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According to this article on MozillaZine you may be able to use Netscape's proprietary spell checker in Mozilla by installing the spell check XPI from Netscape 6.1.

Strange indeed.

http://www.mozillazine.org/

indicates it's off of the 0.9.2 branch and that's what the mozilla site said at one point.

Looks like conflicting info.

Mozilla is meant to be an application development platform, to be sure. However, XUL has not exactly been making waves, and basic issues like application packaging haven't been dealt with yet. It seems the current model is that every application using XUL needs to include its own XUL interpreteter, which is effectively almost a whole Mozilla distro. There doesn't seem to be any provision for a shared interpreter with small application packages.

Given the myriad of small interface bugs in Mozilla, which have recently been exciting comment on MozillaZine, one has to wonder whether XUL is a robust UI language. Bugs like text off the edge of the window should be easy to fix, but somehow they linger on build after build. It is unclear to me whether this is a technical or cultural issue, though.

XUL has also been significantly overpromised -- for instance, remote XUL is alternately either promised or denied depending on where you go at mozilla.org, but the real answer is that remote XUL is too much of a security risk, and would require a better downloading/caching story. Java remote UI software has largely solved the security problem, but it has a similar download problem.

Finally, the lack of any WYSIWYG editor for XUL means that it does not address the most serious problem in UI development, which is that designers who are not programmers should be able to create their own interfaces. The current model in which designers create specs and prototypes which are then implemented by programmers is expensive and unreliable. These two groups rarely get along well and the implementers rarely have any interest in understanding the design principles behind the specification. The result is that good design specifications often make terrible implemented interfaces, and do so at great cost. Breaking the dependence on the programmer is the best way to address the problem, and that can't be addressed by a system like XUL, which the W3C noted is an obscure mix of several different programming language paradigms.

Tim

Has an article on 0.9.2 with comments.

See Mozillazine update from May, 9:
http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/May2001_ buildbar_comments.html

--

Because of the hype that a few of the Mozilla developers put on talkback here on Slashdot and on MozillaZine, Mozilla has seen lots of recent improvements (see the bottom of this page). Now that 0.9.1 is out, the Drivers team at Mozilla will take a large bit of control over the management of submisssions for 0.9.2 in an effort to brush up the code in preparation for 1.0. It looks like we'll see 0.9.2 released after only two to three weeks (see this roadmap sneak-peek); half the current expected milestone lifetime. In addition, Netscape is being encouraged to take the next NS6 from the Mozilla branch this time, meaning that much of the Netscape team's work will be applicable to Mozilla.

Also of note, the Mozilla main page doesn't reflect the new milestone and the roadmap also fails to mention the release or the news about 0.9.2.

Because of the hype that a few of the Mozilla developers put on talkback here on Slashdot and on MozillaZine, Mozilla has seen lots of recent improvements (see the bottom of this page). Now that 0.9.1 is out, the Drivers team at Mozilla will take a large bit of control over the management of submisssions for 0.9.2 in an effort to brush up the code in preparation for 1.0. It looks like we'll see 0.9.2 released after only two to three weeks (see this roadmap sneak-peek); half the current expected milestone lifetime. In addition, Netscape is being encouraged to take the next NS6 from the Mozilla branch this time, meaning that much of the Netscape team's work will be applicable to Mozilla.

Also of note, the Mozilla main page doesn't reflect the new milestone and the roadmap also fails to mention the release or the news about 0.9.2.

Slashdot editors posted a comment which was clearly stolen from http://www.mozillazine.org It would be nice to see a little more integrity from the slashdot editorial staff. Checkin sources, reading referenced links, etc. would go a long way to improving the value this site brings to it's users and the Web in general.

--Asa

This is even better than Mozilla on Amiga.

