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Mozilla Milestone 15
[TWD]insomnia writes "Mozilla M15 is out on their FTP site. It seems already a bit faster than M14 and Netscape 6 PR1. " Not in woody yet (blatant hint ;)
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You're right, some of the other application packages available that use Mozilla XPToolkit technology are faster (e.g. Aphrodite, Sullivan etc) because their style sheets are significantly simpler.
One of the problems with the current skin is that it is huge, style wise - many rules for the different components of the UI (grey menubar menus, blue personal toolbar menus, different types of buttons etc), all of which are read into one large soup of style rules, which must be traversed (looking for matches) when resolving style for elements as the content is built (or is changed). This style resolution is a contributor to some of the UI sluggishness you may have seen.
Once the foundations of skinnability are in place (which is one of my current tasks), we will work to produce a simpler skin that should see some subtle but noticable performance improvements!
Thanks,
Ben Goodger
mozilla.org UI lead
Not really. It's intended to display to the spec (just like any other browser) but still messes up quite often. Most of www.gmx.de gets cut off, articles linked to from slashdot get jumbled, etc. Yes, it's open source, so these bugs get fixed in a reasonable amount of time, but mozilla isn't anywhere near being able to claim standards compliance.
Following the specs to the letter isn't such a great idea anyway, even when they're not contradicting each other and themselves. According to Ian Hickson, image alt text is supposed to be displayed as normal text, with nothing distinguishing it from page text, unless the page specifies how broken images are supposed to be displayed. And, oh, the spec for how to say how broken images are displayed will be in the NEXT version of CSS for website developers who don't want to use mozilla-specific code. Very few webpages with broken or slashdotted images look good in mozilla as a result, and layout is completely messed up even when width= and height= are specified.
It's like one dynamic living document... I love it.
Yeah, it's cool, as long as you have a dual 1Ghz box. (I'm sure it will start getting faster quickly once the features solidify a little more.)
It's a platform, not a program.
So why does the security still suck? (see my sig)
--
The shareholder is always right.
PIII 450 128M Voodoo3AGP running (woefully) Win98.
About the ball:
Mozilla M15 (from:ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/r eleases/m15/) Build 2000041805 a 5339K download without the talkback client.
Impressions:
[1] Downloading the program is fast. Getting a browser, mail and news in under 6M (1254 files), is impressive.
[2] click Mozilla.exe --> open browser == 11 seconds. Cool.
[3] Moving my mouse along the pull down menus, considerable lag when I hover over bookmarks (prolly from the 985 bookmarks:).
[4] Pulled down QA and loded the smoke tests. all OK.
[5] Loaded the aphrodite skin. The GO button is a few pixels to low on the tool bar but, It all works well.
[6] Loaded the Sullivan skin. The back ground color looks like something changed. M15 has a darker grey than the background on the buttons.
[7] Loaded xml.com Alert: "the connection was refused when attempting to contact adforce.imgis.com". There's a dialog for every time an image doesn't load. had to press OK 8 times.
[8] Fast...ohmygod fast. Loaded the Jargon file v4.2.0 Jargon.html file from my local drive (2.16M) and saw it on the screen in less than 2 seconds!
[9] Clean interface, standards compliant, and ohmygod fast.
[10] My best regards to the entire Mozilla team and to all that help them with this wonderfull platform. Your quality work shows in all that you do. To those of you who have been waiting for a working browser before you start your mozilla development project . . .come and get it! !
___
I believe the code for automatic address-completion went in a couple days ago. It's probably not turned on or something.
Mozzy has password remembering already set up. It works okay. The mailer is radically better than previously. Javascript works. Most webpages work pretty well.
It will be better at web-FTP than IE5 for windows, which was the MOST IRRITATING thing I have ever seen. (it turned it into a file folder, but drag and drop didn't work, so you needed to Right Click, Copy To Folder, then do some GODFORSAKEN SHIT to get it to save... that option went off REAL FAST)
Mozilla knows how to download shit and save and open local files now.
Mozzy starts up without dying now. The initial load is very sluggish, like everything else. If it is in cache, it starts up very very quickly.
The biggest gripe is focus issues... They're still fruity and it is far too easy for focus to go into the void, leaving you with a useless shell.
The extras and the obscene flexibility of the UI definition language will make this a seriously cool thing... If you can't imagine how cool something this flexible will be, then that's sad.
It's like one dynamic living document... I love it.
So the colors suck. Deal. You can change them later. A theme manager will likely be set up in a few more months..
It displays shit correctly, to the spec... There are workarounds for shitty HTML like slashdots...
It remembers your homepage, it remembers all sorts of shit now. Except that goddamn default toolbar. Oh well.
Most of what sucks about mozilla is being fixed or can be changed by you... That's what i like about it. And it is free after all.
And stop bitching about the extra features... The editor and the mail program and all that shit are basically hyper-dynamic webpages. The size is probably going to be like 10MB compressed for EVERYTHING that mozzy does when it gets to netscape release... that includes all SORTS of shit plus new java.
/me shrugs... It's really not that bad folks. And it will continue to get better as long as AOL keeps dumping enormous amounts of money into the project.... And we all start learning how to design better (faster/more effective) user interfaces for mozilla faster...
It's a platform, not a program.
-troll taker