Slashdot Mirror

http://www.mozilla.org/projec ts/seamonkey/milestones/

Jay (=

I'm so fed up with Slashdot mob mentality. Slashdot used to be a place where people put forth intelligent discussion, facts, or opinions. Now it just seems like everyone is just waiting to sound off and beat on *someone* (usually Katz )

All of you whining about how Mozilla isn't solid enough--have you actually used it? No, not just a download at M15, but as of last week? I've been using Mozilla for 4 months now. As a browser, it IS solid. Sure, it dies every once and a while, but that's not all that different from Netscape 4.x's stability, is it?

Download a nightly and try it out. Mozilla works great. Go download the PSM module and you have SSL. I use Mozilla for all my browsing (because I can't get 4.x to run--don't ask). It is a good browser, and it is nice to go to IE only sites and actually see the page render (try that in 4.x).

Whine and complain all you want. Be an idiot. But why don't you try and inform yourself a little and download and actually USE mozilla before you go running off at the mouth.

• Mozilla Nightlies
• PSM module (works in latest nightlies)
• mozillazine (stay informed)

Quit your whining. Use the latest builds. Report bugs. Geez, it's your community. Do something constructive.

1. Go to www.mozilla.org
2. Click 'Projects' on the left-hand nav bar.
3. Click 'SeaMonkey' under the browser components
4. Scroll down and click 'milestone plan' in the second section from the bottom.

I have to admit, it took me a while to be able to find the MS plan on purpose. . .

"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"

I believe NS6pre1 is a couple of months old at this point. The Mozilla browser has improved significantly since the release that was repackaged by Netscape. Try one of the nightly builds.

The following is what I posted to the WaSP mailing list:
---
Even being a rabid (frothing at times) web standards supporter, I don't like this.

Being heavily involved with the web, I have been following Mozilla extremely closely since the day Netscape released the code. I have downloaded and tinkered with the code, to help understand how things work, and to hopefully/eventually help them fix bugs.

As a software engineer I can say that a modern web browser is probably one of the most complex pieces of software. Period. This letter, and many of the postings on this list, make me feel that the WaSP is a group with many people who don't have enough understanding or appreciation for the complexity required to do what they ask.

A layout manager at the level of HTML 2 is a moderately hard programming task, but doable. HTML 4 is where it gets interesting, tables on their own would be difficult enough. The CSS box model adds a _/significant/_ amount of complexity. CSS2 makes this even harder. CSS2 scriptable via DOM (DHTML)? ECMAScript alone is a monumental undertaking. Dynamic reflow? Then start throwing PNG w. Alpha transparency in, Z-ordering, etc...creating solutions for all these things and rolling them together into one working piece of software...it IS monumental. And implementing it is the classic 10%/90% scenario...the devil is in the details, especially with things like CSS. It's hard enough for a someone to understand the bloody specs, let alone implement them.

The thing that gets me the most is....what do you think they are doing? do you think they are not trying? do you think they don't know that their market share is trickling away by the minute? do you think they aren't already aware that it's been years since 4? or that there browsers very existence very possibly may be on the line? Trust me....they know. If you follow closely you will realize that there is already /massive/ internal pressure on the developers face to get the thing going fast. And they are doing a fantastic job. I drag down a nightly build every couple days. The bugs are ticking away steadily.

The other factor is people. It's easy to say "well, you're this big company with all this money, throw more developers at it" Even forgetting the fact that "more doesn't always equal better, or faster", I don't care if you are AOL, Microsoft, IBM, or whoever...finding developers skilled enough to work with a task
that complex is next to impossible in this industry. This list probably has one of the highest levels of, say, CSS know how...how many people here could claim to have an understanding of /all/ of CSS? Not only do the people building it need to be expert web designers (which is enough for most people here to handle on it's own), but they have to be expert programmers as well. I am still grappling with understanding CSS2 and looking at the code, and thinking about how one would do some of the things the specs ask for...it scares me. I really respect what they have done. It's no coincidence that Mozilla rocks most the competition on their standards support, they really do have a Next Generation layout...and it's still in it's first iteration.

