might work.

2. If "Always" is selected, windows opened by javascript will require a click before they can call window.open anyway. This will let users kill "hydras" as easily as they can kill normal pop-up ads. However, after the user clicks, the window will revert to the "Always" setting, because the user may have started using the window as a normal browser window.

3. Limit the number of consecutive window.opens to 3 or so. If a web page exceeds that limit, deny access to the last window.open call. This will break the "open selected links" bookmarklet , but bug 9274 will make up for that.

4. Disallow window.open, alert, prompt, and confirm in and after the onunload event (bug 33448).

5. Make sure a failed window.open call is reported to the user in some way (bug 47128, bug 83131).

6. Perhaps allow holding Ctrl while a page loads to enable onload pop-ups.

7. Allow power users to change the settings for specific sites or groups of sites using zone prefs (ui: bug 38966).

8. Make it so that activating a bookmarklet counts as a click, and selecting "open bookmark in new window" on a bookmarklet works similarly to selecting "open link in new window".

can't seem to find that feature in IE or Netscape

Well of course not. After all, the article did say modern browsers. I'm sure they're probably refering to mozilla or Konqueror since we all know that IE universally sucks and Netscape is dead.


--BEGIN SIG BLOCK--
I'd rather be trolling for goatse.cx.

Sure, put the following line in your prefs.js file:

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

You can find more info in the release notes.

While it is true that this is a problem with Lycos which should be fixed, it's indicative of a wider problem.

Scripting languages in browsers should not be capable of DoS attacks like the while(1)alert('') one I posted above.

Something needs to be done to actively prevent massive window-spawn or un-endable alerts. You should be able to stop scripts from a button such as Stop.

And make sure the button is clickable! (It's not clickable on Mozilla or IE due to modality issues).

This link is a fine example... difficult to get out of on Microsoft browsers.

Only on Microsoft browsers? I don't remember finding a browser where I could get out of that kind of loop.

See bug 59314, "Alerts should be content-modal, not window-modal", for fixing this in Mozilla.

Automatic JavaScript on and off based on URL might be OK, but I want a button down in my tray where I can easily turn it on and off -- with, of course, indication of state.

Slashdot rumor has it that Microsoft toyed with this idea for a while and then dropped it when it internally became known as the "porn button". Vote for (or help us fix) one or both of these if you'd like to see the feature added to Mozilla:

bug 38521 Preferences Toolbar, for most commonly used prefs
bug 87538 [RFE] preferences buttons on status bar

Automatic JavaScript on and off based on URL might be OK, but I want a button down in my tray where I can easily turn it on and off -- with, of course, indication of state.

Slashdot rumor has it that Microsoft toyed with this idea for a while and then dropped it when it internally became known as the "porn button". Vote for (or help us fix) one or both of these if you'd like to see the feature added to Mozilla:

bug 38521 Preferences Toolbar, for most commonly used prefs
bug 87538 [RFE] preferences buttons on status bar

The CLI and the JVM are comparable in this instance. As for which is better, I'm still not sure. For example, Python (through the use of Jython) can be compiled to Java bytecodes and can extend/be extended from Java classes (or anything else appropriately compiled to Java bytecodes). The same is true for ECMAScript (Javascript) through the use of Rhino.

Through the use of gcj, Java can be compiled to native code and has excellent two-way hooks to C++ for "native" code with CNI. C bigots can still use JNI (ugh) if they so choose. Java VMs are definitely more mature and "battle tested" than .NET's CLI, but I'm hard pressed to really pick a theoretical (intrinsic technical merits) winner. The more I hear about .NET, the more it truly does look like some things that Java has been doing for years.

And who knows, maybe the Java language will be ported to .NET. It can't be too hard considering the similarity with C#. If this is the case, Java becomes the more flexible solution again in that it could have three targets: Java bytecodes, CLI bytecodes or compile to native.

"Remember, .NET is a platform for distributed computing. Platform/language neutrality is a key part of that."

