Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits

Anderson Silva (among others) zapped us the news that you can now grab Mozilla's M14 release (Seamonkey). The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availability, but it will soon. For now, here are the release notes. So grab, test, and gripe -- bug reports will only make the Mozilla browser better.

Comments

Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

I get a feeling the reason the release wasn't announced was to give a chance for it to propagate to automatic mirrors before announcing it. This is true of a lot of releases, by the way .

Re:Mirrors

[Atev]

I'd agree with you on that. I'd love them to anounce as early as possible, but maybe they don't want their server to take all the traffic.

Mozilla is improving.

[Maul]

Looks like this browser is starting to actually become usable. I'm counting the days until I can finally ditch Netscape 4.x for good for my graphical browsing needs and still have a browser that has full functionality.

No crypto, but certainly a more stable build

[WackyTJ]

I have just downloaded the build, its certainly getting more stable and faster (Win98 version)

Ok, lets get cracking in finding bugs, and submit them to BugZilla...

Can anyone tell me if the Linux version is any faster than previous builds?

Anyway, its getting there.. finally...

Re:No crypto, but certainly a more stable build

[kochsr]

wow... all i have to say is this thing can use a _lot_ of work... it crashed on me twice in 5 minutes. went to techrant.com and the bars and everything looked all crazy. Then i went to voodooextreme.com, and that didn't work either... oh well, i guess i will just wait a little longer!

source?

[akharon]

where is it?

Re:source?

[akharon]

uh, nope, it says m13 when you follow those links too. what i was referring to was that there was no source directory under the m14 directory as is customary with all the other releases.

Fonts still AWFUL!

[DarkFyre]

I'm writing this in mozilla M14 right now, and I've one thing to say about it : the fonts are still AWFUL! See Mozilla Bug # 29726 for my report and screenshots - does everyone else see this problem? Any ideas what to do?

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[Ungulate]

The problem is really with the abysmal state of fonts in X in general. The best thing any person using Netscape under X can do for themselves is get the Microsoft web fonts and install them. Web pages look dramatically better in both Netscape and Mozilla.

xfstt is probably the easiest X truetype font server to configure. If you went nutty trying to get the patched xfs in RedHat to work, give xfstt a try.

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[Yakko]

YES, the fonts for the /. headings are HIDEOUS. Other fonts are OK... I've made my font server prefer 100dpi fonts, btw. netscape looks great; M14 renders some fonts all whacked.

Other than that, everything seems to look good, and it feels a bit snappier UI-wise than M13. (No "middle button fires link in new browser" fix, tho... argh)

--

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[Genom]

I had the same problem - looks like another bug.

BUT

I did find a (sort of) workaround...if you have a mousewheel, try using it to scroll the menus where the scrollbar doesn't seem to work - it worked for me.

You may have to have Netscape configured to use the mousewheel first though (although I did notice a "new" pref area for mousewheel settings...)

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[DarkFyre]

My X fonts look great - better than Windows, in my opinion. I guess it depends on your font server, but if you'd looked at the screenshots I'd linked to, you'd have seen how pretty Netscape shows things.

This reply goes to everyone else who suggested that it was a problem with my font server/config.

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[DarkFyre]

Thanks for some confirmation that I'm not on crack.

If you'd like to see Slashdot look pretty, please vote for my bug at Mozilla bug 29726.

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[LordDartan]

Fonts actually look better on Mozilla than they do on Netscape to me! I checked out your bug report, and I don't have that problem here.

Re:Fonts still AWFUL!

[crush]

There are a couple of things that you can do to improve fonts:

• Look at the Font De-uglification HOWTO
  FDU-Mini HOWTO
• Install some True Type fonts from ...... Microsoft!
  They have a fontpack
• 
  which provides some nice stuff like Arial Black etc...and then install one of the TT font servers:
• One of the most popular is xfsft
• Another available for download is xfstt
• Use RH6.1 which has xfs prepatched with xfsft for TT fonts
• If it's just the sizes that bother you, that's a pretty oldish problem which is fixed by switching the order of the 100dpi and 75dpi fonts in your font catalogue
  There's a note about it from as far back as NS2 at bigfontsthat might help
• Finally Christopher Browne has really helpful web-pages with this topic indexed (among many others) at cbbrowne

--Crush

Mozilla!

[womprat]

My Mozilla keeps crashing when I try to download the new one. Did it three times in a row now

Re:Mozilla!

[DarkFyre]

Yeah, my two-day old nightly release did the same thing. Eventually gave up and used command line ftp.

linux drawing faster

[Freshman]

Pavlov increased drawing performance on Linux by at least 2x, scrolling by 5x.

Worth looking at.

Re:Mirrors (Where?)

[fluffhead]

Check out http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html for a list of download mirrors.

#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak

No Mac release yet?

[Kaufmann]

(see topic)

Hrrrm. I guess I should expect that it would take longer to build the Mac release... but if the Win32 release is already out... hrrrrm.

Re:No Mac release yet?

[znu]

It's there now. But it still isn't and probably won't ever be up to Mac interface standards, which almost makes me wonder why they bother. I assume Communicator 6, based on the Mozilla code, will be though. Can anyone confirm that? Will Communicator 6 use the native widgets for the OSes it runs on?

--

Re:No Mac release yet?

[CrAlt]

The source is there, why not just compile for your system?

Re:No Mac release yet?

[Kaufmann]

The source is there, why not just compile for your system?

Because it requires the latest release of CodeWarrior, which I don't own, plus two dozen other obscure Mac development tools.

Re:No Mac release yet?

[puetzk]

Well, as you should have noticed, mozilla.org hadn't announced the release yet... slashdot just saw that a few of the files were up and announced it for them.

Re:No Mac release yet?

[eauz]

Mozilla will *not* use native widgets for any OS.

This means no Win32, MacOS or GTK widgets.

This decision was made early in the development of Mozilla, to allow portable UIs. Without this decision, Mozilla would have been Win32-only.

Re:No Mac release yet?

[Kyobu]

See, I don't get this. They use GTK, but they don't use GTK widgets. Except for the scrol bars. Why do they always have to be gratuitously different? I understand the issue of portability, but why not jsut port GTK+ to Mac (it's already been ported to Win32)?

Wow

[seanb]

Mozilla looks VERY nice on win32 (I'm at work right now). The dailybuilds have been getting MUCh fatser, and that debug window has finally been hidden.

I really like the looks of that Mozilla splash screen. Anybody know where I can get that image (aside from taking a screen shot when moz is starting)?

Re:Wow

[Jeffrey Baker]

Is it one of these?

http://personal.inet.fi/cool/ne t/mozilla/splash.htm

-jwb

Re:Wow

[Alphix]

if you have the sources the image is under mozilla/xpfe/bootstrap/ and the file is splash.bmp or splash.xpm depending on which format you want

Re:Wow

[seanb]

No, but that is an interesting link. I was able t find it in the mozilla source. I put up a jpg version here

Article on M14 release

[Freshman]

If anyone is interested, I've written an article on the release on Betanews.com:

Here.

Japanese text entry on Linux

[Elias Ross]

I was wondering if anyone can tell me how to be able to enter Japanese text in Mozilla for Linux. Currently, I have Netscape 4.6 working under i386/Debian with kinput2. If anyone has an answer please post. (I seem to recall I could read Japanese text just fine. kinput2 doesn't come up like it should...)

This better not be M14

[slag187]

So, I downloaded the M14 for Linux (with Talkback support). All I can say is - huh? I ran it for maybe 15 minutes and have had it crash already a dozen times - even on pages that are supposed to be verified (like www.cnn.com).

I know that this is alpha software, but my impression of the road to M14 was supposed to make it so that people could use it as their full time browser - and thus squash more bugs.

It crashed the first time I loaded it before getting through the profile creation process.

I've been rooting for Mozilla for a long time now and have been apologetic - I keep telling people to give them a month or two, to wait for the next Milestone. I was very disappointed with it as I had had high hopes for this release (which has been much touted as the push for stability). Am I the only one? Was it built against different shared libraries than what I'm running? Is it better than Netscape 4.7 for anyone (which I've heard before)?