And who is the WaSP to make demands on /their/ timeline? I mean, for me, sure...I think it's all fine and dandy to say to the browser manufacturers "if you make a _web_ browser, please make it support _web_ standards, this is a community whose value is in interoperability, and we would like you to support that interoperability". But I draw the line before making demands on /their/ timeline. It's /their/ bloody product...they can take damn well as long as they want and WaSP can just bloody well wait. Being that it's /their/ product, they can also innovate however they want, and prioritize however they want - Netscape has been kind enough to publicly state that they have prioritized on standards. Be thankful Netscape is building a /free/ (as in speech) browser for you at all. And the free software community is very simple...if you want it done faster... help! (put your money where your mouth is), or at least show some bloody gratitude already.

I would like to take this opportunity to say to the people at Netscape and Mozilla. Thank you for seeing the error of your ways, and doing your best to deliver a standards compliant product. Thank you for what I see as a tremendous amount of effort over the last year to Do The Right Thing. Thank you for spending an enormous amount of resources building something you are /giving/ to the software community. Thank you for helping build and support an /open/ community around your offering so that I can see things progress, and help is whatever way I can. I appreciate it.

I use it for everything now. Most of the major bugs are worked out and only in occasional nightlies does something weird happen.

GO GET ONE YOURSELF - NIGHTLY BUILDS

--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess

Mozilla is open source. Mozilla will form the basis of Netscape 6, which will contain other non-Free code. The difference is easy to see; download the Netscape 6 Preview Release and then download M16. The difference is mostly packaging and marketing, but it's a clear insight into the future of Mozilla; Mozilla will always be a fully capable browser, but Netscape 6 is the preferred option for non-technical users.

--

Mozilla is open source. Mozilla will form the basis of Netscape 6, which will contain other non-Free code. The difference is easy to see; download the Netscape 6 Preview Release and then download M16. The difference is mostly packaging and marketing, but it's a clear insight into the future of Mozilla; Mozilla will always be a fully capable browser, but Netscape 6 is the preferred option for non-technical users.

--

That's what "dogfood" bugs are. Bugs that the developers find themselves from using it themselves.

From the bugzilla keyword definition page,

"... a bug nominated as a blocker to using the product as dogfood. Dogfood is the ability for internal Netscape development to use the Seamonkey product for daily use. The Product Delivery Team at internal Netscape reviews these bugs daily for a PDT+ (approval for immediate fix}, or PDT- (non-urgent keyword addition)."

That's what Bugzilla is all about. The problem with making any large program are the number of interactions that take place. Time spent adding these features is time that can't be spent hunting for bugs unless OTHER people are helping to find and document those bugs. Remember, you don't have to be a programmer to help contribute!

No, he means GPG (aka GnuPG, the GNU Privacy Guard), a GPL'ed, open source alternative for PGP which does not use patented algorithims.

The Mozilla Crypto FAQ has a little bit of information on encryption and the News/Email client.

I'd tell the iCab people to change their program, as it seems to have some erroneus ideas about table width elements.

(From http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd .html#Length)

[!ENTITY % Length "CDATA" -- nn for pixels or nn% for percentage length --]

(From http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html)

"This attribute specifies the desired width of the entire table and is intended for visual user agents. When the value is a percentage value, the value is relative to the user agent's available horizontal space. In the absence of any width specification, table width is determined by the user agent. "

(See also HTML 4.x types defintion for length which also lists pixels or percentage.)

So IE and Gecko's engines seem to assume for the nested inner table that 100% means the maximum width allocateable, because they fail to limit the region available to the inner table from the outer table (which is set to 99% of the user window).

This, despite the fact that the W3C people provide a page about calculation of column width for tables. Including how to handle margins with table widths (which Mozilla gets wrong, and is targetted to be fixed in "future").
---

mk_add_options MOZ_CVS_FLAGS="-q -z 9"
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-strip-libs
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews

How to build it:

cd ~
mkdir mozilla
cd mozilla
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org: /cvsroot
cvs co mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla
make -f client.mk pull_and_build_all

So, was this project REALLY necessary?

