Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla M16 Up For Grabbing
Cioby writes: "No news on the homepage (yet), but on [the mozilla.org nightly builds page] M16 builds started to appear. Go Mozilla, GO! :)" True enough -- though M15 is the latest milestone listed, M16 has been available from the nightly builds for over a month. M16 rocks pretty well, too, though I haven't tried out its transparent gif feature yet. Hard to complain about a nightly release schedule ... [Updated 8:50GMT by timothy] (Sigh) -- Yes, that ought to say "transparent png," not gif. Guess I haven't tried that either.
I'm rather disappointed that there isn't a Solaris nightly build any longer. Where I am we have a network of PC's under Linux and Sparcstations under Solaris. To make Mozilla the default browser for all students we would need a Solaris build.
I discussed this on the netscape.public.mozilla.unix newsgroup, and it seems something broke the build automation process under Solaris and they didn't have time to look into it.
Speaking of which, I have never, ever, been able to build Mozilla myself, on any platform, to give something which looks even remotely like what they ship. Most of times it fails completely, and the reason for failure is not even systematic: it varies according to whether I made a CVS checkout or took a source tarball, it depends on whether I used "make" or "make all", on how I ran configure, and all sorts of things. Even typing make twice, with make clean in between does not give the same error twice. Mostly I get weird C++ errors which I don't understand because I only grok C (errors like "class fooBarMumbleBuz was instantiated with a virtual method frobnicateMeHarder whereas it only has non-virtual constructors", which really don't mean a thing). I also got a lot of unresolved symbols. Strange things.
Not even worth making a bug-report for, because nothing is systematic, every time I retry it's different.
Has anyone had more success?
Myplay locker (p2 of 555) [clr.gif]
.... 5/6ths of the beast
[sml_conr.gif] [clr.gif]
[not_play.gif] Problems playing?
[dotline_grey.gif]
555
Kate Bush
[dead_info.gif] Hounds Of Love
6:13 rock MP3 128K Edit
[ ]
[sml_play.gif] Hounds Of Love
I wonder if it'll work on Quark
Yup. The pages load a wee bit slower than under NS for me, but they actually scroll more smoothly once there. Nicer UI (in my view) as well.
I'd been shy about Mozilla for a while when it kept fouling up forms or leaving artifacts all over the screen, and I skipped M15 completely, but I got brave again (over dialup no less) and my 2-nights-ago build finally works with the slashdot backend;)
"Goodbye NS4, we hardly loved ye
You said it. Hard to believe the Mozilla project is only 2 years and change out of the gate. Compare that to the ueber-funded IE and the difference is pretty amazing.
I know many people like IE, but until they release a version for Linux I can't make all that great a comparison:) Still, from using it on borrowed computers, while IE seems blandly acceptable, I don't remember anything about it which makes me hanker for That Redmond Feeling. What am I missing?
Next stop, Konqueror
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Tne answer is so that web developers can run 2 copies of mozilla at the same time with different preferences. One might view it with a different font DPI, or with Javascript turned off.
Quite useful, actually, especially on a controlled environment where you can't create a new logon for development purposes.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
M16 from 5/21/00 on my Macintosh: rendered with red squares.
The sad state of things at the moment is that multi-browser compliant code has to support the lowest common denominator (ie. NS4), so if you were doing that then you would not be able to use dotted anyway.
The sad state of things at the moment concerning multi-browser compliant code and designing to the lowest common denominator is the fact that it all could have been prevented by Microsoft. Had they felt the need to allow the internet to continue to be platform independent when they first began work on their original browser, they would have concentrated on developing html rendering as close as possible to that of the Netscape browser which, at the time, was used by the vast majority of people on the internet. Instead they spent no time ensuring consistency and all their time on monopolization strategies that have them in court right now. There have been a lot of non-standards complaint work on both sides since then, but in the begining I remember wondering, "why do all these pages look different in internet explorer".
One of my favorite test pages for PNGs is this page (over at w3.org). Unfortunately, the page itself is so weirdly designed, that I can't really determine if Mozilla renders it correctly or not. I even emailed the page's author once, since I suspect there's something wrong with the correct/incorrect demo pictures, but that didn't make me smarter... Is it only me who has problems parsing a red check mark and a green cross into "correct"/"incorrect"? It just makes my brain hurt.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
The recent discussion about alpha channels is about a complete and solid support for the PNG file format. GIF isn't a ./-loved format due to it's stupid license.