Distributed computing is one part of it (a big part when you factor in Passport), but no bigger than EJBs (and related techs such as RMI-IIOP, CORBA, JNDI, etc.) are for Java. The distributed aspects are dependant upon the language/bytecode aspects, not the other way around. What good is Passport without the language/platform support and the CLI? What good are EJBs, Jython and Rhino if there is no JVM? Slightly different comparisons, but not by much.

And for the record, OpenBSD *is* better than Perl. ;)

The main issue there seems to be informed consent, that is, do community contributors understand that their contributions may be used to generate revenue for someone else? I think we can all agree that it would be deceptive to represent software as GPLed and accept free submissions without informing contributors of the commercial licensing of their contributions.

Ghostscript is an example of a GPL'ed Free Software program that provides its primary author with a source of revenue from proprietary licensing.

Thanks for the reference! I see a general description of commercial licensing, but so far I haven't been able to find the modifications to the GPL that assign all modifications back to the owners of Ghostscript. Could you provide a quote or specific pointer, and explain how informed consent for contributing changes works here?

Software under Mozilla-style licenses requires ownership of published modifications to be assigned to the originator. Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner owns all modifications to Mozilla.

I can't find such a provision for assignment of modifications in the Mozilla Public License. Again, could you please provide specifics, and explain how informed consent is obtained?

Thanks, Tim

go on over to mozilla.org and download the latest nightly build. Netscape based their 6.0 browser on Mozilla's .8 release... Mozilla is now up to .9.3 release, still not even a 1.0 release. look deep into the feature set, browser the css demos, watch how fast pages render. once you use Mozilla, you'll agree that IE is a total piece of ..., Mozilla is a great example of people working together to make something great, Netscape is a collection of features and bookmarks added to the Mozilla browser. YES IT'S TAKEN A LONG TIME TO GET HERE, but we're now on par with IE destined to be the best available.

from the article:

AOL also is seeking to give an advantage to Netscape, its own Web browser,

Netscape is now based on mozilla which is an open source product with a great XUL platform for extending functionality through add on applications that inherit the look and feel of the browser skin. I hope they get a Mozilla/Netscape Icon on everybodys desktop just because if they do, this will 'unseat' Internet Explorer as the browser king.

err... like Mozilla's XPCOM or Gnome's Bonobo (heavily inspired by Microsoft's OLE2)

This very obviously is an extension of wrong-minded approach to managing content online. The future is in client-side transformations and page construction, lightening the load on servers (so anyone can run one) and making caching mechanisms more effective. XSLT is one method of doing this. Mozilla is working on TransforMiiX, Internet Explorer has MSXML, and Galeon uses Daniel Veillard's excellent libxslt for transforming stuff on the client-side. Using the document() function lets any XSLT stylesheet basically get parts of the complete page from all over the web and compile them into one document on the client side. Doing this work on the server side not only doesn't improve the oh-so-basic LAMP method of dynamic web service; it actually pins people down to a specific server capability that is rare, immature, and ultimately useless.

• The Nirvana Editor
  It may not be an MDI (multi document interface) like Visual C++, but then I like being able to pop up a xxgdb window and have three scrolling xterms of ouput from gcc's last runs rather than tabbing through a tiny window. Got better syntax highlighting too.
• Don't foget EMACS
  If you can't do it in EMACS, it probably can't be done (or is waiting for the Lisp to be written.)
• One acronym - CVS
  As professional who has worked on real program (i.e. real-time embeded OSes for cirtical system with more than a Megabyte of Z80 ASSEMBLER code in some files) I cannot begin to attest to the superiority of CVS (or even RCS) over Microsoft's $600 SourceSafe product for managing (or mangling) project documents.
• Bugzilla
  Decent bug tracking tools are hard to come by and this one has withstood the test of time (and the mozilla codebase). I don't know of anything equivalent shipped by Microsoft (or specifically for their OS).
• It's been mentioned already, but OpenGL works just as well on most Linux boxes as it does on MS Windows. I've written applets and games (for a University graphics class actually) that compile and run under both Windows and Linux.