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Mozilla Theme Builder Released

icqqm writes: "The people from AlphaNumerica have released their Mozilla theme builder which, of course, runs in Mozilla itself. Looks MUCH easier to use than the horribly complicated instructions fot XML files on Netscape's site" Note that it doesn't work with current builds, but it ought to once the dust settles a bit. I've been using Mozilla more than Navigator these days... Still want to get Galeon working since it looks to be a lot more slimmed down.

27 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. How do you use Mozilla? by kzinti · · Score: 2

    The Taco writes: I've been using Mozilla more then Navigator these days..

    I don't see how. I've been trying to use the latest (what are we up to now -- M17?), but it's not nearly up to snuff yet. Its worst problem is that it dumps core on a regular basis. It also has other nagging problems, but I could probably live with them if the app didn't die every ten minutes.

    On the other hand, I can say that Mozilla is clearly improving steadily; I've seen a marked increase in useability over each of the past three or four milestone releases. I like Mozilla and can't wait to try my hand at skinning it. But it's just not quite dogfood quality yet.

    --Jim

    1. Re:How do you use Mozilla? by Metrol · · Score: 3

      A little factoid for those not following the Mozilla project quite THAT closely. The milestone releases stink. They always have, and probably will continue to do so right up until when they release Moz 1.0 some time 3rd quarter of 2005.

      If you're looking for a reasonable snapshot of where Mozilla is at, pop on over to Mozillazine and use the links at the top of their page for the latest nightly download that's functional. Unless you're a third party developer, such as Alphanumerica, the milestones are best forgotten. Pull down a nightly and see what ya think. Love it or hate it, it's generally a much better picture of where this project is actually at.

      --
      The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
  2. Re:where's the grammar nazi when you need him? by Shoeboy · · Score: 2

    Fuck off, troll, or I'll rip your colon out through your mouth.
    Troll? I think you've got the wrong foot-fetishist. I happen to be a Karma Whore.
    --Shoeboy

  3. Not lynx, links by ghazban · · Score: 2

    No, the best way to read slashdot is with links. See http://links.sourceforge.net. It rocks, I could never go back to lynx again. Just make sure you know about the menu using escape ;)

  4. Re:Future Of Advertising by Metrol · · Score: 2

    I wasn't going to rant here, I wasn't. No, really!

    naden, you hit on a topic that's been scaring the heck out of me considering who is really running the Mozilla show. Yes, I have read many a lecture and been provided numbers of arguments that pointed out for me how Mozilla was not Netscape or AOL, but a truly independant entity. These were all good arguments mind you, but I still have my doubts.

    Clue #1: Netscape home page turned into pop up ad hell, designed to look like the Mozilla default skin.

    Clue #2: Why was theming so important all this time? As cool as this is the whole process of plugging it in and making it work (even with XUL in the play) could have waited until Moz 2.0. Unless a certain service provider needed a way to expand what platforms their software ran on. A simple browser couldn't do that.

    Clue #3: Moz is going to have a mail client. You can love it or hate it, it's in there. For folks, such as myself, it needed to be in order to fully replace NS 4.7. Thing is, somewhere along the line it was decided that they didn't have time to implement LDAP into the address book. This rather upset me, as I utilize this at my office where folks mostly use NS 4.x for mail. Even being upset I can appreciate time constraints. I'm just wondering why 3 months of development has instead been going into working on AOL's addressing schema. All the while, only one indvidual has been doing any work with the open standard LDAP.

    There's a good bit more that's still nagging at me about AOL's involvement with all this. I think I'll save some of that for the next milestone release of Mozilla.

    --
    The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
  5. Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but by ptomblin · · Score: 2

    Ok, then, look at http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/. Validates as 4.0 Transitional except for one tiny little problem that's beyond my control. But Galeon can't handle the relative links in it (try clicking on the link to my Rochester Flying Club page, or the one to my Piseco trip page). Neither can Mozilla M17. Netscape can. IE can. Lynx can. xmosaic could handle them back in 1992. But Mozilla, the saviour of us all, can't.

    So much for standards compliance. So much for the quality of open source software. Maybe if they hadn't wasted the last two years on chrome and eye candy, they could have actually implemented something that has been an integral part of the web since its early days.

    --

    --
    The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
  6. Re:This is news... by jilles · · Score: 2

    no doubt it was submitted numerous times before it was posted on slashdot. I think slashdot should either rephrase the slogan "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to "news for nerds, stuff that mattered last week".

    This is a bit harsh perhaps but it captures my general impression that it takes longer and longer before things get posted on slashdot. This doesn't mean the discussions are less interestng (moderation brought back the fun for me), but it does mean that I no longer use slashdot as a prime source of news.

    I occasionally submit news to slashdot, often on days with very little postings (e.g. sunday). Invariably those submissions are rejected after 15 minutes or so. Only to be posted days later by someone else. I understand, slashdot people have to read through a lot of submissions but perhaps they could monitor some sites for new articles. E.g zdnet is a frequently referenced site on slashdot, yet it sometimes takes days before a post is made on a zdnet article.

    BTW, I have a slashbox for mozillazine, so I learned about the new tool within hours after it was posted.

    --

    Jilles
  7. Re:Galeon is great by waldeaux · · Score: 2
    I'm glad you had such luck.

    I've been trying to use Galeon for several months. Yesterday, I did exactly as you did: downloaded the M17 RPM an installed it, followed by the Galeon RPM.