Well, I give up for now - I'll wait until the official launch and see how it is then . . .

I'm jaded :^\

Re:This better not be M14

[ashp]

Do you run Redhat? I know there were some problems reported with random crashing on older versions of Redhat.

I've been personally using Mozilla for a number of weeks as my main browser, under Debian (woody) and I rarely have crashes. Javascript can still sometimes bring it down, but for day to day browsing it has already replaced Netscape 4.x

The only thing I need Netscape 4.x for is sites that require logging in (like the NOC site at work), and Mozilla doesn't handle those.

Anyway, the results you had surprise me - I've been getting more and more pleased with Mozilla. I haven't touched the snapshot, because I use the nightly builds, but font support seems to have greatly improved three days ago in the nightly builds, and it's getting much faster.

Maybe M14 is on a different cvs branch to the nightly builds. The only (and irritating) problem I have at the moment is when trying to change fonts in preferences, I can't scroll down at all. Maybe it's my gtk theme, ThinIce.

Re:This better not be M14

[raptor21]

The installation notes in the release notes ask you to delete the registry in~./mozilla if it crashes at startup. I haven't tried it yet but the nightly build before this was stable on my box at home.

Which version of glibc do you have? the release notes say that the dlopen and dlclose are broken in glibc2.0 which rh5.2 and many distros are linked with.

Re:This better not be M14

[slag187]

I do run Red Hat 6.1 - so I doubt it is that bug (which IIRC had something to do with glibc 2.0).
I don't know what all the libraries that it depends on are, but I'm pretty up to date with my system:

gtk+ 1.2.6
glibc 2.1.2
XFree86 3.3.6

I sincerly hope that it's just a quirk of my setup that someone will know what it is, and that I will fix it and never run anything but Mozilla again :)

Any ideas along those lines would be greatly appreciated. Or, how do I get it to dump core so that I can use gdb to find out where the problems are? Anyone know?

Re:This better not be M14

[gargle]

Yes, I've just downloaded and tried M14 for Linux (I'm running rh6.1), and it has done nothing but crash, run slowly, and render pages incorrectly. Somehow I seem to recall that M13 worked better.

Re:This better not be M14

[Fnkmaster]

That is very strange. I'm running Mandrake 7, and I have found the latest nightly builds and M14 (which I am running right now) to be pretty rock solid. Crashes are fairly rare, probably every half hour or so of solid browsing. Rendering was a bit problematic in M13, but is flawless in the latest nightlies and M14, for most pages, even pretty damn complex ones. Make sure you are using ViewManager2, and if you find specific rendering problems PLEASE post URLs to bugzilla and they will be fixed ASAP. Oh, and M14 is much faster than M13 (Linux builds). And the M15 nightlies have a speedup of about a factor of 2-3 for some complicated pages (like the bugzilla query page) over M14... they didn't put the changes into the M14 tree, because they wanted it stabilized.

Re:This better not be M14

[Slothy]

The problem here is that you're using an SMP box and Mozilla is not yet thread-safe, though I have NO idea why they don't put this is big bold letters on the M13/14 pages. So people with a single CPU have a fairly rock-solid browser, and people with SMP boxes think this should probably be Milestone 3.

The bug for this is:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2155 6

Re:This better not be M14

[gargle]

(I posted this list of sites earlier as an AC):

Problems rendering:

www.wired.com
www.zdnet.com

General slowness. When one window is rendering, all the other mozilla windows seem to lock up. e.g. www.nytimes.com seems particularly slow for me, and as it's rendering, this /. window can't be accessed. The entire UI is extremely sluggish as well. And this /. text box seems to tremble whenever I change the /. formatting option.

Re:This better not be M14

[AT]

I know that this is alpha software, but my impression of the road to M14 was supposed to make it so that people could use it as their full time browser - and thus squash more bugs.

The fact that it crashes for you doesn't mean that it isn't usable as most peoples full time browser. It just simply means that it doesn't work for you. Find out what is different about your system, or narrow the situations the crashes occur on. Cross reference this with Bugzilla, and add a bug, or add your comments to an existing bug.

This is what a public alpha is all about; expect bugs and try to identify -- if not solve -- them.

Re:This better not be M14

[thue]

I have been using M13 till now, and M14 is sligtly more unstable.
But it is a lot faster. And the textboxes now work properly, also without taking 100% af my CPU.

Yes, I have deleted my .mozilla directory...

Re:This better not be M14

[Daniel]

Huh? I'm a little confused; when I've run Mozilla it looked like it was running single-threaded. Where does SMP come in? (also, a well-written threaded program shouldn't encounter bugs only when running with SMP..these probably bite non-SMP users occasionally, but SMP just exacerbates them..for example, from the bug logs, the problem seems to be that the internal Mozilla memory-allocation/refcounting system wasn't thread-safe! This is a big no-no, and I'm not surprised it was causing problems..) Daniel

Re:This better not be M14

[puetzk]

zdnet's misrending is very much their problem - see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_ bug.cgi?id=24795

While mozilla will probably have to work-around their HTML problems (the odds of them fixing the incorrectly calculated widths that add up to more than the width of the page and make it linewrap) this is not a mozilla problem.

Re:This better not be M14

[luge]

If you want to see more details on this issue, take a look at the primary SMP bug here. To comment on some of the other notes on this SMP thread: 1) Yes, it is multi-threaded. The problem is that certain key functions arae not thread safe. 2) The problem does show up on non-SMP boxes, but is rare- it is greatly exagerrated on SMP, both Linux and NT. 3) There is a lot of work underway on this problem, since several of the developers use SMP boxes at home. Unfortunately, while the solution is reasonably straightforward, it will require a lot of work. You'll note that the bug is marked beta1- which means it is a priority. We'll see...
~luge

Slow and crashy and trembling screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla (on Linux) crashed twice on me as I was trying to post a message here. The first time, I was complaining about the slow UI (menu draw slowly, right mouse button menu comes up slowly), but now I think I'll just complain about the crashing.

And oh, a wonderful trembling screen effect. When I switch from 'html formatted' and 'plain old text' the whole text box literally trembles.

Use a talkback build

[linuxci]

If you're using Windows or Linux please consider downloading a talkback build (they have talkback in their filename) this'll automatically send back crash data (with your permission - a box will appear first) to the Mozilla team which will help them track down the main causes for Mozilla to crash.

BTW the source code for M14 should follow on the FTP site soon. If you can buld for other platforms please do so and contribute your builds back to Mozilla. See here for details of packaging your own milestone build for your platform.
--
Make use of your spare CPU time!

Re:Use a talkback build

[Simon Brooke]

I've been using talkback versions of Mozilla since about M8, I think - it doesn't always work. In my experience four out of five crashes go down so hard and so fast that talkback never gets a chance. Maving said that, M13 was in my opinion very nearly as stable as 4.7 - but having said *that* I've now ditched 4.7 in favour of 4.6, because I found 4.7 so fragile as to be more or less unusable.

Re:Use a talkback build

[linuxci]

Talkback seems to work most of the time for me, although there's a few times where it's crashed and talkback hasn't appeared (but it's rare).

The main problem for me is that sometimes it's not possible to connect to the talkback server (it's either down or M14 is crashing a lot and it's gettting slashdotted). Hopefully they'll make sure their talkback servers working by the time they officially announce this on mozilla.org

--
Make use of your spare CPU time!

OpenBSD

[Zach Garner]

Is anyone working on a newer OpenBSD port of Mozilla? The one in the port tree is REALLY old.

What about NetBSD? I think they are in the same state as OpenBSD, but i dont know.

:wq

Re:OpenBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed the linux-emulation port, and the Linux builds work fine. (Slow, but that's constant across all platforms. Especially when you have a measley 32M of RAM.)

I'm using FreeBSD, mind you, but I'm 95% sure you could run M14 w/ Linux emulation under OpenBSD.

Re:OpenBSD

[mr]

The BSD OSes have made the Bug reporting list, but they have not made the nightly builds/release builds.

Anytime you submit a bug report, they say 'use a current build'. Make BSD builds, and you will get current info.