The 0.9 branch is known as the performance branch (though more performance stuff is still being checked in) and to that end a lot of stuff has been rewritten for speed: For example, Mail/News now uses Outliner which has at least doubled the speed which I use to have using Mozilla Mail/News. Then there's PSM 2.0 which was totally rewritten from the ground up so that SSL pages are now blazzingly fast. ImageLib (LibPr0n) also was completely rewritten so that it renders images 2x as fast as it did before. This is not to say that this is the end of the performance fixes. In addition to the ones mentioned above, the latest nightlies have a very big speed increase loading pages (which was checked in right after 0.9 branched). In addition were working on getting the startup time down, with among other things the ability on (Winblows computers) to load Mozilla at Startup just as you would IE. bug 76004, (I know some people won't like this idea but some will, and you will have a choice) If you want to help out you can join the channel #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. We need Linux coders to help optimize the speed on Linux so that its just as fast as on Windows, were getting there but were still a bit behind. A while ago I stopped b*tching about Mozilla and its slowness and decided to get involved and I have found you can make a lot of difference if you do. Even if you can't devote lots of time to it, even filing bugs, helping sort and duplicate bugs or creating testcases for those bugs is sorely needed. If you have any questions feel free to email me or check out Mozillazine.

Of course, that's not to say that I don't like Mozilla. In fact, I make a point of downloading the nightly builds every day :)

PS For those Mozilla enthusiasts in the audience, you may find the daily build comments interesting. There, the page's author lists the various bugs that were fixed in the day's build.

Alex Bischoff
---

I would suggest watching http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/ and getting or not getting builds based on the excellent comments Asa puts up there.

I'm not sure why your text entry widget wasn't working; if you could file a bug report on it (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org) that would be great. The menu bug is a very recent regression and is being worked on.

try mozilla. it'll cure what ails you.

especially a nightly build.

http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/

Anything like this for Win32? It would be nice!

Sure: http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/

I run Debian/Linux, and use that "build bar" to decide when to upgrade. It should be fine for Win32 users as well.

At the pace the Mozilla project is going, 0.7 is going to be obselete in a week, so keep the link handy.

- Dr. Foo Barson

I've been playing around with nightly builds for the last few months and have been pretty impressed -- anyone still using Netscape 4.x should definitely upgrade.

For anyone interested in the nightly builds, Mozillazine publishes a page with nightly build comments so you can find out if there are any showstoppers -- http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/. This is also a good way to help out in the testing process, obviously...

please make sure the bugs also occur in a recent nightly build. Mozilla 0.7 branched about two weeks ago so your bug might have been fixed since then.

By the way, today's nightlies are pretty good - several recent regressions were fixed. Two new bugs in today's builds that weren't in 0.7: links on some pages are ignored and home page isn't displayed on startup under Win32 when using -console option.

You should also check the build notes to see if the nightly is stable or not.

The site doesn't do a good job of telling you WHAT to download (it just points you to the uber-confusing nightly download directory).

Here's what I know. The build comments page points you to a Linux, Mac and a Windows version. These all live in the same download directory from 12/6/2000.

Hope that helps people out.

Not only that, but it's clear they've been holding their heads low for a long time now. Take a look at the latest article posted to Mozillazine. Pathetic, childish drivel that'll put the average Slashdot Troll to shame.

And THESE are the people we'd trust with the future of online communications?

Anyway, to bring things back on topic. It's a wonder how much we know about dinosaurs to be exact fact? Who knows what future Earth-dwelling races will extrapolate from our remains?

This is cool. Now we even have trolls submitting stories. How can I mark the story as -1 flamebait?

MSIE is not open source, bad Microsoft, bad bad..

Mozilla is open source, bugs, bugs, bad, bad

Sometimes I think that nothing is good enough for some people. You're damned if you don't release your source code and you're damned if you develop your software openly giving full access to CVS.

Mozilla bashers should really look deep in the mirror. www.mozilla.org, www.mozillazine.org and especially bugzilla.mozilla.org contain everything you need to know about Mozilla. You can find out why the tarballs are big (several skins, debugging code), why the memory footprint is big (not optimized yet) and what bugs are still to be fixed (a lot). If you're lazy, stop by at #mozilla on IRC and ask. You'll get a fast answer, I guarantee you.

People, understand your responsibility. Go find out before climbing on a soap box and starting to complain. All this complaining about Mozilla crashing will hurt it's reputation. And Mozilla or Netscape is not to be blamed for it. Mozilla has been pre-alpha, alpha or beta all the time. Any programmer knows that it's still far away from a rock solid Mozilla 1.0.