I've just recently updated my web page (http://www.wpi.edu/~dpotter/, /. it and die as I'll lose my account) to support both IE, Netscape 4, and Mozilla through use of Javascript. Disable Javascript, though, and it won't work. I have to use Javascript to detect the browser version and then route around incompatibilities in both browsers. (Look at the .css file and you'll notice that I've copied a basic style rule to many elements because Netscape 4 doesn't follow the inheritance rule properly - very annoying.)

At one point, I was ready to throw in the towel with the XML web page and just say "IE only" but I can't because the company I work for uses Netscape 4.73 as their standard browser! (And, BTW, so does the armed forces :).) It's now being designed by someone else though (probably a good thing), and I think he's just using very basic HTML.

At one point, I was ready to write my own browser to properly support CSS. In fact, I am writing my own parser/renderer to support CSS2 - it's not available anywhere yet, but it's in Java (for now, maybe in C++ later), and when it's ready (it's really, REALLY, in early stages right now), I'll release it under the GPL (sorry BSD fans :)). It's very, VERY annoying to try and create a web page that utilizes the features specified in standards at least two years old, just to find that nobody actually supports them.

On that note, Mozilla's HTML/CSS support looks very, very nice, and I can't wait for Mozilla to be ready for prime-time. Keep up the good work, Mozilla! Submit bugs to help them!

I've just recently updated my web page (http://www.wpi.edu/~dpotter/, /. it and die as I'll lose my account) to support both IE, Netscape 4, and Mozilla through use of Javascript. Disable Javascript, though, and it won't work. I have to use Javascript to detect the browser version and then route around incompatibilities in both browsers. (Look at the .css file and you'll notice that I've copied a basic style rule to many elements because Netscape 4 doesn't follow the inheritance rule properly - very annoying.)

At one point, I was ready to throw in the towel with the XML web page and just say "IE only" but I can't because the company I work for uses Netscape 4.73 as their standard browser! (And, BTW, so does the armed forces :).) It's now being designed by someone else though (probably a good thing), and I think he's just using very basic HTML.

At one point, I was ready to write my own browser to properly support CSS. In fact, I am writing my own parser/renderer to support CSS2 - it's not available anywhere yet, but it's in Java (for now, maybe in C++ later), and when it's ready (it's really, REALLY, in early stages right now), I'll release it under the GPL (sorry BSD fans :)). It's very, VERY annoying to try and create a web page that utilizes the features specified in standards at least two years old, just to find that nobody actually supports them.

On that note, Mozilla's HTML/CSS support looks very, very nice, and I can't wait for Mozilla to be ready for prime-time. Keep up the good work, Mozilla! Submit bugs to help them!

If I could help them I would but it's way out of my league unfortunately. I wish them luck, and hope they release it before its too late.

The truth is that even if you aren't a hardcore C++ coder and can't help on the front lines, there are still a lot of supporting areas that can use your help. Quality Assurance is the main one. We are a bit short handed becuase people still think that helping Mozilla is out of their league. You should go to MozillaZine and look at joining BugDay on Tuesday evenings (EDT). Asa Dotzler at Mozilla.org hosts these and you don't even have to have an IRC client. There is a Java IRC client available right on the MozillaZine web page.

On BugDay, you will learn how you can help build testcases for reproducing bugs, helping to verify bugs, and helping to assign bug reports to the correct contact. If you want to get more involved, there are even daily smoketests that are run to make sure that the previous day's code check-ins didn't break normal usage of the browser. All of these things leave more time for the programmers to code and fix bugs, not deal with bug management. Please read the Mozilla Browser QA page for more details on how you can help out.

I, too, got tired of waiting for the final Mozilla release, so I decided to help out to help out. I think that if each person that feels like I do makes some effort, Mozilla is only going to be a better product and available sooner than if I sat on my ass.

I use mozilla every day, but my employer has 'standardized' on IE. Normally, this would be something that I could shrug-off, since mozilla displays everything correctly that I can throw at it. Unfortunately, intranet documents are being mounted on NT servers configured to use the "NTLM" authentication method, which neither mozilla or netscape classic can do...so I can't even get to the documents. Trying to get the web administrators to use another authentication method is like pulling healthy teeth. "Why should we? We've standardized on IE!" There is a bugzilla report about this, and it seems close to being resolved...so there's hope I guess.