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
***MOZILLA***
d ownload
Few more things...
Mozilla/static/x86/linux is like 7MB compiled/gzipped. I wish they would Bzip2 the bastards. I have not tried any auto-installer for any platform...
The emailer is becoming far more competent. I will enjoy supporting it. Multiple POP3 accounts, al crossplatform. (drool) Goodbye you fucking identities.
The HTML editor is tres-slick... I'm confident it will suck cock for the first netscape release, but oh well..
Keybindings are still a bitch for all platforms. Finicky, tempremental. Fuckit. FUCKIT. I hate that.
Mozilla has the most open development of any project I can think of. No months-of-silence, open CVS tree, open mailing lists, open development discussions, open documentation, public builds for platforms on the HOUR, decent license, open source bugtracker, open buglists, open discussion, GOBS of FTP power, great feedback methods, all is very very nice. Oh yeah, and a script on the homepage that shows EVERY code update made in the last day or so, plus exceptional code navigation tools, all on the web.
Mozilla/NS may never take over every desktop, but does it really need to? It's going to fill shitloads of niches that IE in all it's forms (yeah even pocket explorer which has GOT to be completely new code) is not going to fit into... Look at the netscape4/unix builds going into web appliances... Imagine what mozilla is going to accomplish in the next 10 years...
if nothing else netscape/AOL has opened up reams of competition, both from the Opera people, and people who will turn XPCOM/mozilla into a thousand different mutants...
***LINKS***
For a text-based browser that is similar to lynx and w3m but INCREDIBLY lightweight, complete, easy-to-use, and just all around makes you want to cry with joy, please look into the GPLed 'links'.
It is written in C, compiles anywhere, is way under a meg tarballed, and is the absolute most cruft-free thing I have ever used. Press 'g', go somewhere. It is nearly impossible to describe how fundamentally nice this program is.
It does frames exceedingly well, flies with tables, and is magic over a modem. The interface is (somehow) more pleasant than lynx's and it has pulldown menus hidden with ESC for other options.
It is the most underrated browser I have ever seen. The author is a god. My only complaint is that it fights with gpm for cut and paste.
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
-troll taker
Since nobody else has said so outright, I'll remind you all the actual milestone build of m16 is not yet out. These (as others *have* said) are the nightly builds along the path to m16. These have been available since before m15 was released.
When M16 actually does come out (and it should be within a few days), it'll be available at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m16/.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
My impression of what happens with a Mozilla milestone is that they start working on the next milestone even before the last is finalised. So although these nightly builds are aimed towards M16, it doesnt mean they are the actual milestone.
If it doesnt say on the Mozilla release page, its probably not released.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
BillWinUsr who probably has no compiler ready
If Mozilla were using GCC for Windows, this would be no problem. Bill could just double click make.bat and play some Minesweeper, Solitaire, or Vitamins while GCC is compiling everything.
Will I retire or break 10K?
POssibly - I did manage to load the whole locker a gfew minutes ago, and I began trying to do things...
Then it froze after I switched desktops and came back...
Only 72 megs needed to render 2000+ entries.
(BTW - thanks to whoever listened to that URL - I'm back at number 1)
The M16 release is not out yet and won't be for several weeks at least! The builds you see on ftp.mozilla.org marked with M16 are nightly builds on the M16 development branch and not the final product. There is a whole bunch of bugs and stabilisation to be done before M16 will be released. It does no good to bitch and moan about the quality of M16 at the moment since nightly builds vary wildly in quality from day to day.
As long as I can remember, the Mozilla builds have crashed every time it interacts with the filesystem on my Debian distro. Segfaults every time I try and save or access a file. Anyone else seen this or have a cure?
Mozilla out of the box may well not work with Junkbuster; it requires HTTP 1.1 to be turned off in Mozilla, as Junkbuster doesn't support that.
Search Bugzilla for "Junkbuster" and you'll find the name of the pref. you have to set.
