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Actually, the default security on NT 4.0 is loose because they need to account for braindead Windows 95 programs that think they can write all over the filesystem and the registry.

Win2000 supposedly fixes this by being tight enough to refuse to run poorly written Win95 programs when running as a member of the "Users" group. Unfortunately, certain popular programs (errh, Office 97) won't run for "Users".

Even today, software is being developed that is not compatible with NT's multi-user security model (ERRRHHMM, Mozilla -- go vote for bug 6464), even when a Unix port is designed correctly.

So, it looks like that NT Admins will need to go on granting local "Power User" or "Administrator" authority to their users, negating any security advantages of NT's design.
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I hope they're planning to Aqua-ize the interface, or at least provide it as an option. The current preview is being ripped to shreds on all the Mac forums I read as ugly, nonintuitive, and just plain broken, especially in the design of the dialogs. Unfortunately, I doubt that submitting thousands of "it's not Mac-like enough" bugs to Bugzilla would necessarily help things.

However, if work keeps progressing on Fizzilla or the Rhapsody Yellow Box ports...sweeeeet.

I hope they're planning to Aqua-ize the interface, or at least provide it as an option. The current preview is being ripped to shreds on all the Mac forums I read as ugly, nonintuitive, and just plain broken, especially in the design of the dialogs. Unfortunately, I doubt that submitting thousands of "it's not Mac-like enough" bugs to Bugzilla would necessarily help things.

However, if work keeps progressing on Fizzilla or the Rhapsody Yellow Box ports...sweeeeet.

Another non-Netscape Mozilla development... this is looking into the use of W3C RDF for logic/inference applications (eg. client-side decision support tools). See the Mozilla Enabling Inference pages for details, and Geoff Chappell's Mozillation announcement on the RDF Interest Group.

DARPA's RDF-related Agent language might also be of interest to /. conspiracy theorists... ;-)

Good luck... integrating CVS with any bug tracking system is going to be a bit difficult.

Greg Gallagher

Good luck... integrating CVS with any bug tracking system is going to be a bit difficult.

Greg Gallagher

"Their server is not letting bug reports in." I don't even know where to start. Well, I guess I can start with "it's been open for nearly two years." At any point during that time, you could have submitted that bug. I'll follow up with: Since you never submitted the bug, how the heck do you expect it to get fixed? Those things don't just happen on their own, you know. You can't just download a beta product and expect things to magically be fixed. Finally, I'll just say you are full of it- all of these bugs have been submitted to day. Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking that maybe bugzilla is open and you've just been too lazy to find this page. Now go, run along, and put your money where your wide mouth is. P.S. Sorry to go off, but it's not just you- there are about 10 million complaints here (some good, most not so good) of people who just expect good, free, software to magically appear in front of them without investing any of their own energy.

"Their server is not letting bug reports in." I don't even know where to start. Well, I guess I can start with "it's been open for nearly two years." At any point during that time, you could have submitted that bug. I'll follow up with: Since you never submitted the bug, how the heck do you expect it to get fixed? Those things don't just happen on their own, you know. You can't just download a beta product and expect things to magically be fixed. Finally, I'll just say you are full of it- all of these bugs have been submitted to day. Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking that maybe bugzilla is open and you've just been too lazy to find this page. Now go, run along, and put your money where your wide mouth is. P.S. Sorry to go off, but it's not just you- there are about 10 million complaints here (some good, most not so good) of people who just expect good, free, software to magically appear in front of them without investing any of their own energy.

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Ah, there is a simplified bug reporting page:
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/he lp/bug-form.html

That's extremely useful.

Ok, both bugs reported. Thanks for the encouragement.

(I wish I could post with M14)

Don't need Java, AIM, Flash or Net2Phone? Then grab ftp://ftp.mozilla. org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozilla-win32-nb1b. zip instead, it's only 5MB. It is the very latest build of the stabilized Netscape beta branch, compiled on April 4. The official Netscape6 PR1 release uses an Mozilla engine that is already several weeks old.