However, I do use Mozilla more than Netscape now. I love Mozilla's speed on NT and how it renders correctly pages that the old Netscape can't even dream about. That's very nice for a beta-version, isn't it? Let's see how the memory footprint and stability is in another six months or a year.

The bottom line still is that Mozilla looks good. It has got a lot faster lately. It's getting better and better every week and when it's ready, it will be fabulous. I just hope that this Mozilla bashing won't give it a bad rep so that people won't even try the final product.

It's weird to see all this Mozilla bashing going on. Yes, it has taken a long time and yes, it's not read yet but how many of you Mozilla bashers have really given Mozilla a try? A good one instead of "it segfaulted at startup, so it sucks"?

Netscape PR3 won't be installed on my computer. Nope, I really don't need all the AOL stuff. That's why I have been downloading Mozilla daily builds and actually use them more than the old Netscape. And let me tell you, the latest builds have been impressive in both speed and stability.

So here's how you should do it. Go to Mozillazine and check the build bar there. Go read the comments and choose a nice build. That way you can actually choose not to download a bad build. If one of those crashes too much, delete your .mozilla-directory. Chances are you have an old one which is not necessarily compatible.

That's it. Oh, and don't only talk the talk. Walk the walk and submit bugs instead of just complaining about beta-versions.

Even though I won't buy Opera, it's nice to see some competition. I strongly suspect they will have a hard time with Mozilla, though.

There's always a few biased posts that completely praise the named product. In this case, mozilla.

I think this is really a Mozilla-only phenomenom. I'd say the ratio of pro/con is greater for this project than any other.

As for speed, if you read some of the old chats at MozillaZine, especially Mike Shaver's, you'll find that Mozilla will never be faster than Netscape 4.7. As Shaver himself said

when it comes down to how many CPU cycles are needed to display a given page, I don't think we can _ever_ get faster than 4.x

And as for stability, I've run both Moz and Galeon (using the embedded moz gtk widget) on a P133 and they are about 5X more unstable than Netscape overall.

Please define "kewl new features" in the Mozilla product.

There are, from an end-user POV, two new concepts in Mozilla (as opposed to Netscape 6, which is NOT what is being developed here -- things like AIM are added by Netscape directly):

1) The theming concept. As this entry at H2G2 point out, themes are a concequence of the development of cross-platform code. And it works. It works today -- there's a whole new app just developed by some outside dev folks, called Forumzilla, for one. Personally, yes, I think the skins are a "gimmie", but I also see why it's important to showcase the tech _today_.

2) The IRC client. All the IRC client is, and has been, is a simple wrapper for basic TCP/IP calls, which is all that IRC basically does. It's not a replacement for MIRC or BitchX or any of those. And it's important to the dev team, too: They chat on IRC all the time, and use their own client to do so.

Just wanted to hopefully clear that up.

----Woodrow

This was posted on mozillazine.org 3 days ago.

Anyways, I tested it with a nightly build and it brought my whole x down. I think they should make a version check and give you an error message if you try to run it with the wrong build.
You might also want to check out the latest mozilla nighlty which has now the new modern 2.0 skin, which i, amongst many others think is looks cool. This has also been posted before, but just in case you dont know...

Try here.. Example: the skin MozBilla, which makes Mozilla look like IE (which a nice Bill icon right up). Installing it is a matter of copying files somewhere in the Mozilla-tree and restart the program. See the README which is included. I haven't figured out yet how to run multiple skins on the fly.

http://www.mozillazine.org

Why am I bothering with this when M18 is already so much better? My wish: that Netscape gets their act together for PR3. This is one of the stupidest rollouts that I've seen (worse than PR1, even). Damnit, guys - the Mozilla product is so much better.

I recommend downloading an M18 build if you're looking for a better indication of where the product is at currently. The PR2 build doesn't do it justice, and I don't see that it has enough useful extras to recommend it.

I'd concur; I've played with M18 builds on my Win98 laptop and have been very satisfied. Except for some problems rendering radio buttons and associated text on the same line, M18 renders a website I work with far more cleanly.