If they build it, we will come.

M14 already? What happened?

[drivers]

But there are still 500 bugs targeted for M14

I saw M13 get whittled down to zaroo boogs, then it came out, I assumed the same for M14. Does this have anything to do with Netscape wanting to get a Communicator 6.0 beta out ASAP?

Re:M14 already? What happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

But there are still 500 bugs targeted for M14

Wow! That's 130x less than W2k! So why not use it now? :)

Don`t forget about Mozillazine!

[Sits]

Mozillazine is a website manned by helpful volunteers hoping to make Mozilla the best browser possible. If you are unsure as to how to get started bug testing, I recommend stopping by #mozillazine for a friendly chat.

Re:Don`t forget about Mozillazine!

[Sits]

Before I forget, the irc server is: irc.mozilla.org

Mozilla with large fonts???

[jmv]

As anyone been able to use mozilla on Linux with 100dpi fonts? I'm running 1600x1200 on a 17", so 100dpi fonts are vital! No matter what I chose in the font preferences, I'm still stuck with 75dpi fonts, which is simply unreadable.

Besides that, for me M14 seems to be even less stable than the two previous builds (It took me 5 minutes to crash it, doing nothing unusual).

Re:Mozilla with large fonts???

[DGolden]

YOu can now set the DPI for fonts. For reasons best known to Mozilla, it defaults to ninety-five on my system (xdpyinfo insists I'm on a 75 dpi display...) BTW, how do you tell X what DPI your display is - mine's closer to 120 DPI, being an old 15inch mointor I've underclocked to do 1280x1024@50Hz
(Modeline "1280x1024@50" 87.602 1280 1312 1624 1656 1024 1025 1031 1058 -HSync -VSync) Yes, I know what a silly idea that is...

Alos, M14 is only finding a tiny subset of my installed fonts - another poster suggests earlier versions found his (truetype) fonts, and now M14 doesn't, but I don't have earlier versions around to check this, and it doesn't seem to find a lot of non-tt fonts too...

I hope the mailer shapes up

[Jeffrey Baker]

I use mozilla when I can, but it still has crash bugs to work out so it isn't my primary browser. Mozilla has made so much progress so quickly that I am not really worried about the browser.

What I am worried about is the mailer. The mailer in mozilla, even M14, is atrocious. The UI has so many different styles going on at the same time, it makes me queasy. The widgets are constantly jumping around on the screen. And of course it is hideously slow.

Today, Communicator is the only viable IMAP mail client for X. Sure, there are dozens of alleged mail agents, but they invariably have some huge glaring usability problem that turn me away. I'll be pretty depressed if the Mozilla mailer sucks and I have to keep 4.72 laying aroung just for the mailer.

-jwb

Re:I hope the mailer shapes up

[orcrist]

Today, Communicator is the only viable IMAP mail client for X. Sure, there are dozens of alleged mail agents, but they invariably have some huge glaring usability problem that turn me away.

I'm not sure what your definition of 'viable' is, but this is the first time I've seen Messenger turn up in that sentence without a negative ;-) In any case, assuming you mean a graphical mail client (as opposed to one which can be run in an X-term) there's a pretty lengthy list right here. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention Pine which, though not graphical, is a very solid IMAP client (it should be since the author is one of the people to design the IMAP protocol) and allows you to configure any program you want for viewing of attachments; so unless you have to view your images inline, it works out pretty well.

Chris

nightly builds

[miahrogers]

I've been using last-night nightly build for the last several hours, and (on my machine) it hasn't crashed. I know that on some machines the luck is not so good. But I'm using a newer version of glibc than the computer that built it was(i use libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3 and it was built for libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2), i had to symlink the libs, and it still works great.

Note: If you are using woody, until the debian build comes out mozilla won't run out-of-the-box on your computer, symlink libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 to libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 , then it should work(at least it did for me).

Sites that don't render correctly

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that more sites don't render correctly with M14 than with M13. I'm using Linux.

Try
www.wired.com
www.cnn.com (minor glitches)
www.zdnet.com

And did I mention how horribly slow the whole thing is? It seems to lock up my poor P200 whenever a page is rendering.

Re:Sites that don't render correctly

[m3000]

Add one more to that list:
ign64.com and it's sister sites.

And i know what you mean by being slow. It seems to take forever to load up dialog boxes(like prefrences), and the browser itself.

any hope for the speed?

[Splork]

I'm very happy that Mozilla is happening and that its in a pretty usable state now, but it seems that every time I actually try a new version, it is unnaturally slow. (Netscape 4.7 is -much- faster at rendering large pages).

Can any mozilla developers answer this?

I know that there is supposedly lots of debugging code enabled (which could be a big part of it), but has anyone tried an optimized build without the debugging overhead? How's the speed compare to netscape and, more importantly, IE?

(all my testing has been done on Linux)

Re:any hope for the speed?

[Fnkmaster]

Do you have any specific examples? Find a URL, post comparative speed results between NS 4.7 and Mozilla. Mozilla, by the way, is a *whole* lot faster in the win32 builds than in the Linux builds. This is a reported, known bug, and is being worked on currently. The latest M15 nightly builds are about 2-3 times faster on some widget intensive pages (like bugzilla query form) than the M14 builds, although in general only a bit faster. Mozilla at it's best (i.e. latest builds on win32) is still slower than IE5, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and it's still in alpha. So I am quite sure win32 builds will be up to snuff. I just hope that Linux rendering is brought up to parity with win32 rendering.

Re:any hope for the speed?

[raptor21]

Actually mozilla nightly builds and even M13 as I tested them on winnt 4.0 were faster than IE5. I tested them on two machines simultaneously( pII 400,128MB, 10mbps lan).the machines are identical and the enter key was pressed on the same url at the same time by two people and Mozilla came out winner in majority of the cases it amazed even the most diehard IE user who witnessed this.

I run linux at home and personally and the reason i can come up with for why mozilla is faster on win32 and slower on linux is that the win32 builds donot spew out debug satements in a termial/dos window. And as far as I know printed debug satements can slow things down.

I have been tracking mozilla since M7 and it has come along way and is definitely getting there. and when it gets here its going to turn heads.

Congrats to the mozilla team for achieving another milestone build!!!

Re:any hope for the speed?

[DarkFyre]

All right, I'll give you a specific example : the Slashdot story previous to this one. The l0phtCrack story has ~350 comments. In Mozilla M14, this took 116 seconds to render - That's almost two full minutes!!

In Netscape 4.72, the same page rendered in about six seconds.

Re:any hope for the speed?

[FagFace]

In Mozilla M14, this took 116 seconds to render - That's almost two full minutes!! In Netscape 4.72, the same page rendered in about six seconds.

Grab the source and try `./configure'ing it with the --enable-x11-shm (X-shared memory support.)

I just tested the latest CVS version (not sure how different it is from the binaries they release today) using that option (also disabled debugging) on the 500+ comment "What's Banned On Your Campus?" story, and Navigator 4.7 took 21 seconds, while Mozilla took 28 (on a K6-2 300 system.)

Here's a list of the build options I used:

--with-pthreads --disable-mailnews --enable-x11-shm --disable-debug --disable-netcast --with-jpeg --with-zlib --with-png

Re:any hope for the speed?

[Cid Highwind]

That's strange: I've used the nightly binaries and just built the current CVS, and they both run circles around communicator 4.6. (I haven't bothered to upgrade to 4.7's bugs yet) As an example, load Mozilla M13 or M14 and look at a graphics-intensive site like the Wallpapers section at customize.org. or any of the themes.org sites. It takes about 1.5 minutes to render a 20-image page from customize.org on Netscape, and less than half that on Mozilla. Slashdot and other text-heavy sites seem close to equal on both browsers.