Gerv
Trying to display all my tracks basically means rendering a *huge* table - 1000+ rows with gifs and links on every one.
Netscape needs abotu 256megs of memory and takes 10 minutes to do it - this is one of the reasons I'm waiting for mozilla to be able to do it (IE handles it perfectly - shame on us).
Mozilla used to be able to do it. - but the latest build dies :-( Maybe it's just because I keep adding stuff to my collection and the test is getting harder - oh well.
I can imagine some people here saying that the myplay locker design is stupid because it renders everything in one big table (well - the default is only 15 items). But you have to keep in mind that the browser from the evil empire handles it perfectly well - so shouldn't we be able to do a bit better. Arrrgghhh it's so tempting to take a look at this code myself.... as if I have any spare time...
(Why don't you go listen to some of my stuff while you're here - go on - you know that a slashdotter should be number 1. ;-)
Let's see, would that be the IE5.5/x86/win9x BETA? Or the one I can download for free from windowsupdate.microsoft.com today, assuming today has been redefined to be the future? Or the one that comes packaged with NT2k? Or the Mac version? I need clarity on this please. My arguments are quite important to me, and minutae is everything.
-troll taker
Mozilla: Makes Dots according to W3C CSS specifications.
Every Released Version Of IE5.0: Does not make dots, as required by W3C CSS specifications.
Apology accepted.
-troll taker
Run on my DG/UX box. And my Sparc Linux box. And my x86 Linux box. If you're going to troll, at least come up with something that isn't so trivial to counter...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
CSS on Mozilla is actually getting quite good. Last I checked, it was like 99% compliant with CSS1. To give credit where credit is due, IE 5 for the Mac is apparently fully compliant (but IE 5.5 for Windows isn't...the irony.)
Anyway, the most recent table of client-side XML performance I've seen is this one on xml.com, by Simon St. Laurent. In brief, Mozilla looks pretty good in this comparison. It's the only browser with XLink support of any kind, and handles a few other small things better than IE. Other than that, it's basically right up there. You mention XSL, but no browser has a standards-conforming XSLT at this point.
More interesting to see will be how well things shape up for CSS2 and DOM support, assuming DOM Level 2 ever gets unwedged. You mention SMIL, but I would have to argue that full CSS2 and W3C-compliant DOM are much more important.
Babar
how long does it take for you to build a CVS check out?
:-) A little bit less than 30 minutes.
took two and a half hours this morning for me
Heh. I love my Alpha
--
Heya Mozilla, how about a non-debugging build for the Milestones on those platforms w/o 'easy compile' options? Give all these THIS-POS-IS-TOO-DAMN-SLOW opportunists to see what a build looks like w/o all the debugging overhead.
Granted, you lose any option to debug problems the user may have, but perhaps at least give them the chance to see mozilla's true potential.
(fwiw, I'm downloading source and building w/ and w/o debugging enabled just for laughs.. I'm thinking more along the lines of Joe MacUsr or BillWinUsr who probably has no compiler ready. That, and I'm getting sick of the ITS-TOO-SLOW whining)
-'fester
There are some things you might want to keep in different user profiles though. Perhaps you NFS mount your home directory and access a single account form multiple boxes. In that case, you might indeed want different font sizes depending on what monitor you're using. But again, that's unrelated to your email account and shouldn't really reside in a "user profile", but a "machine profile" or "location profile". You are the same user every time.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Try margin widths expressed as percentages with a float to the side. Opera renders this by interpretting the it as x% of the available space. This seems to me what is implied by the box model. But IE 5 interprets these as x% of the total width of the containing box, which makes absolutely zero sense to me.
I don't have a spec handy, and I don't remember whether it's width or margin that breaks it, but I do know I wanted to fucking strangle the IE developers after spending 4 hours tweaking my new homepage in IE and then having it break horribly in Opera, NS and Mozilla.
It turned me off to web design, and sent me back to text only, 1993 style pages until Mozilla is actually usable.
> Is this relevant anymore? I mean, what can Mozilla do that IE doesn't do already?