I personally believe that the best way to help mozilla is to use it daily. Report bugs when you can, and try hanging out in #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org on a regular basis. #mozillazine is a really good way to get started, although if you want to code #mozilla can be more educational.

Joseph Elwell.

User Interface Markup Language is a device independent way of creating interfaces. For instance, UIML intefaces would display as well on a Palm as a desktop. XUL (Extendable User-interface Language) for Mozilla is another effort. Orbeon is working on a project called Albatross which is to be a GUI for all browsers. Thanks to the folks at ShouldExis t for these links.

Right now, when I think of the dream mac OSS initiative, it would be an open source alternative to Photoshop which would eventually surpass the quality of Adobe's program.

Why Photoshop? It's expensive, true, but the features and stability are excellent. Plus, it's my impression that free projects work best when they're building software that developers build and understand. That's why the GIMP isn't competitive for print work and why nobody working on it or using it cares. To my mind, the graphics professionals using Photoshop on Macs aren't going to start messing with some new toy and aren't going to give developers the feedback to make something really useful.

I'd say the number one priority should be a free web browser. Fortunately, there already is one in progress. The Mac version is really lagging, though. It needs lots of help from testers and developers.

Moderators, please forgive me for veering offtopic, but this lad needs to be enlightened.

There are several alternative browsers on the market. They're all maturing slowly and some have even got features that Exploder doesn't already, despite Micro$oft's corporate feature bloating.

Konquerer, part of the KDE Project, is another good example of an underdog browser that's starting to take hold in the market. It's support for standards which make a viable browser are almost unmatched at the moment (in the alternative browser market).

Xemacs has a Browser called W3. It supports the majority of standards that make a viable Browser, and is written in Elisp, thus compatible with the Xemacs editor.

Of course, we can't forget Mozilla. It's the open-source version of Netscape 5. Probably the best browser out at the moment aside from Exploder/Win32, it runs on many platforms and is the most likely browser to take over the Exploder market share. It already enjoys a large market share in the UNIX world, just under that of Netscape 4.x. This thing supports nearly everything, including Alpha channels. Watch out for it.

Like, if I request a URL from www.flibbertygibbit.com, can't the browser be smart enough not to request further resources from, say, ad.doubleclick.net (but be smart enough to request resources from pix.flibbertygibbit.com)?

Yes; the trouble is that many sites have offsite images load from a perfectly normal and harmless third-party server. Akamai is the best example; companies from Altavista to Apple to Andover store their graphics on Akamai's distributed servers for faster load times. If you prohibit all third-party graphics, you prevent these graphics from loading, thus breaking many pages.

Wasn't this capability in Mozilla until recently? How hard is it to put back in?

Yes, it was; see this older slashdot story for details. The good news is that Mozilla retains the capability to block off-site cookies, which doesn't totally eliminate the web bug problem but does take a huge bite out of it (along with the whole DoubleClick-privacy problem in general).

Personally I suspect that the offsite image problem could be 99% solved with a little special-casing and some creative DNS work. But I don't know that for certain.

The bottom line is that, because of this one incredibly simple feature, Mozilla is currently the most privacy-friendly off-the-shelf browser that I know of. Of course, if you are really concerned about privacy, you could try add-ons like Junkbusters or IDcide.

Jamie McCarthy

Mozilla currently has a preference setting for loading only images that come from the same domain as the page, as well as a "Warn me before loading an image" option. This is by analogy with its cookie-handling. It should be possible to defeat "bugs" using either this feature or a more convenient adaptation of it.

Presumably, this feature will appear in Netscape 6 and the AOL client, but you never know what marketing will object to...

Is this supported or hackable into mozilla?

I don't think it's supported yet - bugzilla bug 29346. not exactly what you're asking for, but pretty similar and with the same intent (not get trapped by annoying sites). you might post on that bug (or make a new bug) the idea of limiting redirects in addition to limiting popup windows.

All my votes are spoken for, sorry. And I'm not familiar enough with how LDAP works to implement it.