For the people keeping score at home, that's Netscape Communicator 4.61 and Mozilla current CVS configured with --disable-mailnews --disable-debug --enable-x11-shm, on a P200 running Linux 2.2.13

Bug Reports

[asa]

Mozilla releases these milestone checkpoints with the hopes that lots of people will take a look and give some feedback. Bug reports are the best way to give this feedback. Mozilla's bug database Bugzilla (located at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org ) provides some really nice tools for reporting bugs and feature requests. Before reporting any bugs it is a good idea to give the database a query to see if your bug has already been reported. This will save mozilla QA a lot of time weeding through duplicate bug reports. You can search the database at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi . Start off with simple searches in the Description field. If that yields too many bugs to weed through you might add more to the search. If you find your bug reported please add any relevant comments to that bug report. If you find that your bug is not reported then please take a quick glance at the bug reporting guidelines before making your report. These guidelines will help you report a bug that developers and QA can track down and fix more swiftly. The bug reporting guidelines ca be found at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guideli nes.html . If you are new to the process you might try the new Bugzilla Helper which will guide you through the process. Remember that the better the report the more quickly it will get confirmed, assigned and fixed. Thanks, and enjoy M14 (for those that like to stay on the bleeding edge, M15 cycle nightly builds have been available for a few days now.)

Asa
external QA on the Mozilla project

Re:Bug Reports

[SgtXaos]

I read that comment four times and still do not understand what you are trying to convey.

Bugs

[jesser]

Report the bugs you find!</redundant>

Also check the frequently reported bugs page and the most popular bugs query. If you're really bored you can even look at the bugs I submitted.

I got the impression that M14 was not much more than just another nightly build with the label M14 slapped onto it - Netscape engineers are concentra ting on getting all of the big bugs out before the M15, the first public beta release. I'm going to skip this release and download another nightly build in a few days.

--

But how soon?

[Taco Cowboy]

You said: "The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availabilit, but it will soon."

Well.... how soon?

One look at the mozilla nightly builds ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/ and we all know that the M13 was first built sometimes before 12/20/99 but the official M13 release was 01/21/00

Actually, the first nightly build for M14 was at 01/21/00, and now we are seeing the M15 nightly builds.

Let me ask you the question again: how soon?

One has to be cautious not to raise too much hope on projects like the Mozilla. Unlike commercialware, most open-source projects do not have rigid deadlines.

So, please be patience. The Mozilla M14 will be out when it is ready.

Blame it on XPToolkit?

[jmv]

OK, this is just my opinion (usual flames > /dev/null)... I'd tend to blame the idea of XPToolkit for the stability and speed problems in Mozilla. It adds another layer to something that's already complicated enough:
Mozilla->XPToolkit->GTK->GDK->X (am I forgetting anything).

Actually, I think the problem is not necessarly with the idea of a cross-platform toolkit, but the idea that widgets should look exactly the same on all OS's. This way you need to rewrite all the widgets for all toolkits, which adds both bloat and bugs. For instance, the scrolling in the message (mail) window is way too slow. A simple GTK widget would be 10x faster. Why not an XPToolkit that keeps the look of the original toolkit? This makes even more sense with GTK when you have themes...

Any comment on that?

Re:Blame it on XPToolkit?

[WackyTJ]

No..

Actually that GFX controls and the XPToolkit is almost required. it offeres the following advantages

-Ease of portability
-reduced "hard coded" interface routines..

but the most important thing..

CSS requires styles to be applied to controls, such as "blink" strikethrough etc... this cannot be handle by ALL native controls in ALL target platforms of Mozilla, so the GFX controls, and XP toolkit, is almost required... there is no other way.. Even IE uses a similar thing to the XP_Toolkit.. but a more proprietry one.

Re:Hey!

[AndyL]

Why is this off-topic? Silly maybe. But it's on-topic.

Works for me. Did you try...

[ggoebel]

Try making sure you deleted all the mozilla files, registry settings, and don't forget to delete these two: C:\windows\mozregistry.dat and C:\windows\mozver.dat

Then try installing again.

I'm running M14 on my wife's Win98 machine. Seems snappy fast, and hasn't crashed once!

Re:Works for me. Did you try...

[slag187]

I did delete my old .mozilla directory.

But I couldn't find c:\windows no matter how hard I looked :)

(I run Linux as I stated in the original post.)

irc log from last night (edited)

[Anonymous Coward]

#mozilla topic: "sarcasm is just another service we provide"

<Icos> Does anyone want to throw in a quote for my article on M14's release? (hint: say yes!)
<alecf> "At least you don't have to reboot twice to install it"
<tor> "It sucks less than previous milestones"
<Pavlov> "Don't run it on SMP systems."
*** Quits: Icos (Greg@hyper2-61.wctc.net) (Read error: 131 (Connection reset by peer))
<alecf> heh
<alecf> we scared him off
*** Joins: Icos (Greg@hyper2-61.wctc.net)
<Icos> bah
<Icos> I was thinking more along the lines of "We here at Netscape are proud of the great new features of M14 and look forward to delivering an impressing beta"
<Icos> Sigh.
<Icos> nobody likes the press.

They are "low-priority" => triaged to M15,

[ggoebel]

I saw a similar post to yours over on mozillazine. According to MozillaAdmin, they are "low-priority" M14 bugs that are in the process of being triaged to M15.

mozilla.org front page might not show m14...

[jesser]

but the release notes are up.

--

:unscaled

[Ford Prefect]

I'm in Win95 testing Mozilla M14 at the moment (can't run it in Linux because I haven't got glibc2.1), so I can't give you specifics, but have you tried putting your font paths followed by :unscaled in your XF86Config? Also, have you got the URW outline fonts installed?

There's more details at http://www.gimp.org/fonts.html - I think modern Linux distributions have all the relevant bits done automatically. It'll help some people suffering from blocky fonts at any rate...

The Windows version of Mozilla M14 seems very nice - it gets better with every release. Soon it'll replace Netscape as my standard browser.

Ford Prefect

I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[j1mmy]

... but I'm a big fan of Microsoft Internet Explorer. It offers far better support for HTML4 and CSS than any other browser available, it's less quirky than netscape, faster than mozilla (though most browsers are), and free unlike opera.

I've heard that there is a linux port in the works, but haven't able to find much information on it. Anybody know anything?

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[Oscarfish]

I agree. IE beats Netscape flat out at HTML 4.0 spec support, iframes, CSS sheets, and the like.

I've gone looking for a Linux port but haven't found anything - IE on Linux, as corny as it sounds, would be my ideal setup. Until then I'm stuck with Mozilla and Netscape.

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[PurpleBob]

What a lovely comparison. Reminds me of this review for Douglas Adams' "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul":

"Funnier than Psycho, more chilling than Jeeves Takes Charge and shorter than War and Peace..."

--

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[jallen02]

At work we have some *VERY* complex forms (like insurance application) and NO other browser save IE can even handle all the styles you really need to crank the forms out at a reasonable pace. IE has the best Object Model/scripting support and is the only platform we have used that can build really rocking intranet apps using pure HTMl/scripting without delving into java and worse (activeX...) Okay.. that is what RAD is about and im quite sure many other shops who develop tons of Cold fusion are in the same boat as us. You cannot do these things without utter torture of netscape and its not worth it when IE is freaking build into peoples operating systems... This is where pragmatism comes in over ideals. We have even used Php3 for one intranet as a test and it went incredibly well. (my Recommendation to use php3) co workers were impressed with it and that it was free etc. My point here is.. WE NEED mozilla :-)

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[MicroBerto]

I'll agree with you on this. I especially like clicking an MSIE button and seeing a blank window pop up in less than a second. That's all i ask for.

However, when MSIE crashes, it crashes HARD! Boom there goes your computer, reboot, pray, and what not.. but that's ok, i'm steady in linux and don't use it. (except to boot up for games, but that'll die once xfree4 and nvidia get crazy)

wait i'm in it right now! hahaha... at work on a coworkers computer. oh well :)

Mike Roberto
- roberto@apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[mlogan]

I definitely agree with this. I hardly use windows anymore, but IE is faster and renders more correctly than Netscape.

-Mark

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[orcrist]

Why... I do believe you have found the perfect analogy for his comparison!