Good question. Here's your good answer: It can be uncoupled from windows, in fact, it never was coupled with windows. It's solaris build (I assume) won't be a half-win32 port built in to let the browser run. Windows is big, yes. But mac, UN*X, BeOS and friends aren't dead. Netscape 4.xx is dead, thou. imho, and anyone arguing that it *doesn't* need to be replaced needs mental help. Matter of fact, a dyed in wool MS friend of mine *likes* mozilla, so I know you're just a troll and most MS windows users are more polite than yourself.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, spend half the day in meetings instead of doing what I needed to do.
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
Does Mozilla handle client-side XML yet ? And NO I don't mean the piss-poor CSS implementation that the earlier builds had.
I hate the Redmond behemoth as much as the next /.'er, but they've given me client-side XML in IE5, with an XSL that is weird, but usable. Until I get the same from Mozilla, I won't be switching my own desktop's browser. I'm even starting to not worry about writing IE-only code on public client sites (oh, the sweet temptation of this heresy, for which I shall certainly burn in the volcanic fires of monster island)
Lately, I have mainly been running IE 5.5 (with a SMIL). Mozilla is getting a long way behind.
Really, this should be on top (+5). I can see why this would confuse people who don't regularly browse the mozilla.org FTP site, but it should be made clear that builds have been labeled as M16 since the day after M15. Despite that labeling, it isn't M16 until it is announced by mozilla.org. Of course, that should be within the week, and it isn't a big error on /.s part, but /.rs should still be aware that what they are getting isn't the real thing.
IAAL,BIANLY
Latest nightly builds
M16 builds have been appearing for ages. The nightly builds are named after the upcomming milestone, so when M15 comes out all nightlies are now called M16... Take a look at the directory structure...
On related stuff the new builds are getting quite a bit faster and now have stuff like autocomplete in them. There was a feature freeze not long ago so we should (hopefully) see builds becoming more stable.
Linux moz is looking good although some old favourites (such as the scrollbars coming free bug) are still there.
The mac builds are still lagging behind other platforms which is a shame. We really do need more mac helpers to stop it becoming a third rate platform (in terms of the quality of it's mozilla builds).
From the little testing I've done on Windoze those builds seem good too.
Plugs/Links:
Visit Mozillazine! It has a build bar that informs you how good previous builds are.
Hang out in #mozillazine. If you've got irc (and you should because moz has one built in which can be launched from the prompt using mozilla -chat) use /server irc.mozilla.org then /join #mozillazine
Got spare time and a fast connection? Help Smoketest the daily builds.
New to mozilla? Take a look at NewZilla
Very nice. Definity an improvement of M15. It's still not all that fast though; and there's still a couple of noticable bugs in it. At least the stupid bookmark bug ( 11586 ) was fixed.
/etc/hosts so that way I odn't have to view the damn ads. But now everytime I come to a page with them on their, I get a dialog box saying "The connection was refused when trying to contact [insert blocked domain here]". It's really annoying, and it's the first time it's ever happened, since with IE5, N4.7, and M15, it never had any dialog box complaining about not being able to contact that particular server. Basically I'm asking if there is any way to turn this thing off.
One pretty major problem though, at least for me, is a stupid dialog box coming up evertyime I hit a page that I've blocked. I have certain domain's blocked (like ad.doubleclick.net, a dforce.imgis.com, etc) in
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
I've been karma-whoring on the slashdot, all the livelong day.
</TITLE>
<STYLE type="text/css">
P {border-style: dotted ; border-color: red}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This proves I am a fundamentally better person than you in every way. I hope parasites eat your colon and you die soon. Perhaps they'll look like the little red dots that are around this little sentiment. Unless you use IE, in which case you're going to be eaten alive by red tapeworms which will be shitting red string until you die.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
-troll taker
I saw a good discussion of portabilitiy concerns and one lept out at me. Most operating systems hand you back the least recently used block of memory when you ask for more so that if you have dangling pointers you are likely to not be using them any more. W2K deliberately hands back the most recently used one which means that if you made a mistake, you find out about it immediately.
This shows that someone at the OS division is serious about long-term stability. Forcing people to catch errors right away is a good quality control step. But in the meantime it means that a lot of things die on W2K, and in many of those cases the error really matters.
OTOH W2K changed a lot of other things, big chunks of it are a piece of cack, and all that. So this could just be yet another piece of W2K stupidity. But they should not conclude that until they check that they are not responsible...