Note that the Mozilla site doesn't currently offer daily Linux Netscape beta branch builds, only the normal experimental/milestone daily builds.

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Even better....go to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/. There's a whole tracking system for reporting bugs on the browser, built with Open Source tools!

I've used it myself -- it's not easy easy (like the Talkback for the Windows browsers) but it's complete, and you can not just report, but also track the bug as it gets fixed.

They don't just want you to use it, the developers ENCOURAGE you to reports bugs. That's what the nightly, M-series, and Preview releases are for...to do something proactive about bugs before the final version is out.

Everyone grips about bugs. With Bugzilla, you can DO something about them. Isn't that the Open source way?

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

The codebase was taken from Netscape on March 31, 1998. People struggled with the old code for months trying to achieve the desired results. On October 26, 1998, Brendan Eich announced that the old code would be mothballed and development would proceed with a completely new architecture. I'm not an expert on the Mozilla codebase, but my impression that most of the code has been replaced, and very little remains of the original Netscape 5.0 codebase.

The new layout engine (Gecko), the cross-platform component system (XPCOM), the cross-platform front-end toolkit (XPFE), the HTML editor (Ender), the new networking library (Necko) and the mail/news components are all new code that comprises a huge chunk of Mozilla. (And that's not all of the new code!) Calling the new release "Netscape 6.0" was clearly a marketing decision, but it's not totally unreasonable given the extent of changes since the first developer's release of Netscape 5.0...

I'd say Mozilla has come a long way. In just a year and a half, the browser has been almost completely rewritten to be cross-platform and standards-compliant like no other browser. That's quite an accomplishment, whether or not a final release is imminent.

FreBe(er) would be more tasty if it was served with BeZilla. If I may pander, this is a good example of Open Source's benefits. A few thousand more people using Be with a handful of developers among them could really help this project out -- it looks like they need it!

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FreBe(er) would be more tasty if it was served with BeZilla. If I may pander, this is a good example of Open Source's benefits. A few thousand more people using Be with a handful of developers among them could really help this project out -- it looks like they need it!

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Check out the Palm theme for WinAmp, at the linked site (I had a link, but Mozilla crashed -- hey, a good excuse :-). There's also a MacOS X theme (pretty, my favorite actually).

For us Linux folks, they all work perfectly in XMMS too!

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http://www.mozilla.org/party/2000/flyer.html has details about the party celebrating the N6B1.

To all the hard working programers that have helped to build the lizard over the years: Thank You and have fun!
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If it's April 1st, it must be Quittin' Day...

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I was just looking at M14's release notes and I saw a section on Downloable Chrome. I went through my mozilla directories and found one called skin. Inside it another directory named default which has a lot of gifs in it. They were named after parts of the browser, such as back.gif, forward.gif, search.gif, etc. So I went and switched the back and forward ones, loaded up mozilla and now as I see them my back and forward buttons are switched. I didn't know mozilla could do skins! I am looking forward to seeing some nice ones that I can custimize my broswer with. Unlike IE or Netscape 4.72 which look the same all the time.

You completely misunderstood how Tinderbox works (the thing with the red and green columns). Red means that the build was failing at that point in time. It has nothing to do with the number of bugs outstanding, it just means that someone checked in something (it could be a single line) that wouldn't compile on that particular platform.

You can still view the current Tinderbox status for Mozilla at http://tinderbox.mozilla .org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=SeaMonkey.

The NPL (the particular MPL-based license used by Netscape for the Mozilla release) grants special rights to the initial developer (in the case of Mozilla, this is Netscape). Specifically: If you release modifications to NPL-covered code, Netscape can use your code in non-NPL products for up to two years following its release (after that, the normal requirements of the MPL apply to Netscape and to everyone else). In addition, Netscape can make their own modifications to NPL-covered code without these modifications falling under the NPL.

Read the licenses yourself if you want the details.

Note that the GPL was not really an option for the Netscape source release, as it is too restrictive to allow Netscape to base their browser on an open-source project while still fulfilling their contractual and legal obligations with regard to licensed, patented, or export-controlled code that is included in the final product. You may complain about some of the terms in the MPL/NPL, but remember that many of them were absolutely necessary for the Mozilla source release to take place.