Chris

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[chialea]

>and its not worth it when IE is freaking build into
>peoples operating systems...

oddly enough, it's not built into mine. and I have no use for anything else in windows, and I can not do my work on it, so I can't switch. see the problem here? you have excluded a good number of people from your customer base with this. (now, I don't buy insurance, so you don't give a damn about me, but that's not the point :) )

yes, in an intranet you can force everyone into windows, but do you really want to? perhaps you develop applications for windows. otherwise, why would you want to force them? personally, I would have about zilch productivity on a windows platform...

just some food for thought...

Lea

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[divec]

Do you believe that IE having a very high market share will mean that MS can pollute the HTML standard to their heart's content? Do you think this will make it hard for other people to write web browsers? Do you think that would damage competition, and hence innovation in the web browser market?

If the answer to all the above questions is "yes", do you think that scenario is your "ideal setup"?

If the answer to any of them is "no", then I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

(this is not intended as a flame, though maybe as part of an impassioned debate)

Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ...

[jallen02]

*mutters* hehe, well yer a girl so whats it matter!! *KIDDING* *KIDDING* Dont worry I am phsyically abused for my sexist comments on a daily basis...*grin*

Okay okay to my real reply ;-)
Its not my choice honest! :-(

I would love for work to spend the time to get some good reusable code going in Php3 and Netscape and alternative browsers as the clients! But no one here is a real Unix weenie other than me. We have no real system administrators (just me and one of my bosses) A few folks have CS degree's and everyone would manage I think, but bleh my bosses wont do it say we are to small and dont have the development time to expend.. On top of that these systems are incredibly expensive so it matters even less since we have a very specific target audience for the software.

I have managed.. im not as productive as I could be because I have to use Windows.. I do VB stuff quite often. Project finish time always sucks, and we are ending a dev cycle now.

Anyways there is just little *I* can do about it since everything and almost all the code we tend to reuse is VB ActiveX controls. Again if things were done my way.... :-) okay back to work.. dont flame me to bad for the first part of my reply.

Disclaimer: women are actually to be worshipped and anyone who thinks otherwise is sic, Ive been married its deeply ingrained into me now :-o

Protocols supported

[linuxci]

As well as the protocols you'd expect to be supported some outside contributors have also added the daytime protocol (although they've wrongly called it the datetime protocol) and the finger protocol. There has also been work at implementing the IRC protocol.

Try clicking on the following links in Mozilla:

Finger

Daytime (site may be down in a few hours though so if it doesn't load it's probably not mozilla)

I can see a use for the finger protocol (if all major web browsers end up supporting it there'd be no need for those finger CGI scripts that people use to view .plan files on the web)

--
Make use of your spare CPU time!

Re:Protocols supported

[jesser]

I can see a use for the finger protocol (if all major web browsers end up supporting it there'd be no need for those finger CGI scripts that people use to view .plan files on the web)

Yep. More boxes will be slashdottable.

--

testing vs. personal use

[SEAL]

Why should you download the latest Mozilla milestone?
Don't say for personal use... it is still in a testing phase.
You have to remember that the developers are counting on your input.
Pour over the little details and give them feedback.
Some of the crash bugs need to be endured - don't go screaming back to I.E.
Hot off the press builds (nightlies) should probably stay with the developers, however, who have more
Grits to deal with the situation.
Down to the last milestone, you have to think like a tester, not an end user.
Your feedback is important to the Mozilla team.
Pants off to them... er whoops ;) Hats off.

SEAL

(sorry I couldn't resist...)

Re:testing vs. personal use

[Boolean]

I don't even have netscape any more. I dl'd the Marc 1st build and promptly deleted all other browsers. Coincidentally I freed up about a gig :) didn't know how many other browsers I had on there - - whoa.

If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson

Here are easier links for anyone who wants em...

[bergee]

[Redundent, just for those that are copy and paste imapaired]
Mozilla's bug database Bugzilla
Query Bugzilla
The bug reporting guidelines

-bergee

One other error I noticed

[slag187]

One more thing that I noticed is that when I run mozilla, I get this error:

modprobe: can't locate module net-pf-10

Maybe that's related? I'm running a stock 2.2.12-smp kernel that came from Red Hat (after having some problems with 2.2.14 - I reverted to see if it would help). But, I saw the same error when I was running 2.2.14.

Don't know exactly what it is as I could only find references to net-pf-3,4,5 (IPX and appletalk related).

Huh - maybe that's my problem? Anyone else seen this? Lets see if there is a correlation. Check /var/log/messages - that's where it shows up in my logs.

Need to open link in new window

[linuxci]

It appears in this build for these finger and daytime links to work you need to right click on them and open them in a new window.
--
Make use of your spare CPU time!

smp bugs?

[jslag]

just started getting my new smp box (BP6, 2 celery 500s) and I've noticed that M13 crashes randomly and often, while it is very steady on my K6. Planning to file a bugzilla report once I get a chance to delve into it a bit...

Question about Mozilla

[Oscarfish]

I'm having problems creating a Mozilla.kdelnk for my KDE desktop in Linux Mandrake 7.0. I point it to usr/bin/mozilla/mozilla (or wherever I unpack the files) but I can't get it to start up the browser. I've tried using the "run in terminal" option but I have the same problem. Whenever I go through Konsole, though, and do a ./mozilla it starts up fine. What am I doing wrong? Please help.

Re:Question about Mozilla

[Boolean]

You can't run it like that... here's how I fixed the problem. In any way to run it other than from an actual terminal (ie panel, icon, etc) I did:
cd /where/mozilla/is; ./mozilla
and it works fine.

If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson

Re:Question about Mozilla

[robwicks]

#!/bin/sh cd /home/robert/src/package/ && ./mozilla

Now that is just spooky. Same directory structure as my own machine. I guess I need to change my username. :) For a minute, I had flashbacks to my BBS days when people would embed control codes to cause variable values to appear on the screen so that you would think some complete stranger had your address and phone number. I remember reading one of those messages, and it said something like "Hello Robert, do you still live at 1425 Brookridge Ave? Can I call you at 404-263-0687? I nearly freaked out until the Admin let us newbies know the deal.
"Logic . . . merely enables one to be wrong with authority"

Re:Question about Mozilla

[Biswa]

To run mozilla from anywhere, here is a patch: go to /package edit mozilla (yes, it is a shell script) and change: dist_bin="" to: dist_bin="`pwd`" ; cd $dist_bin That's it.

Page rendering

[Stary]

Hmmm... I just tried it out (Win32). M13 seemed to render pages just fine to me, but M14 seems to get spaces between tables and table backgrounds among other things all wrong... anyone else notice something like that?

Noted some improvements though... I sure hope they get this thing into a good usable state soon.

You need glibc 2.1 (so Slackware 7.0 also works)

[linuxci]

You need a distribution that uses glibc 2.1 which includes RedHat 6.0, Slackware 7.0 and the latest Debian (I think - not 100% sure).

The reasons for glibc2.0 not being supported are ">here.
--
Make use of your spare CPU time!

Still no Java :(

[BorgDrone]

Nice job, the scrolling really got better.
still no java though, thats the only thing preventing me from using it as my main browser, so I guess I'm still stuck with my old, buggy netscape 4.x

---

M14 another leap in the right direction

[hunnr]

M14 is beginning to show some definate speed increases, as well as the slow disappearance of the many smaller less-important bugs that ran rampant through earlier milestones. It is still clearly a beta product, but it's reaching it's final state very quickly. It may not yet be stable and complete enough for every typical user, but i'm using it right now as i type this, and i would definately reccomend it to anyone with interest in the future of web browsing.

Woo Hoo

[Blakes 7]

Another milestone which doesn't work correctly! Alright!

Mozilla Sesame Street Build

[DonkPunch]

Today's fonts were brought to you by the letter "A". :)

I like it

[angel]

I am using M14 right now. Some of the fonts are a little wierd, but for the most part it seems great. I think its save to say that the fonts are better than nutscrape 4.x for linux, but there are still probs. Other than that it looks great. It is very fast. I haven't had it crash yet and I've been trying to get it to. One thing I really like is that it finally remembers settings. On M13 no matter what I did when I closed that bar on the left it came back the next time I opened the browser. That seems to have been fixed. N E ways.. I like..

Will Mozilla ever work with hotmail?