Cheers,
Ben
PS I think it would be nice if there was a version of Linux that provided a stress-test for errors that should be handled. Constantly giving EAGAIN exceptions. handing back recently used memory, etc.
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I mean, what can Mozilla do that IE doesn't do already?
Offer sufficient competition to MS to ensure that they bother to keep improving IE.
I hope they tighten the code up some so it may be usable on low end machines as it has a FANTASTIC amount of promise. The programmers kick ass!
I *still* don't understand the user profile support in the Linux version - surely linux doesn't need it, since linux is a true multiuser system anyway?
As far as I can tell, the user profile stuff is redundant and confusing - allowing Alice to have Alice, Bob and Chris users configured in her ~alice/.mozilla/ directory, as well as having separate ~bob/.mozilla/ and ~chris/.mozlla/ users on the system...
I mean, why not just make the preferences user-specific ?
We weren't doing that. We were calling someone who was posting a "different opinion" embedded in falmes and flamebait a troll, and rightfully so.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Using the Win32 version of M16 found at the ftp site on the box at work, and the PNG alpha test site found here, I got these results. Not quite what I had hoped for. I will test both the Win32 and Linux builds on my personal box when I get home today.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder
FC Closer
Timothy assumes that since M16 is available, it must be ok to download it and do whatever you want with it.
And he's prefectly correct to assume so because of the nature of the Mozilla project, which he and everyone here knows about.
Everyone and their brother assumes that since mp3's are up on Napster, they're available for everyone as a God-given right, and anyone who tries to take that away is a filthy communist, etc. If somebody runs a w4r3z site, it's completely legit to download software from it (it was posted, right, so it must be ok!),
That's idiotic. No-one in their right mind, and hardly anyone here on /. really thinks that way. Heck, I how stupid would one have to be to associate "communism" with an attempt to protect a copyright, given that that's the exact opposite of communistic ideals?
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
For real, M16 and all the nightlies are becoming ridiculously good...
Experiences with Win32/x86/133/40/unloaded:
Fast on a 133/40 box... no shit... I spent an hour or two testing my CSS pages and it didn't crash once... The flakiness from generating new browser windows is almost gone...
The sidebar is ACTUALLY cool.. check out cnn.com with NS6PR1 to see how cool questionless/seamless sidebar/install can be.. This ISN'T like those shitty IE4/5 toolbar conquests from noname companies... It just slips in, giving actually cool information and shit...
The UI has calmed down lots... it is clean, rather functional, and what's best, can be COMPLETELY OVERHAULED to be faster/better/simpler/more-complex, ANYTHING...
Mozilla isn't just a lets-clone-netscape thing anymore, it's a big collection of XPCOMponents that you can use to create apps... Mozilla is just one of them..
The default mozilla/netscape skin is still pretty damn slow but managable on my win32/x86/100/40 you will see mozilla FLY when the lighter-weight skins are made... I have used them and they just feel so much lighter...
Experiences with linux 2.2/x86/90mhz/32MB
this machine is used for like three different services and at the time had 6 people using it, plus three people using X apps all over the network...
It was SLOW. FUCKING SLOW.
It took forever to unpack.. It took forever to load.. it took FOREVER for anything to happen...
Then i realized it was running almost entirely in swap, and still hadn't crashed.. that was cool..
The machine was RIDICULOUSLY burded at the time, so i can forgive it...
Experiences on linux 2.2/x86/400/128
Ridiculously fast. Ridiculously good. First time user startup in under 15 seconds... from there on out, starts up in 3 seconds... if mostly cached in memory starts up in under a second...
Crashes are becoming significantly more difficult to find... it is now more pleasant to use than NS4 for me... less UI niggles... FASTER. Good.
Goodbye netscape 4... FUCK IT.... Mozilla is going to be so radically more modifiable and fluid and extensible and NICE... oh wait, it already IS.
Goodbye NS4, we hardly loved ye...
P.S.: crystal-note-perfect CSS is an utter joy... my heart leaps...
from coworker: "where are your graphics stored?" (referring to complex CSS1 box with lots of color-tricks on no-graphic page)
-troll taker