But if anybody's interested, the bug report is here. You can also see the full list of LDAP-related bugs and feature requests here

All my votes are spoken for, sorry. And I'm not familiar enough with how LDAP works to implement it.

But if anybody's interested, the bug report is here. You can also see the full list of LDAP-related bugs and feature requests here

Well, at least IMAP works properly in M16 now.

If you want to see LDAP support fleshed out in Mozilla, go submit a bug and/or vote for it in Bugzilla. Or, better yet, implement it yourself. :-)

M17 schedule: I checked the Mozilla milestones page on Sunday before beginning the article and again Monday morning (3am PDT) just before submitting it; it claimed M17 would branch yesterday (26 June) and be on the wire today, and in fact it still says that--although there's now a red comment at the top (dated 27 May 1999!) that M17 won't be out for another couple of weeks. As a side note, I submitted the article with the following comment:

Well, supposedly M17 branches later today and hits the wire tomorrow (ha!)

Unfortunately, it seems that both Jamie and I believed the other person was more informed about the true release date than we actually were. I apologize for the screwup.

Background: Back in April, around the time of the M15 posting, I commented to Jamie about the recent progress in PNG alpha support in browsers and the, shall we say, somewhat uneven accuracy of /. comments w.r.t. PNG and MNG features. He suggested I write something up for the next milestone, and I agreed to do that. Unfortunately, M16 showed up while I was on an extended business trip, so I wrote the article for M17 instead. I assumed it would be posted when M17 actually hit the wire, but it seems we were a bit premature. Oops...

Browsers and alpha support: As other comments have noted, OmniWeb and CscHTML also support full alpha blending, and Webster XL has not been abandoned--it's still under development. I've requested and/or have received screen shots for all three and will post them soon. On the other hand, I've been informed that Konqueror supports only binary (GIF-style) transparency, not full alpha blending. If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know. (I've downloaded a recent binary but am still missing a sufficiently recent libstdc++, I believe.)

Updated article: a corrected version of this article will be permanently available at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/slas hpng-2000.html. (The page is already there, but I haven't had time to update it yet.)

Hemos: I'm not Hemos, but I play one on TV.

Greg

I did a little digging on Mozilla.Org. I checked the tree status and it was "Closed" but not "Closed for M17". I checked the milestone plan and the planned date for M17 to be on the wire is today's date, which is obviously wrong. If you look at the top of that page, though, there is a note (with a really screwed up date) that says that M17 will be out in at least two weeks, no sooner. Now, this info is suspect since the date is actually for a year ago, but it wasn't there before so my guess is that the date is a fat-finger error.

On a side rant, I agree with the original poster (christophercook) here. People need to get their heads out of their asses and check to see that their "M17" download came out of the "nightly" directory and not the "milestone" directory. Duh?

I did a little digging on Mozilla.Org. I checked the tree status and it was "Closed" but not "Closed for M17". I checked the milestone plan and the planned date for M17 to be on the wire is today's date, which is obviously wrong. If you look at the top of that page, though, there is a note (with a really screwed up date) that says that M17 will be out in at least two weeks, no sooner. Now, this info is suspect since the date is actually for a year ago, but it wasn't there before so my guess is that the date is a fat-finger error.

On a side rant, I agree with the original poster (christophercook) here. People need to get their heads out of their asses and check to see that their "M17" download came out of the "nightly" directory and not the "milestone" directory. Duh?

I did a little digging on Mozilla.Org. I checked the tree status and it was "Closed" but not "Closed for M17". I checked the milestone plan and the planned date for M17 to be on the wire is today's date, which is obviously wrong. If you look at the top of that page, though, there is a note (with a really screwed up date) that says that M17 will be out in at least two weeks, no sooner. Now, this info is suspect since the date is actually for a year ago, but it wasn't there before so my guess is that the date is a fat-finger error.

On a side rant, I agree with the original poster (christophercook) here. People need to get their heads out of their asses and check to see that their "M17" download came out of the "nightly" directory and not the "milestone" directory. Duh?

I understand that M17 doesn't appear to be out yet, but blame mozilla.org not slashdot.