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Terminology: In Mozilla-speak, chrome is a package which changes the XUL that defines the interface for Mozilla. Chrome changes not just the look but also the feel and even the functionality of the browser. Within just one chrome package, however, users will also be able to use skins, which in Mozilla refer to packages which simply change the look of the widgets.

The chrome that Mozilla has been using since around milestone 12 is chrome that was designed by Netscape for Communicator 6. Hence Communicator 6 will look much like M14.

Mozilla developers have assured us that the grey strip under the buttons will go away. (There's even a bugzilla entry for it.)

In any case, it is likely that once the skinnability support in mozilla has settled down, the open-source mozilla browser will begin using a distinct skin, separate from the netscape skin. The following was posted to netscape.public.mozilla.ui by Matthew Thomas:

...This would actually be of little relevance to Mozilla itself, were it not for the fact that Mozilla has been wearing Netscape's skin for the past few months. That's not really anyone's fault, it's just that the Mozilla chrome isn't properly skinnable yet -- it has a few too many hard-coded values, boxes with incorrect wrapping properties (so when the font is changed some of the text disappears off the edge of the window), and other problems like that. So maintaining multiple skins during this period of development, when a lot of the chrome was being fiddled around with to add features, would have been difficult.

But skinnability is also going to be fixed by Ben during the chrome cleanup after beta 1 (go, Ben!), and Mozilla will be able to start using its own default skin distinct from the one used in Netscape. And that, in my humble opinion, can't come a moment too soon.

For now, you can download new chrome to use with M14 or with the latest nightlies at mozillazine's chromeZone.

As the Mozilla site points out , this is will be a beta release of Netscape, not Mozilla. The two share the same code base. They differ in features, with Netscape targeted towards the 'end user' community and Mozilla targeted towards the 'developer community.'

The difference has to do with what is expected by developers verses what is expected from an end user product. Many Mozilla APIs are not finalized. Also, the Mozilla IRC client is not complete. Lacking an IRC client is of no concern relative the the Netscape product because it isn't included.

I like the arrangement because it shares the effort between both products, while avoiding the obvious conflicts between what AOL wants to put in front of their customers and what 'we' want to see in an Open Source browser.

well, you can have it NOW

Mozilla.org still has pages on its own site referring to the upcoming release (the one with the Gecko engine) as being version 5.0. Since they themselves weren't referring to the version they dumped as Netscape 5, your explanation is just an exercise in revisionist history. Everybody knows the real reason why it's version 6 -- to make it sound better than IE5 -- so please quit trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes on this.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

I'm apparently to look out for other such cases of error, but some at Netscape don't think that I should be able to view Netscape-confidential bugs, so that might get tricky.

We Shall See.

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We'll be hashing out a policy for security bugs on netscape.public.mozilla.security. Mike Shaver has already posted a proposal. We've never considered keeping the set of people that can see security bugs limited to Netscape, nor have we considered keeping the security bugs private indefinitely.

Note that security bugs that have been fixed are *already* available for anyone to view. This query shows all the security bugs I've fixed, which includes some exploits and some implementation bugs. The only issue revolves around bugs that are known, but not widely known, and not yet fixed and distributed.

One thing to keep in mind: In my experience, fixing security bugs isn't hard, it's finding the bugs in the first place. So we don't need a lot of eyes on the bug to get a fix. Instead we need a lot of eyes on the source to find security problems.

So if you'd like to help prove that open source increases security, come look for security bugs in mozilla. Mail me if you'd like to help.

(posted with mozilla)

One of the features most requested by web designers for Mozilla is true alpha channel support in PNGs. I personally was looking forward to this feature. Do you have any comments (possibly compelling reasons) now that mozilla has pretty much decided that won't make it in the final release?

See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_b ug.cgi?id=9594

Yeah, that's right. These folks are marketing an add-on for IE to give it something Netscape has (tried to) offer for years.

-Peter