try67 (and many others) wrote to tell us Mozilla Milestone 13 was made available yesterday. Check the release notes
here. You'll see full builds for Linux, Win32, and Mac OS 8.5. And the source, of course. This is the long-awaited Mozilla Alpha version. Have fun!
Slashdot Mirror
You can FINALLY get rid of that dang sidebar (view menu, uncheck sidebar)
Properly coded pages actually look better (for the most part) than they do in IE5. Slick.
CSS is done well.
Crashes FAR less often than M12 on my P2-333 64megs, Win98 box. Haven't tried it under Linux yet.
Bad:
Font Prefs aren't done yet (I want sans-serif by default, dangit!)
"Theme" selector not done yet (Really, I just want to get some win-standard chrome rather than the "Mozilla" interface)
Still crashes more than NS 4.7 (but it's getting close!)
Back button intermittant (This just ain't right)
Overall - not too shabby for a 1st alpha. I would've liked to see all the prefs panels actually be functional, but this release does indeed show that Mozilla is "getting there".
Nice job to all involved.
This is the mirror list of ftp.mozilla.org mirrors. I checked the nearest mirror to me, it was up to date; so don't /. the main ftp server :-)
Just downloaded it now. It's working a hell of a lot better than previous releases, so if you were put off by it a while back, give it another go!
Note to Win32 users: You must grab the install version, as there's a few library files that need to be bang up to date which the normal version can't fix.
However, I have tested it on a site that uses layer hiding/showing and it does not show/hide the layers ... at all :(
Still, this looks and feels really nice, and will use it to browse sites without layers.
Keep up the good work.
A few quick things despite this thread's age.
Native system widgets CANNOT BE USED FOR A WHOLE LOT OF LAYOUT due to W3C specifications. They are just NOT the right thing for the job. Deal.
Yes the interface on the mac is probably going to suck for a while. Perhaps forever.
**THE USER INTERFACE IS COMPLETELY MUTABLE BY YOU!**
Read the release notes before talking about replacing X11.
Yes it crashes. Yes it's slow. Yes it's NOT DONE YET.
No it doesn't need to be 'pared down like icab'. Icab is icab. Mozilla is mozilla. Learn why they made the technology decisions they did and starting THINKING about the problemspace these products are addressing.
Most previous versions of Netscape had email clients and news readers and stuff.
AOL is probably going to spend around $100,000,000 on mozilla development all said and done. Perhaps MUCH more. You have paid $0.00. Netscape 5 is their product. Mozilla is yours. Bitch accordingly.
Internet Explorer 5's implementations of HTML4, CSS1, XML, and the DOM are broken according to specifications. Mozilla's generally are not.
Mozilla NEVER PROMISED CSS2 and will probably not deliver on it.
Finally, for the severely clue impaired, MOZILLA CODE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NETSCAPE CODE. AT ALL.
Toodles.
-troll taker
(like personal information being tranmitted to web sites)
for those using IE that haven't changed the default settings after they installed or upgraded, you should check under
Internet Options > Advanced
for the settings
Enable Page Hit Counting and Enable Profile Assistant (both are checked by default)
Make sure and right-click to read the "What's This" description and hate M$ all over again. You don't have to hide this stuff in code, just put it under "Advanced" "Security" settings and newbies will steer clear.
+&x
There is an ActiveX wrapper for Mozilla, which can be used in place of the IE ActiveX component.
Mozilla does work pretty well with Proxy, but I advise you to skip this release if your proxy requires authentification, like mine does.
Indeed it seems this alpha build can not remember your proxy password, which means that you have to enter your id and password dozens of times (frames + images) for each url you visit. I finally gave up after visiting my third bookmark. Sigh.
The list of bugs fixed in M13 is here
As just a rough estimate, it looks like about 760 bugs were fixed. Cool huh?
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
P2-333 w. 128mb, Riva TNT video, RH6.1.