The milestone plan is maintained here

If you look at it, you'll see that they have filled in the "on the wire" box, which appears to be an "actual" not a "schedule", because it's only filled in for past milestones and the dates appear (at first glance) to match the actual release dates.

If mozilla doesn't want people to shoot off "mozilla M17 out today" then they need to keep this page accurate and current (or get rid of it).

On the other hand, the M17 open bug and engineering task list is here.

It lists 1073 bugs and tasks. So is M17 coming out later today or is it going to be 6 weeks away? This gives me the impression that mozilla.org is confused and doesn't have it's shit together on the communication side.

I understand that M17 doesn't appear to be out yet, but blame mozilla.org not slashdot.

The milestone plan is maintained here

If you look at it, you'll see that they have filled in the "on the wire" box, which appears to be an "actual" not a "schedule", because it's only filled in for past milestones and the dates appear (at first glance) to match the actual release dates.

If mozilla doesn't want people to shoot off "mozilla M17 out today" then they need to keep this page accurate and current (or get rid of it).

On the other hand, the M17 open bug and engineering task list is here.

It lists 1073 bugs and tasks. So is M17 coming out later today or is it going to be 6 weeks away? This gives me the impression that mozilla.org is confused and doesn't have it's shit together on the communication side.

Anyone else notice just how good IE 5 for mac is? (as opposed to Netscape 4 and IE 5 for PC)

Or, as opposed to Netscape on the Mac. I agree -- IE 5 on the Mac is really sweet. I'm still sticking with Netscape out of habit and because it's what I use at home in Linux, but I'm definitely making a sacrifice by doing that.

Meanwhile, MacOS Mozilla M16 is barely usable. I tried it out, reported all the bugs I could find (lots of Mac-specific ones) and went back to Netscape. It's a pity -- Mac users are certainly a group that's receptive to using a non-Microsoft product but they'll never accept such a clunky UI.

Support my favorite Bugzilla report!

So very, very simple... But wait! It does say so:

http://www.mozilla.org/projec ts/seamonkey/milestones/

Apparently Mozilla's milestones page is not to be trusted, even when the second and third date columns are filled in. Sorry for the false alarm, but I did say "supposedly" when I submitted the story yesterday at 3am PDT.

Yeah, it's a shame. I hear people mention this all the time about Mozilla, and it has some merit.

I just wish they'd release the source code so someone, somewhere, could do something about it. Wouldn't that be nice?

XPCOM is a very simple framework that lacks lots of the glue that COM provides. I would assume COM+ provides even more. So while XPCOM might be a good starting point, it doesn't really compare to a COM or COM+ framework (yet).

From a mozilla document:


COM -- Isn't that a scary Microsoft thing?

No on both counts, actually. COM has its origins in Apollo's NCS system, and was later developed by Digital and Microsoft as part of their OLE/ActiveX architecture. We use a very small subset of COM that we call "XPCOM" ("XP" stands for cross-platform) for the new Plugin API that is essentially a method of using abstract base classes, and 3 simple but powerful methods:

QueryInterface: Deals with interface versioning by using universally unique interface IDs.

AddRef and Release: Deal with reference counting the object so that the system knows when it can deallocate it.

That's it. Using XPCOM in the plugin context is really quite simple. We don't make use of any of the COM factory constructor mechanisms, object aggregation, OLE interfaces, or the registry to find and load components. Plugin DLLs are still searched for and loaded by Mozilla from the plugin directories where they've always been found.

This is too easy, use XPCOM - it stands for Cross-Platform COM (Component Object Model) XPCOM Documentation. XPCOM is binary compatible with COM, and uses XPIDL - Cross platform Interface Definition Language. XPCOM is everything COM is plus Cross Platform. Don't let anyone tell you to forget about anything like COM for Linux! Mozilla uses (created) XPCOM and is used on all sorts of Unic variants - and the same component can be used on any computing system that the core XPCOM architecture has been ported to. Currently this consists of the main computing platforms - Mac, Windows, Unix and possibly OS/2, Be and others I don't keep track of.
Joseph Elwell.