I believe in the promise of Mozilla, and hope that the Netscape branding and customizing process doesn't bury the project.

They seem a lot better to me, and mozillazine agrees (There are quick links to M18 builds there too). Also, for me the Windows build is much much better for me than the Linux one. Most notably for rendering times.. on average Linux is 1.5-10 times slower at rendering pages for whatever reason. This is with XFree86 3.3.x since I haven't seen any distro that's confident enough to release XF4 to the masses.

XPI is mozilla's cross (X) Platform Installer. It uses a combination of zip files with javascript and RDF to keep track of what you have installed so you can easily add and remove pieces of the browser.

What uses XPI? Well, the win32 and linux installers use it to install the application. This means that if you don't want to install ChatZilla (which rocks by the way, full IRC client in a 400k install, IIRC) you don't have to. Same with mail/news. Even the PSM comes as an XPI. And skins? Skins are wrappable in XPI.

Want more information about XPI? There's a tutorial written by kerz at MozillaZine

Oh, and by the way, I use Moz full time, and so does most everybody else on #mozillazine (irc.mozilla.org)

--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess

Yet more FUD from the rumour mill and yet more misinformation from those who really haven't got a clue. Myth killing time.

Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be.

This must be why I'm using it. In fact this must be why I'm using a build labelled 25th July 2000. This must be the reason why it has replaced Netscape on my machine. And there still appears to be very active signs of life on the mailing lists, on the status pages and the steady reduction in '+' bugs.

Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.

This is a more interesting comment. Yes - the original code released from Netscape was hobbled, and eventually a near-complete restart was opted for. Often when a project gets too big for it's boots (i.e. Netscape 4.x) a rewrite is the only clean way to continue. It hurts, it takes time and there is a long period of absence while the core functionality gets moving but it does result in a better codebase in almost all cases - you learn from the mistakes of the previous generation of code.

The second part of this comment on the "unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants" is also intriguing. As far as I can see, the basic consumer wants a browser which works on all the pages in existence. Beyond that they want it to be stable, easy to use and reasonably straightforward to configure and integrate into their setup. I don't see any fundamental problems in the Mozilla approach - it aims for full standards compliance, it has a configurable interface so that it can be wrapped in as simple or as complex an interface as wished, and its configuration uses the same UI approach as most other programs out there. Yes - it would be nice to have had it two years ago to butress against MS IE 5.5 (Windows version - the Mac version is pretty standards compliant) with its foibles and 'reworking' of the HTML and CSS renderings, but sometimes life is like that.

Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight

Late? Possibly, although I never saw a timeline laid down for the completion of the project.

Fat? Certainly there is a lot of code, and it's memory requirements up until recently have been large, partly due to memory leaks. Things seem to have been getting better - the memory usage on this browser is at 33MB after several days of uptime, so I think there is still some way to go. But I am running the memory cache in there as well.

Ugly? You make not like the default appearance, but it is changeable. In fact it is a lot more than simply skinable - most of the GUI can be stripped, reimplemented and changed according to your whim. And there are signs of sanity on the GUI front too - the skins on Mozillazine are looking good, and there are drop in replacements to coax the GUI back towards the OS standard you might be used to (Classic -> Windows Netscape, Sullivan -> MacOS style UI).

No end in sight? Obviously someone not familiar with the Milestones for Mozilla. We're approaching Milestone 17. 19 is performance tuning, and 20 is, if I remember correctly, the first full v1.0 release. We may be quite a few months away from that (9+) but it's not quite the long unending tunnel...

Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster.

I see this one bandied around a lot. "They should have written just a browser". What often happens when you go for a code re-write (see above) is that the code gets a lot more modular. And so the Gecko engine (the rendering engine) is separable from the rest and yes, someone has already made a cut down browser-only version. It's called Galeon.

