Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla M16 Released
Mozilla M16 Builds are now up at the Mozilla FTP site. Check your local mirror first! This release supposedly has the switchable skins stuff in there. You can
also read the release notes if you're interested in some details.
Well, woody and potato work just fine here. The basic instructions.
/usr/lib/mozilla /usr/lib/mozilla /usr/lib/mozilla/run-moz* /usr/bin/mozilla /usr/bin/mozilla. Change to n "
:) )
1) Grab the tarball, and unpack it.
2) You should see the package subdirectory from the directory in which you unpacked it.
3) su
4) rm -rf
5) cp package
6) cp
7) edit
MOZ_DIST_BIN="/usr/lib/mozilla"
MOZ_APPRUNNER_NAME="/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bi
also, go to the end and comment out all the bogus
environment variables (quite sloppy of them) that define
SHLIB_PATH
LIBPATH
LIBRARY_PATH
ADDON_PATH
Leave LD_LIBRARY_PATH alone. You need that one.
Then, exit to your user shell. For most things, it beats netscape. If you need java, you need netscape. If you need complicated animated gifs, use netscape. For security, use netscape. Everything else, mozilla (or w3m
...but still nowhere near ready for prime time.
The app itself is greatly improved. Windows no longer draw with all the speed and grace of a snail on barbiturates. The app doesn't feel quite as responsive as earlier milestones (and they have got to get that launch time down), but the overall feel is much better.
The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.
My other major complaint: no HTTPS support in MacOS yet. Come on, guys; it's in Windows and Linux, and even Netscape 6 beta 1 got it into their MacOS version (it was unstable as hell but at least it was there); why isn't it in the Mozilla builds? Honest question; the PSM for MacOS obviously exists so I don't understand why it's not put in when it seems to be for the builds on other platforms where it exists.
Skin support is much nicer; it's even easier to get rid of the "modern" retro default. This is an absolute necessity, short of replacing the default skin entirely, so I'm glad to see it's landed. Ditto for full PNG support ("full" PNG support meaning everything, including alpha channels, which were missing until now).
Rendering times, for those pages that worked right, was awesome. I can hardly wait for Fizzilla (the OSX port, using Carbon for the UI but raw BSD for the networking backend); this will truly rule. IE5 on OSX DP4 was respectable (at least for an early developer release, which it was), and OmniWeb was better still, but this has the potential to really clean up.
OK, a while back I was watching a Godzilla movie. I noticed that while I pronounce Godzilla "Godzilla", the actors pronounced it "Gozeera". I am wondering if there are any similar pronunciation conundrums with Mozilla?
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
My grandma had one some soap opera today(think it was all my children), and they had a computer scene with Mozilla and the Mozilla mail client open and being used. I couldn't believe it! Is this because Netscape has copyright issues or something? It was great!
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Scott Miga
suprax@linux.com
I hate to point out the obvious, but I've seen alot of posts here saying we've got a few milestones to go before the feature set is complete, and then speed optimizations begin.
This does not make sense.
IE has something like 70% of the browser market now, mainly because it just browses, nothing else.
Mozilla Team: Please consider freezing the features right now. You already have the best rendering engine, prove it by making the necessary optimizations. Then we can all have a prominent UI based opensource app to point to as a success.
"Stop eating your own dog food, and finish the damn browser."
Hotnutz.com - Funny
Under the heading about DOM issues, it pointed out that:
"Gee, is that a deprecated method? I can't remember...hmm, let's check the standard!"
So I surf on over to www.w3.org, click on the "DOM" topic, and BOOM
Crashed the browser, froze the iMac (running 9.04) and made me realize that one way to claim standards compliance is to refuse to let users see the standards. :-)
No, I have no clue why this bailed, but, if memory serves, this exact thing has happened to me before.
Babar
IT WORKS!
The acid test for me until now has been IMAP support - every single build I've tried has crashed trying to read my IMAP messages. That and deathly slow.
I honestly think M16 is *gasp* _faster_ than Navigator. They've pulled out some of the bloat, the rough edges are starting to come off - menus work, highlighting works. This is really getting to be sweet.
So jump on the bandwagon now folks... before the rest of the world discovers it and you have to turn to Opera to be cool again. =)
PS: Anybody got any cool skins yet?
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Just kidding of course (although I will note that Signal 11 posted a comment with this very topic to the story about the latest release of Mandrake and got moderated up to +5 (Insightful)). Anyway, not being a karma whore, I will be forced to confine myself to pertinent and ontopic postings. I downloaded M16 a couple of hours before the Slashdot story submission came through. It's *much* better than M14 (the last milestone that I've tried). As expected, the HTML rendering engine is fast and reasonably accurately displays most HTML documents, including the Slashdot home page. CSS support is a bit iffy around the edges, but this is well within acceptable limits (text styles are not always rendered consistently depending on window resizing details). The whole UI is a faster and more streamlined than in previous milestones, although I regret to say that it did crash 3 (three!) times the first time that I tried to start it up. A quick reboot later and it worked fine from there.
You don't need to know how to program. Every day about 100 bugs are reported. You can help by checking them for duplicates. Another way of helping is to test the bugs reported on Windoze and Mac and see if they also affect your Linux Box. This will prevent the people who can "program worth a lick" from wasting time that could spent fixing bugs.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Everyone seems to be looking at Mozilla as just another version of Netscape, but if you look at it that way, you really miss the point and potential impact of this project. The true importance is in the cross platform development that it makes possible at a high level. Not to mention that it employees the newest technology like XML, DOM and JS to create an interface that is so flexible, that it is written and interpreted at runtime. Oh and it is still fast! Skins are not the key to Mozilla, "Mozilla Total Conversions" are... as are "Chromes". Mozilla is versatile enough to write any program within it... I personally would like to see ICQ written with Mozilla. Check out the ChromeZone for projects that modify or use Mozilla as a development platform. I am involved in a project that customizes the Mozilla UI and adds some features for power users.(not a skin, but a Chrome) You can look at it here: Wayfarer Chrome.
Judging from the first couple posts, it seems that it might be safe to say that milestone 16 should be dubbed as the people are really pissed it's still a milestone milestone.
:)) .. it seems to me that Mozilla is already beginning to suffer the ridiculous feature bloat and slowness that was the downfall of Communicator. It amazes me that Communicator has so much absolute _crap_ in it they took the time to code, yet the HTML renderer is way far from perfect. Deep enough tested tables take tens of seconds to render on a p500!
Though I haven't downloaded 16 yet, M15 is slow as anything on my Linux box (Celeron 450/64MB RAM).. but maybe that's because of all the debugging crap. I'll try M16 sooner or later I guess.
I agree with the guy who said they should tone it down a bit with the features. I switched to IE because it has a simple interface, its fast, and it works (I choose to ignore the gaping security holes
Just make a browser that works and is fast guys.. leave the e-mail/chat/news/widget stuff for an addon or something.
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Putting together Gecko/Rhino (both of which seem fairly mature and fast) with a mature, fast toolkit could result in a very small, light, and fast web browser for those of us who just want to browse.
Unfortunately, none of those efforts seem to have matured enough yet even for an alpha release.