What I'd like to see is an ISP that promotes itself by offering an ad blocking service (using something such as the Junkbuster proxy as these ads are very irritating to those on slow connections, however I never block ads myself as I understand how many sites would not be able to operate without the income these generate, but if I was on a modem then I'd see things differently particularly if I was paying call charges.

I'd also like to see a feature where Mozilla could automatically download a blocklist from a user specified central server periodically. This would be for blocking ad images and perhaps cookies and not websites. This feature would havew to be switched on by the user and they could select the server they trust to maintain the blocklist (or companies and organisations could maintain their own).
--

What I'd like to see is an ISP that promotes itself by offering an ad blocking service (using something such as the Junkbuster proxy as these ads are very irritating to those on slow connections, however I never block ads myself as I understand how many sites would not be able to operate without the income these generate, but if I was on a modem then I'd see things differently particularly if I was paying call charges.

I'd also like to see a feature where Mozilla could automatically download a blocklist from a user specified central server periodically. This would be for blocking ad images and perhaps cookies and not websites. This feature would havew to be switched on by the user and they could select the server they trust to maintain the blocklist (or companies and organisations could maintain their own).
--

If you want to filter banner ads out a simple way to do it with most browsers is to use the Internet Junkbuster filtering proxy, or if you're using a fairly recent release of Mozilla you can use their image manager (Edit | Advanced | Cookies and Images or Tasks | Privacy | Image Manager) which lets you specify hosts that you'd rather not display images (such as ads.doubleclick.net), or you can only allow images that appear from the site you're viewing or you can selectively allow images by means of an interactive dialog (a similar management system applies for cookies). Hopefully the image manager will be included with the next release of Netscape 6 as it's a useful ad blocking feature.
--

big business can innovate and often does a damn better job than what comes out of somebody's garage

Yes, Bill Gates put it best:

"The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft."

After all, who would spend THREE WHOLE MAN YEARS developing software. Free software could never put that much work into programming, bug finding, or documenting, and distributing for free hobbyist (free) software.

Everybody remember when Wang tried to use their 1988-issued videotex patent to get royalties on web browsers in 1998? No? Look here for the Mozilla.org description of the lawsuit, here for the patent, and here for the Mozilla.org description of its dismissal.

Now, it says that BT is going to go after ISPs on this. Well, AOL (including Netscape) is the biggest one around, and the Netscape lawyers were sent tons of prior art during the Wang case. I rather doubt BT is going to have a chance on this...

Steven E. Ehrbar

Everybody remember when Wang tried to use their 1988-issued videotex patent to get royalties on web browsers in 1998? No? Look here for the Mozilla.org description of the lawsuit, here for the patent, and here for the Mozilla.org description of its dismissal.

Now, it says that BT is going to go after ISPs on this. Well, AOL (including Netscape) is the biggest one around, and the Netscape lawyers were sent tons of prior art during the Wang case. I rather doubt BT is going to have a chance on this...

Steven E. Ehrbar

... if you combine it with CSS.

All the replies here seem to say that not only do all browsers render HTML differently, but that's how it should be. However, that's not the case when CSS accompanies a document - in fact, it's just the opposite. CSS performs all the page-layout and style description that HTML wasn't meant to do. Also, there are specific standards for how HTML+CSS is meant to be graphically rendered; check the various test suites available at http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/te stcases/css/. (Yes, I know that different browsers have different levels of CSS conformance, but that's to do with buggy and incomplete implementations, and nothing to do with lack of clarity or general unsuitability of the standard. There's only one released browser that has full CSS1 apparently, and that's IE for Mac.)

Please bear this in mind when reading the other posts in this thread regarding graphic designers, especially those that suggest that we need a completely new format. We don't. We just need proper implementation of an existing one.

This works also in practise. But we still need to see first fully-compliant HTML/CSS user agent. Mozilla could be it after 8000 bug fixes.
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I agree with you on this point. Sheeple that will accept whatever crap a business peddles make far better customers than those who aren't willing to be fucked around and will demand the quality that they deserve. Just ask Micros~1.

