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 (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?

[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.

Article on M14 release

[Freshman]

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

Here.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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

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.

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).

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?

[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:Wow

[Jeffrey Baker]

Is it one of these?

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

-jwb

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.

--

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!

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.

--

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 ...

[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 ...

[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)

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: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.

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

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...

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!

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.

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...)

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.

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

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: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.

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

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: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

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: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

[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

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.

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.
--

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.