There's still some work to be done with certain aspects (scrolling is nice and clean, UNLESS you wiggle the scrollbar up and down... then it gets kinda sluggish. Oh, and the key repeat rate is friggin' painful. Use the mouse to navigate around text entry boxes). It's apparent that it's still in beta, but it's come a *LONG* way.
At the very least it's worth checking out.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
I predict that when Mozilla will be finally released (and relatively bug-free), there will be plenty of improvements that people will do to it. I know I want to add things to Mozilla, but I will wait until it's stable.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I think the decision was made simply because throwing all the resources at the browser would have yielded simply too many people working on the core technology, and an impossible to manage project. This way they've split the teams up into sensible chunks working on seperate things. Throwing the other people at the browser/renderer wouldn't really have helped things IMHO.
(I kind of agree though from a user POV, but I know from management experience that they're doing the right thing).
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Try MozillaZine
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
How is Netscape going to pull itself out of the pit and back into direct competition with IE? Can you say "Mozilla on every single AOL users desktop" ?
It's usable, certainly much more than NS4.7 which I can't stand. Like previous versions, you can resize the window (eg. max/min) without the browser reloading the page from the server, just like IE & Opera has been doing for over 2 years :P. It's nicely done, a bit slower than IE, but I guess the reason for that is the same reason why the drop down menus, and just about everything in the UI seems abnormally sluggish.
:P.
:)).
The thing on the left (a copy of window's extensible explorer bands?) doesn't expand properly after it's colapsed, it kindda dissapears and doesn't draw itself properly.
Fonts, does Mozilla not support native windows fonts? I now portability is an issue, but I'd kind of like mozilla to honour my exotic fonts if they're installed in windows.
CSS seems to work nicely now, like IE
I'm going to start testing web pages now with mozilla as well as IE (i gave up on NS4.7 ages ago).
I know mozilla is supposed to be 'standards compliant' and all, but I still find that IE always seems to be able to render and support the more exotic parts of the standards while mozilla is till 'getting there'.
Oh well, looks promising. Anyone know if there's an ActiveX wrapper for mozilla yet (IE has had that since IE3)....which is why so many apps have integrated HTML (WinAmp, Neoplanet, Office, and other 3rd party ones I can't remember
The first cut was a monstrosity because it was simply the snapshot (more or less) of the current Communicator code with some minor changes. We all know Communicator is enormous.
The second cut was a total rewrite; basically what you see today. The key improvement here, besides the fact that it was a total rewrite, is that the HTML rendering engine is FAR more efficient and handles all the standards properly as per specifications (you can't say that about Communicator, IE or Opera!)
The rendering engine (Gecko) is more or less completed; they are still tweaking and adding minor features to it, but without a program to wrap around the engine, what's the point? Now what you're seeing is the addition of a mailer, news reader, preferences, history, etc. etc, eg. all the other crap that makes a modern web browser. Yes, this stuff is going to add to the code size, but the most important part of Mozilla is that the HTML rendering engine is quite good and very efficient.
Now only if I can get this release to build on Solaris... ;-)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
make sure you DELETE your OLD PREFERENCES!!!! I can't stress enough how many weird problems crop up because you have out of date mozilla preferences lying aroung. If you are using linux, do an rm -rf ~/.mozilla. If you are under windows, I don't know what you should do. Mozilla is a constantly evolving project, and the preferences are constantly changing.
Two simple reasons.
Yes, for browsing web pages in any of the Windows operating systems, ie5 is much better than Netscape 4.x. You'd be crazy to say otherwise. But, the way it is now, I have to close ie5 and open Netscape in order to view research papers. I know I can use ftp and gzip and a postscript viewer to do it, but it's easier with a browser, now that the preprint servers have nice front ends.
I know people say Mozilla is open source and therefore better. I agree, abstractly, but most people ain't gonna read it anyway. It does give a kind of confidence that nothing sneaky is going on (like personal information being tranmitted to web sites) and that is important to me. But when it comes to performance, the inability to handle gzipped postscript is absolutely unacceptable. I have heard of workarounds, but haven't been able to carry them out.
That's my honest opinion.