[duder]

This might be a stupid question, but why does not Mozilla work with Hotmail? Is the Mozilla team planning on fixing this?

AH HA!

[slag187]

Thanks, I did not know that. I agree, it should be widely advertised. I guess SMP is still not very widely used, so it doesn't effect very many people.

I'd moderate this way up if I could :)
Thanks again.

Colored bookmarks supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does or will Mozilla M(N>=14) support colored bookmarks, i.e. can each bookmark be assigned a color by the user?

Color-coded bookmarks would, for example, enable related bookmarks to be grouped ,by category, in a visually ergonomic way.

Re:Hey!

[AndyL]

You see, it's a pun. The topic is about the latest build of mozilla(a webrowser) sometimes refered to as "seamonkey"(a jar of brine-shrimp)

DOS port

[VAXGeek]

Nothing beats my DOS based web browser for pure browse-ability. I run Caldera OpenDOS {used to be available from www.calderathin.com, but I think now it's lineo.com) with packet drivers for an NE2000 and I run the DOSzilla webbrowser [http://idt.net/~kassoc/dos/, it's really cool, a webbrowser for DOS] ported to a DOS TCP-IP stack. For rendering, it's number 1. I pity the fool that tries to DOS my DOS box.

nWo for life!
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless

Re:DOS port

[evil_one]

I have used Arachne, and I find it to be at least as advanced as NS4, though lacking java/javascript support.

Good, but no cigar

[crivens]

Well that's being generous. It's already crashed once within 10 minutes of using it. I tried to download something, but it kept forcing me to choose to save the file, even though I was already selecting a directory. I know I should report the crash, etc etc, but I spend most of my day at work fighting bugs, so nah! Can't be bothered tonight. Mozilla is still a *long* way away from being an Alpha release methinks.

Features

[Esperandi]

I'd appreciate it if someone could clue me in to Mozilla's features. I know I'll get moderated down as a troll as soon as I post this because I'm an unashamed Windows user, but I'd like to know. I followed Netscape very closely and used their products exlusively until one day they decided they didn't need to support anything new, I'm just wondering, do they do DHTML, CSS, all the new junk?

Esperandi
I know its not Netscapes fault, they would have reamined strong if AOL had realized that the best programmers didn't HAVE to continue working anywhere and as soon as they made it unpleasant they'd jump ship (I would have too)

Re:Features

[robwicks]

Well, the DHTML may not work as well as Communicator. I went to a Red Dwarf page and the DHTML page they have didn't work with Mozilla, but did work with Netscape 4.72. Go figure.
"Logic . . . merely enables one to be wrong with authority"

Re:Features

[seoman70]

Mozilla can support plenty of DHTML features (possibly more than IE?), however, Netscape Communicator's "DHTML" is incompatible with Mozilla's, since Mozilla uses the W3C DOM (Document Object Model) standard for DHTML instead of the proprietary "Layers" method that Netscape Communicator used. Thus many pages that take advantage of Communicator's "DHTML" don't work. The upside to all of this is that it should be easier to write DHTML that works both in IE and Mozilla without having to resort to browser detection.

No RSA so no Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotmail requires SSL2 or SSL3 based on patented RSA (until September) algorithms so while security is beginning to get integrated into Mozilla, Hotmail won't work with Mozilla until sometime in September. There is no way to use Hotmail without security. I guess you could request this option from Microsoft but the answer will probably be a resounding NO!

If you want free email that doesn't use ssl try www.linuxstart.com -- works fine with Mozilla

migrating 4.x stuff (use your Netscape bookmarks)

[asa]

If you've got Netscape profiles already, you can migrate them to Mozilla. Just make sure you've deleted your mozregistry.dat file and then run mozilla -installer or mozilla -ProfileManager. Mozill will present you with a profile manager and you just select the 4.x profile from the list and start it. It will prompt you with a migrate dialog. Agree. Then you can run mozilla with all your 4.x bookmarks, preferences and mail-news settings. Have fun.

Asa

RPMs

[Kyobu]

Source and i386 RPMs are at http://students.washington.edu/mpalczew/, for those of us who have been unable or too lazy to compile the tarball.

Re:RPMs

[Kyobu]

Sorry. I was under the impression this was about GNOME 1.1.5, not Mozilla. Sorry again.

mozilla.party

[WebMistress]

Who cares about the source code? It doesn't look like they're having the party this year. Jamie, come back!!!!!!!!!

SMP does not better.

[mrsam]

I don't think so. Only if Mozilla is explicitly written to use threads, but is not thread safe, will you experience any problems. And you will experience problems whether or not you have an SMP box.

I have an SMP box here, and I have plenty of software that is not thread safe, yet they have absolutely no problems whatsoever. The SMP-ishiness of your box is only a factor that the kernel needs to consider.

P.S. You can check if Mozilla uses threads in Linux by feeding it to ldd, to see if it loads the libpthread.so library.
--

Re:SMP does not better.

[puetzk]

unfortunately, mozilla is multithreaded but not smp-safe. sucks, don't it?

But nice and solid otherwise... hopefully it will get fixed.

Re:SMP does not better.

[mrsam]

I would welcome a technical explanation for that. It simply does not make sense from a technical standpoint. Whether you have a single CPU doing context switches between threads, or whether you actually have multiple CPUs executing different threads simultaneously, the net effect is the same.
--

Re:SMP does not better.

[puetzk]

I think it involves memory allocation races? I don't know the technical details, but bugzilla.mozilla.org probably does. search for SMP in bug summaries, you'll probably learn something.

Faster win32 builds

[luge]

Just a few days ago they removed a bug in the timing code which had been quadrupling win32 rendering times. Oddly enough, the bug wasn't in Mozilla itself but rather in some debugging/timing code- once that was disabled, the slowdowns went away.
~luge

Thanks all

[Oscarfish]

Thanks Boolean and Claude Debussy. I wrote a script for it and it works fine, I really like that icon too :)

Oh dear...I'm having some serious scrolling and font issues with M14...don't remember them from previous builds. Onward Talkback!

No solaris build

[bolthole]

neither x86 nor sparc binaries available.

I thought they were supposed to auto-build all
this stuff. What's going on?
grumblegrumble...

Re:Anything apart from Redhat supported?

[kartracer_66]

Download libjpeg.so.62 from somewhere in rpm format and just force the rpm to install. I tried statisfying the dependencies, and then X wouldn't start. I had the same problem in SuSE 6.1.

Re:A Linux product needs bug reports???

[divec]

The way some people talk [...] Linux products are almost unbelieveable in their stability.

I agree this isn't true. However I think you could make the following claims:

• Mature free software tends to be more stable than closed-source software of equivalent functionality.
• Once a version of a piece of free software is stable, subsequent versions are usually stable. This is not true of closed-source software
• Linux (and GNU libc and other core parts of the OS) is very stable. This means there is a chance that applications running on top may be stable. This is not true of any popular closed-source OS. It is true of some unix systems which are derived from software developed openly.

Re:will someone tell them unix != linux

[divec]

I would imagine that stable versions will run on solaris, irix and *bsd just as well as on linux. However, you must expect that development versions will be documented best for the most active development platforms. This means Windows > Linux > Mac > Other Unices.

M14 behaves much worse than latest M15 nightly..

[Axe]

... I am posting from it right now (Linux), and it looks buggier than two day old nightly build (tagged M15) that I was using before that. I will put it back.

OT: Slashdot speed (was 'any hope for the speed?')

[orcrist]

I'm very surprised that Rob hasn't implemented Gzip::Chain for Slashdot. For those of you who don't now what that is, it's a modperl handler which gzips the output before sending it. This takes advantage of the single most unused feature of Unix Netscape, namely gunzipping pages on the fly. Given the huge amounts of text on most Slashdot pages, as well as the above-average use of Unix Netscapes by Slashdot visitors, I figure this would be a very significant improvement in speed for said users, not to mention reduced bandwidth usage. Of course, I'm not sure how much CPU time that would require on the Slashdot servers, though I assume bandwidth is more of a bottleneck.

Just a thought which I keep on meaning to mail Rob...

Chris

Yep, yep you are going to get flamed for that.