The other thing that bothers me is that the competition (i.e. MS) has built a platform too on Internet explorer. Quite frankly, if Mozilla had just been a browser we'd have had a bunch of whining suckers moaning about how Mozilla can't compete with IE because it is wasn't a platform. The idea of a portable broswer-integrated platform has not been missed by MS - they recognise the importance of it for building web applications and services. Having Mozilla available for most OS's under the Sun might go some way towards providing a base for a similar hegemony of applications on an open source base.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

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.

One beautiful example of a heavy-headed hypocricy is this:

If you fail now, the web will essentially belong to a single company.

This comes AFTER the WaSP (because no single author would take credit for this piece) suggests that Netscape withdraws its browser, had never started working on Mozilla, and should have never tried in the first place. They attribute the lack of support for Netscape products to its lack of standards compliance, NOT the fact that Microsoft used unlawful monopoly tactics to bully it out of the market.

Here is a nicely written counter-attack by Chris Nelson, which gives some very interesting counter points. Don't let the WaSP get you down Mozilla, just keep on rolling.
---

This seemed to be missing from the article:
http://www.mozillazine.org/art icles/article1524.html

Oh, completely! But that was 4.x and before- Mozilla is standards compliant to the point of breaking pages that 4.x and IE render just fine. Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable, but that's how it is. If you want to page through the old articles in mozillazine you'll find plenty of links that actually test CSS compliance and document that even pretty early Mozilla betas beat IE and NS 4.x hands down. In contrast, check out this little article about how badly IE 5.5 breaks/"extends" various standards. (Given that 5.5 for Mac is actually very standards compliant, but (no offense) Mac IE isn't exactly what drives the market.)
~luge (hey, I don't want to defend MS either, but that doesn't mean we can't both take a swipe at the "old" NS)

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.

Just out of curiosity, who here thinks there is any chance that MSFT, probably the only software company with billion$ of dollars in cash reserves will either a.)go out of business or b.) quit development on a product in which from various statistics is the dominant player in its market.

Secondly, who believes that if AOL fired all the Netscape developers (who outnumber Open-Source contributors) there'd still be a Mozilla? Considering that several laudable open source projects have languished without corporate support including IBM's JFS and almost everything SGI has GPLed for Linux.

Finally from a PointyHairedBoss perspective which is more likely a.)MSFT goes out of business or quits developing IE or b.) AOL decides to stop flogging a dead horse and concedes defeat by keeping IE as its default browser instead of spending money developing a second stringer to IE?

This is not a troll but a genuine counter-opinion, being Open Source does not mean diddly to most PHBs unless there is still someone to point at Apache has the Apache Group while Linux has Red Hat, SuSe, etc...Mozilla has AOL. Almost four years later, it is still primarily a Netscape operation with a minority of Open Source developers. Your argument would not hold sway with most bosses (heck, it didn't hold sway with my project manager and he's a developer) since it is unlikely that they are either a.) going to say "yeah, we can carry on development if it ever gets scrapped by AOL" or b.)We'll trust our entire corporate decision making on the hope that a bunch of random hackers will work on this software in their spare time.

I like the classic look too but the problem is it's platform specific. At the moment it is only being released with the Windows version I believe.
If you check in the .CSS files you'll see lines like:
background-color : threedface;
color : windowtext;
I wonder how other platforms handle this.
Do you know about the chromezone?
This is where other skins can be found but there one none that work above M16 yet. We need more chrome developers.

Everyone seems to be looking at Mozilla as just another version of Netscape, but if you look at it that way, you really miss the point and potential impact of this project. The true importance is in the cross platform development that it makes possible at a high level. Not to mention that it employees the newest technology like XML, DOM and JS to create an interface that is so flexible, that it is written and interpreted at runtime. Oh and it is still fast! Skins are not the key to Mozilla, "Mozilla Total Conversions" are... as are "Chromes". Mozilla is versatile enough to write any program within it... I personally would like to see ICQ written with Mozilla. Check out the ChromeZone for projects that modify or use Mozilla as a development platform. I am involved in a project that customizes the Mozilla UI and adds some features for power users.(not a skin, but a Chrome) You can look at it here: Wayfarer Chrome.

To be honest, I would, but someone else got them ;-). That's also the beauty of open-source / free software.