Customers do not "accept whatever crap a business peddles." If a site is hard to use, does not provide sufficient content, or otherwise does not meet the consumer's needs they *will* and *do* go elsewhere. Calling the vast majority of users "sheeple" is at best, pompous. I have used more browsers than I can count, and because it is faster, more stable, and complies better with standards than other browsers I choose to use IE -- as does the majority of web users -- am I one of these "sheeple"?

Is someone among these "sheeple" if they don't *care* about the browser? Why *should* they have to care about the browser? It is just a tool. The only important factor is how well it does its job.

The fact which you have refused to address repeatedly is that things like images, CSS and JavaScript are VERY powerful tools to improve usability, readability, and performance of web based applications and information.

Simple features like color can be powerful tools for making information easier to analyze and absorb. Witness SourceForge's bug database which uses the background color of a table row to denote the severity of a bug. A quick glance gives you a pretty good idea of the shape that the project is in: A lot of red indicates that the code is riddled with severe bugs... Layout is even more important.

And of course, branding is imporant to any company that wishes to survive. Customers (and that means companies as well as individuals) wont use a service if they forget it exists. This apparently matters even among techno-savvy users -- witness the success of RedHat versus other distributions.

IME customers go both ways - perhaps yours want whizz-bang graphics that explode off the page at them.

You have repeatedly tried to set up the abuse of capabilities as a straw man to distract from the real argument. I reject this argument. That's like saying "drunk drivers kill lots of people, so cars should not be used!"

The real argument here is about standards and progress. You apparently do not see new and evolving standards as being progress. Therefore your opinion is that web developers should not use them. You might as well complain that you can't access all these web sites using Gopher.

I see new and evolving standards as a means to deliver a better service. If I develop a web based application, things like JavaScript provide me with a way to deliver a user interface to the application that does not go against 20+ years of usability research and information theory. I can provide information in a cleaner, simpler visual layout and put more functionality on the page with a simpler appearance. Not only that, I can make the performance of the application FASTER for my users: Why should search results be sorted on the server? Why not have the client-side sort the results of a search instead of having to open a connection to the server, make a request, have the server sort the results, and then send the entire page back for the browser to re-render.

When I was teaching a course on browsing the web with Netscape, most of the newbie-students I was teaching were overwhelmed by how loud many of the pages were. ("It's so busy" were one's exact words.)

That is an example of poor usability. The abuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.

As for hardware, running Netscape 4.0 on a P120/16MB is a painful experience.

Buy a better computer. A $400 eMachine has a 500Mhz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and 4.3GB HD. It also comes with Windows, and thus IE which as I pointed out before, is more compliant with standards than Netscape 4.x -- not to mention that IE runs very well on such a computer. You can get an equally good machine used for much less.

Netscape 6 is miserable. Opera is bearable but costs money. None of them are open source, and if it was my decision my Win95 install would be on the losing end of a HD reformat. I am far happier with lynx and w3m.

Since when is Netscape 6 not Open Source? And yes, performance sucks right now -- it's in *beta* and has all sorts of debugging code in it. By the time it's released it will not only comply with standards better than any browser out, it will be vastly faster than almost any other browser.

If you are happy with Lynx, then fine. Use it. But don't complain about web developers using *industry accepted* standards that you have consciously chosen to ignore.

-JF

The bugzilla report is here.
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Zardoz has spoken!

Resource Description Framework (RDF) and some Perl/PHP/scripting language of choice to represent a sitemap. You can autogenerate the RDF file via a script and plug it right into anything you want. You can also use this for a mozilla sidebar panel to have a tree navigation view of your site.

Links:

• W3 Resource Description Framework (lots of links in here)
• XUL <template> reference (For mozilla sidebars and such, will give you an idea on how to create a sitemap via Perl/PHP/Whatever

Intel's been helping with Mozilla for a long while now. For instance, look at all the bugs that have been assigned on Bugzilla to people with @intel.com addresses. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Intel also had people working on other open source projects.

They have to be working with the source with this type of box, or as some people have pointed out, the living room box just wouldn't be stable enough. Perhaps we should stop thinking of Intel as a hardware company...their marketing mantra of "building blocks of the internet" includes software too.

-Merlyn42