[mosch]

Because it's simply not true. Netscape navigator has shit-poor CSS and HTML4 support. IE5 introduced the world to a new level of compliance, piss-poor. Mozilla, while unstable, has almost perfect to the spec compliance for CSS and HTML4.

Anyway, I'm not going to waste any more of my energy on your troll.

----------------------------

Re:Yep, yep you are going to get flamed for that.

[Sundiata]

Dude, Mozilla hasn't even been released yet; while it's not vaporware, it's not exactly shipping, either. I'm extremely eager to see Mozilla released; if it turns out to be a superior browser to IE5, you can bet I'll switch back in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the development and release have taken so embarassingly long that I'm beginning to wonder whether or not the Mozilla engine will be able to break back into the mainstream market. At this point, it needs to be an earth-shattering product.

Goodness

[srcosmo]

What has happened to the ./ effect here, people? Their FTP server has max. 512 users, and I got through??
We've got to try harder! :P

Re:You need glibc 2.1 (so Slackware 7.0 also works

[Stormie]

You need a distribution that uses glibc 2.1 which includes RedHat 6.0, Slackware 7.0 and the latest Debian (I think - not 100% sure).

The reasons for glibc2.0 not being supported are here.

Here is a working link to that message.

Crashed on Anandtech ....

[Enmity_qXp]

does www.anadtech.com crash yours too? Might be me .. running a beta browser on a beta OS (win2k) is usually not good :)

no icon on win32

[QuantumG]

Yer.. tis just a shame that they cant put an icon up in the top left hand corner, like every window under win32.. what's there is the "standard" application icon.. totally lame.. I drew some icons and wrote the code to load it (how hard is LoadImage.. really?) and submitted it on the mozilla newsgroups.. it still isn't included.. I really don't think I should need cvs write access to do a simple update like that.. oh well.

Re:Blame it on XPToolkit? - win32

[QuantumG]

bah.. on win32 you should use the common controls that are a part of the operating system.. I don't want some crappy thin line border around my pop up menus.. I like the win32 gui.. that's why I use it. (I hate the blue screens and file bloat and that's why I use mozilla).

check out the file browser

[tweek]

Open up a local directory in mozilla. I don't know how it looks on win32 but it really kicks ass under *nix. I know it's kind of silly but it still makes it pretty neat.

As a side note, do the precompiled binaries have SSL support? I can't get it working and the crypto FAQ on the page hasn't been updated yet.

Any tips or should I just let the Lizard build overnight?

Re:Memory leak?

[lambda]

Mozilla? Memory leak? Never!

Re:Clue for the humor impaired

[seoman70]

Why should you download the latest Mozilla milestone?
Don't say for personal use... it is still in a testing phase.
You have to remember that the developers are counting on your input.
Pour over the little details and give them feedback.
Some of the crash bugs need to be endured - don't go screaming back to I.E.
Hot off the press builds (nightlies) should probably stay with the developers, however, who have more
Grits to deal with the situation.
Down to the last milestone, you have to think like a tester, not an end user.
Your feedback is important to the Mozilla team.
Pants off to them... er whoops ;) Hats off.

Re:Anything apart from Redhat supported?

[DannyGene]

I had a similar problem. Try running ldconfig...it fixed a libjpeg and libpng library not found error.

Neat preview, not my main browser yet

[NightParrot]

Ok, I'm writing this in M14 under NT4 after an hour or so of casual browsing. I haven't run previous Ms so I can't comment on relative merits.

It looks neat, it feels neat. Couple things missing, though:

- Alt-cursor key navigation for back and forward. I use this a lot in normal browsing.

- You can't turn off image autoloading. I consider this basic browser functionality so I'm startled at its absence. (: Someday when this gets fixed I'll consider M# for bulk surfing!

WAAH-HOOO!

[Sith Lord Jesus]

I'm gonna use the hell out of this thing, bugs and all. I'm sick of Communicator 4.7 and it's problems, and IE 5 freezes on me every 10-15 minutes and I have to restart. Screw that. Mozilla's 11-13 have run (mostly) great on my machine, and have gotten better with each release. I'm counting the days until beta.

Talkback is really M14, Readme says M13...

[SuperKendall]

The README contained the following line:

<i>mozilla-win32-M14-talkback.zip is identical to mozilla-win32-M13.zip.</i>

I'm grabbed talkback and am just running it now, it does say M14 - so I guess that's just a typo and not a version behind!

Re:OT - Re:Anonymous Moderator post.

[Byter]

Then make it "-1, Factually Incorrect". Anyone who is rational knows that OS choice is an OPINION, not something factual..and if some idiot moderator moderated that down with "Factually Incorrect", they would get KILLED in Meta Moderation.

I just want something to knock down people who state something like it's a fact when they actually don't have any clue, and then that misleads other people.

Irix Build?

[Chris Frost]

Does anyone know why there have not been any Irix builds for *any* of the milestones?

I have tried many of the nightly builds over the past couple months, but they all have problems mapping the gtk library for some reason (Irix 6.5.6m, R4k; gtk 1.2.5 and 1.2.6).

I have tried build from nightly and milestone releases using gcc 2.8 and 2.95 several times, but it seems I need sgi's cc to bulid nspr.

I did find a page detailing how to build mozilla under Irix (didn't work), but the person who wrote that page has since left sgi, and after I was able to get in contact with him, he said that he couldn't really help. :(

Could anyone point me in a direction to an Irix build? Or even better maybe some pointers on why nspr doesn't build with Irix/gcc (but it does with Linux/gcc or Irix/cc)?

Thanks!

wow, this is so good, that I'm....

[Snorp]

running `apt-get remove communicator-smotif-47`

M14 really rocks.


Snorp

www.dn.se

[matsh]

It has crashed on this page since M11.
I run NT on a single processor PIII.

Re:www.dn.se

[Biswa]

I loaded this page on my machine (latest nightly on WinNT 4 SP 6a on PII 64 MB RAM) - It worked fine. Have you tried the standard methods (deleting C:\winnt\moz*.dat, users50 directory, etc ? )

Re:testing vs. personal use (crypto)

[chialea]

do you not need things that use crypto? personally, I have mr. spammail (and slashmail) box at hotmail that I couldn't get to in M13... of course I expect this to change, but it sure as hell hasn't yet (I just checked hotmail in M14 for linux).

Lea

Re:OT: Slashdot speed (was 'any hope for the speed

[evil_one]

This would increase speed on connections where the following conditions exist: Slow connection (eg, less than cable/dsl) AND there is no Modem or PPP compression This would likely decrease speed on cable/dsl and higher, as the browser would have to unzip the html prior to rendering.

Re:migrating 4.x stuff (use your Netscape bookmark

[evil_one]

Under WIN32, yes. *nix and mac folk need to migrate everything manually.

My only gripe about Mozilla

[msaavedra]

Mozilla runs great on my system, but there is one seemingly minor (but aggravating) problem that prevents me from using it for my everyday browsing: it doesn't let me click the middle button to open a link in a new window like Netscape 4.x for Linux does. I like to browse the web with lots of windows open at once, and its a pain to always have to select an option in the context menu to open a new window. This always keeps me going back to 4.x, despite that browser's numerous deficiencies.

Does anybody know if Mozilla will support this eventually? I'm not sure if I should submit this as a bug, since it's really more of a feature request. Is there any standard method to request a feature from the mozilla developers?
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"

Re:OT: Slashdot speed (was 'any hope for the speed

[Zico]

I don't think that any benefits would be worth the extra load on the server compressing all this dynamically-generated data, though. Especially because I don't think the benefits would be too drastic for most users. A lot of users (I'd guess most) have net connections (modems, isdn adapters, etc.) that already perform decent text compression between them and their ISPs. Just my opinion, corrections welcome

As an aside, IIS 5.0 (maybe 4 as well, I'm not sure) also supports compressing sent data -- any idea if Netscape can handle this as well?

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

Regarding Ports and such

[evil_one]

M14 is for bugstomping. M13 is still the latest ported milestone, as evidenced by this quote from Project Seamonkey: Current Project Milestones and News [Latest Testing, Evaluation and Porting Release: M13] [Next Development Milestone Target: M14 - Open Bug and Engineering Task List] For additional information on this and other upcoming milestones check the milestone plan.