As I said, I'm using it right now to post this. At M14, Mozilla would just fill up my available RAM, though it didn't crash. Now it's slick and reasonably fast. Fast enough that I haven't tried running "strip ./mozilla-bin" yet.

I really must say, Mozilla has come a long way. But, if it gets killed by AOL or something, maybe I will fork it. Or, maybe I'll move some of the good code into Konqueror (assuming the license allows that). Who knows?

All I can say is that, after a quick download of the encryption supplement, I don't think I'll be using the normal Netscape for a while.

And when I meant slower, I just meant that it takes a while to load the initial browswer. However, again, open code has fixed that too: it loads in almost as little time as the normal Netscape.

By the way, I run Linux-Mandrake on an AMD K6-2 300 with 64MB of RAM. Not a specifically fast system. So, Mozilla is progressing happily along. Long live Mozilla. Remember, Lizard Rocks!, a little ditty written by me.

You can pick up some icons for Mozilla here and here. Also be sure to look at some of the skins you can get for Mozilla here .


-AU

You can pick up some icons for Mozilla here and here. Also be sure to look at some of the skins you can get for Mozilla here .


-AU

M16 builds have been appearing for ages. The nightly builds are named after the upcomming milestone, so when M15 comes out all nightlies are now called M16... Take a look at the directory structure...

On related stuff the new builds are getting quite a bit faster and now have stuff like autocomplete in them. There was a feature freeze not long ago so we should (hopefully) see builds becoming more stable.

Linux moz is looking good although some old favourites (such as the scrollbars coming free bug) are still there.

The mac builds are still lagging behind other platforms which is a shame. We really do need more mac helpers to stop it becoming a third rate platform (in terms of the quality of it's mozilla builds).

From the little testing I've done on Windoze those builds seem good too.

Plugs/Links:
Visit Mozillazine! It has a build bar that informs you how good previous builds are.

Hang out in #mozillazine. If you've got irc (and you should because moz has one built in which can be launched from the prompt using mozilla -chat) use /server irc.mozilla.org then /join #mozillazine

Got spare time and a fast connection? Help Smoketest the daily builds.

New to mozilla? Take a look at NewZilla

If you want some different icons try over at The Chromezone. Actually they haven't updated the page in a while, but the newer icons are up at my page.

A lot of people seem to forget that a web browser is alot more than just as document renderer. The interface and shell around the rendered (raptor in mozilla i believe) is also very important. While IEeeeee can do this now in windows its still not as easy to do as it will be in mozilla. When you look at what encompases mozilla and how amazing it really is it becomes a very cool piece of software. Even if you don't understand C/C++ take a look around the source code tree, most of the code is very clean, very well documented and very organized, that in itself is impressive for such a large project. I for one will encourage all my non-geek friends to install netscape 6/mozilla when it comes out.

Geoffeg

A lot of people seem to forget that a web browser is alot more than just as document renderer. The interface and shell around the rendered (raptor in mozilla i believe) is also very important. While IEeeeee can do this now in windows its still not as easy to do as it will be in mozilla. When you look at what encompases mozilla and how amazing it really is it becomes a very cool piece of software. Even if you don't understand C/C++ take a look around the source code tree, most of the code is very clean, very well documented and very organized, that in itself is impressive for such a large project. I for one will encourage all my non-geek friends to install netscape 6/mozilla when it comes out.

Geoffeg

4. Middle-click on a link does not yet open a new window. I use that extensively in NS 4.x. Where is it?

Works for me. And I remember looking at the bug list, and that they had fixed that "bug".

D'oh! You're right. I tried it again and it does indeed work. Cool!

I know that drop-down menus on the Back and Forward buttons have been requested for a while, and you can get them now at the ChromeZone (look at the Back/Forward Context Menus "skin"). It only takes a little extra work, and it's very handy!

Check out Greg's Bridge Page!

--

> why don't they make the GUI skinnable?

I believe what you're after is ChromeZone.

Mozilla is much more than just skinnable. Read up on XUL for more information.

They are building "Aquaesque" chrome. Check out this shot I found in the mozilla newsgroups.

Plus the sullivan chrome at mozillazine feels very mac-like.

Chris