SMP safe Linux apps?

[Schmerd]

This makes me worry. I am planning to upgrade my machine in a couple of months to a dual-PentiumIII. I was under the impression that the only SMP problems were at the kernel level (in development drivers and the like). But now that I hear normal apps might not be SMP safe, it makes me wonder if I would waste my money buying an SMP machine. I'm interested in hearing from people running SMP desktops as to how many problems they have caused by apps or kernel things not being SMP-safe.

Re:SMP safe Linux apps?

[flux]

SMP is definetely worth it. I bought my dual P450 at summer, and it is still fast :). My uptimes have been around 50 days, but the shutdowns have not been crashes. (Well, except one incident with hdparm..)

I've had my X crash sometimes with GL-applications, but I'm not convinced it is an smp-problem.

And yes, if an application is not thread-safe (and uses threads), it is more likely that it crashes on smp than on a single processor. This is because considering that tasks are switched 100 times per second (if they're busy), a code fragment can be easily executed in 1/100 seconds - but on smp, if the locks aren't there, the violating code segments are ran simultaenously, hilighting the problems with poor locking.

I'm sorry to see this issue was clearly (?) not taken care from the very beginning (or atleast from the current reincarnation's beginning), as it might be hard if not impossible to fix all the race conditions as an afterthought.. Perhaps adding global locks will cure, but then the performance won't be as good as it could be.

Re:SMP safe Linux apps?

[mrsam]

Relax. I've been running a dual-headed machine for over a year now. I do not believe that this claim is true.

I'm a developer, and until someone comes up with a technical explanation how a thread-safe application is not SMP safe, I will consider this to be a bunch of bunk.

The most likely explanation is that poorly written software that uses threads, but is not thread-safe, is far more likely to exhibit faults when you have multiple CPUs running multiple threads of execution. When you have an atomic operation that is not properly locked down by a mutex, it will fail in a threaded environment only when a context switch happens to occur when BOTH threads are executing the atomic operation, which is far more likely, comparatively-wise, when you've got multiple CPUs banging at it.

So, what you're really seeing is crappy going croaking on a dual-headed machine more often than on a single-headed machine, and falsely concluding that the app is not "SMP-safe", which makes absolutely no sense because there's no such thing, the app is really not thread-safe.
--

I'm running M15

[SurfsUp]

In fact, I posted this with M15. It's a nightly build - so far, pretty darn nice. Still a memory hog, though.

Proxy authentication fix is gone ?!

[Krollekop]

The M13 bug where the HTTP proxy could not remember the password had been fixed in one nightly build last week. It is not anymore in this release. I am certainly not going to use that M14 build if I must reenter my username and password each time I need a Web document (either an html page or an embedded image).
Damned! M14 is not even there and I must already wait for M15 ...

Offtopic

[anatoli]

Gentle Slashdot team,
please introduce user-customizable comment filters. They may look like this:

• content:goatse.cx: -1
• content:grits.*pants: +1
• author:Broose Perrens: -1
• author:^TrollKing$: +1
• etc.

With an option to display 'em on user's page, and an option to use top N popular filters, where popularity is weighed by karma. You will earn ethernal gratitude and Karmic Koolness.
--

Goodbye netscape

[Espressoman]

That it folks. I've been using this version on my dual PII 450 with 2.2.14 for the past half-hour without a single crash. Goodbye netscape you dog. Netscape/AOL should be ashamed. This pre-alpha build of Mozilla is a better browser and it's all I'm going to use from now on.

Thanks team for working so hard. I love this. I'm beyond words to describe how wonderful it feels to have such a great open source internet client. M15 is going to blow them all out of the water.

Dynamic g[un]zipping?

[divec]

Is it possible to get add-on hardware specifically for gzipping?
I imagine that'd be quite handy for high-load servers.

Does mozilla M14 on Windows handle dynamic gunzipping?

This is a classic

[xeer0]

This is a classic, from the Known Issues/Browser section:

"Strange Waterson attractor: Setting your Navigator preferences (Edit menu: Preferences: Navigator) to "last page visited" may reset your starting page to Chris Watersons' homepage. (bug 29166)"

Hasn't this happened to all of us, at one time or another?

Why not leave netscape/mozilla running?

[divec]

I especially like clicking an MSIE button and seeing a blank window pop up in less than a second. That's all I ask for.

This is achieved by preloading IE on startup, as testified by Prof Felton in the DOJ trial.

So if you like it, you could get exactly the same effect by preloading netscape/mozilla. If you also use a window manager which hides shrunk windows, then the effect is identical.

M14 and IE are comparably fast

[divec]

They've squashed a couple of showstopping speed bugs in M14. It's the first time I've seen mozilla running at a speed comparable to IE.

It offers far better support for HTML4 and CSS than any other browser available

That depends if you count mozilla as "available". It is more standards-compliant than IE.

If you need to use freedom-eroding software because it is technically better than Netscape, then please go ahead. But don't give people a false impression about mozilla by making misleading claims like this.

her

[/ASCII]

Mozilla is a she. Just like Godzilla. So it's her face.

Mozilla M14, just did a spec file

[snail_talk]

hello all, i just did a spec file today for the mandrake distro, though i guess it owuld work on redhat as well. i ran it and i must say that i was impressed with its looks, but i gues it's rather...flashy. not my type.

Is chrome support broken?

[Caine]

According to the Features list in the release notes,chrome support should be working, but as soon
as I try to set one, it dumps core on me.

1) Am I lame?
(Counting this only, not in general, in which case everyone would just say yes =) )
2) Is chrome support broken?
3) You have to go about setting a chrome some very odd way?

Re:you shouldn't get flamed for that

[jdasher]

I use IE5, and you're right, it's much faster. It's also more stable than Netscape or Opera 3.? (7, I think).

I have a Win98/Linux (currently RH5.1, eventually RH6.1, formerly RH6.0, Mandrake something.else, SuSE, yada yada) machine with the most recent Communicator, Opera, and IE browsers. Opera doesn't always render pages completely (lack of support for certain bells-n-whistles), and Navigator 4.7 sometimes crashes when I have too many pages open - let alone the fact that it doesn't recognize many embedded links, so I have to use the mouse after typing my userid and pwd at certain sites.

I downloaded/installed M14 yesterday, and it worked great, except for vertical alignments in some tables, wouldn't let me use the mousewheel, and wouldn't let me type email messages at OperaMail (whose webmail I use). (I'll rut through various files and bugzilla to see what's wrong this weekend, when I have more time.)

Still, none of these compare to the speed of IE. Sure, MS isn't compliant with several HTML & other standards, but during the week (and most weekends) speed and stability matter more to me than my personal preference for Navigator (and now, Mozilla - I really do love this build). People who don't like that fact should work to fix what's broke in other browsers, not deride you or me (or many other people, I'm sure) for using what works better.

Re:You need glibc 2.1 (so Slackware 7.0 also works

[Bio]

I'm a stupid, stupid, stupid user.

But why do I get this message:
./mozilla-bin: error in loading shared libraries: /home/tiemann/incoming1/package/components/libucvj a2.so: undefined symbol: assign_with_QueryInterface__13nsCOMPtr_baseP11nsIS upportsRC4nsIDPUi

I have Redhat 6.0 installed.

Request for assistance

[treebeard77]

I admit, Installer.exe has spoiled me. It picks up my existing proxy setting & bookmarks nicely. I've been using the nightly builds lately. Yes, they crash a bit, but I've preferred them to the old milestone 13.

Is there an easy to apply the talkback option to an Installer.exe installation? or What steps should I take to preserve or transfer all my settings from the previous installation?

Thanks, I'd really like to at least help by sending feedback

Re:OT: Slashdot speed (was 'any hope for the speed

[westyx]

As somebody who pays for their net usage, i'd love this feature. Of course, i'd love proper searching for articles by time and date, but i've already sent the email requesting that feature a few times, and i'm not holding my breath waiting for it.


Chief Prosecutor
Advocacy Department