    When I run it nothing happens. NOTHING. No diagnostic messages, no crash, no whirring of the hard drives - a silence as profound as when the whale swallowed Jonah.

    I'm presuming that this isn't what's supposed to happen, right?

    I'm running Sawfish 0.30 on Helix 1.2.1(?) on RH 6.2. If someone out there is using the same setup and has had success, I'd be interested in hearing how you managed it. Even more importantly, if someone experienced what I am experiencing and worked their way out of it, I'd LOVE to know your secret! I've heard a lot of good things about Galeon and I'd really like to try it!

    P.S. The same thing happens when I run M17 too.

  8. Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but by Chris+Pimlott · · Score: 2

    The problem with your CSS is the "#664433". Get rid of those quotes and it renders fine for me in Mozilla.

    Always a good idea to check your pages for standards compliance.

    Not sure why the JavaScript doesn't work (although DOM layer support is rather dicey and browser specific).

  9. I -completely- disagree by Pengo · · Score: 2


    You should try using the nightly builds.. you will be shocked. I must say that it's running amazingly better now than the M17 build.

    I don't know what bug(s) they fixed but I must say I am quite impressed with the nightly builds the past couple of days.

    They have also put a new skin on the distribution and it looks GREAT.




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

    1. Re:I -completely- disagree by macpeep · · Score: 2

      Huh? Did you reply to the wrong post? I didn't say anything bad about Mozilla and I have indeed tried nightly builds - just downloaded one yesterday. This is what I was talking about. The new skin - Modern 2 - looks great. Modern 1 that is now known as "blue" sucked big time tho. I'm talking SKINS - not the browser on a whole.

      The browser on a whole is getting better every day and especially with Classic and Modern 2, it's very promising indeed.

  10. Re:Mozilla memory footprint (offtopic) by Sleepy · · Score: 2

    Well, Microsoft *did* build IE into the OS. This makes the browser lighter at the expense of the OS.

    The end user never sees the difference, as the mem count is roughly the same. Windows shows only memory dedicated to the application, and I doubt it's showing *shared libraries* in that total.

    Put it another way, if you could force Windows to load Gecko as a shared library during boot, then you would have LESS ram after boot. Now make a "lightweight" browser that invokes Gecko. You now have a browser that's as small as you want to fake it.

    That said, the Mozilla interface is the real bloat. Galleon crashes a lot, and some of those crashes are obviously happening in the UI. I love Galleon but "random clicks" in the UI kill it - I hope they implement a stable/unstable tree.

    As for Taco "wanting" to install Galleon - heh - please, we know he's playing Diablo 2 in Windows 98 all day long. Heh.

  11. Galeon is great by jancastermans · · Score: 2

    I installed the Galeon rpm after I installed the Mozilla RPM from the Eazel site. Imported my Netscape bookmarks and it worked immediately! I'm sure everbody can do that!!

  12. The app by 348 · · Score: 2
    Seems a little light on some of the basics, however all in all I think they have hit a home run with the "marketing" approach. Having reached a higher level of stability with 17 the timing is right to try to get non Mozilla folks to give it a try. Using the easy branding approach is a great way to gain some corporate support. Joe Lan admin could easilly become a hero when he ports the companies browsers to 17 with a custom corporate look and feel with logos etc.

    Very good tactic. Hats off to the Mozilla team for creativity in targeting and tracking to a valid marketing strategy rather than relying on just "Mozilla is cool man, It's open source."

    --

    More race stuff in one place,
    than any one place on the net.

  13. Future Of Advertising by naden · · Score: 2

    With Mozilla having the ability for the entire user inteface itself to be defined externally, I wonder if we are seeing the beginnings of a possible future advertising hub. Whilst this is somewhat occuring with the ability to add buttons and toolbars to IE, XUL enables an unherelded array of customization possibilities.

    Could in the future, the entire web browser be a huge banner, with the theme being streamed via an All Advantage server in exchange for money.

    Similarly could porn sites trick you into using a porn theme complete with Forward and Back buttons that go off to other porn sites rather than the appropriate destinations.

    Also, how long before Netscape really does fulfil its goal of becoming the ultimate x-platform OS shell.

    Im just dreading the future of the net.

    Naden

    "Who do you want to geekbone today ?"
    - www.it-guys.com

    --
    Funtage Factor: Purple
    1. Re:Future Of Advertising by Greyfox · · Score: 4
      Also, how long before Netscape really does fulfil its goal of becoming the ultimate x-platform OS shell.

      Kind of like Emacs?

      Funny thing is since they've ported Xemacs to gtk and are working on integrating it with bonobo and they're working on integrating Mozilla with bonobo, you're going to have two applications that think they're operating systems that can communicate with each other via CORBA. Why don't they just add E-Lisp bindings to Mozilla now and be done with it?

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  14. Re:Themes don't work anyway by Metrol · · Score: 2

    The themes do install, and even on the nightly builds. They just don't install as advertised yet. For some reason the theme install seems to hang while trying to get back in contact with themes.org. What ya need to do is let the theme download, which will extract the files into their proper folders. When the dialog box showing the install goes away, pop into Mozilla's preferences and select the new theme manually.

    There's quite obviously more work needing to be done on the follow through on the install, but it is quite possible to get those themes down and switched. You should be aware up front that when switching themes it'll blank out whatever web page you happen to be looking at, so you'll have to re-load. Minor stuff, but a glitch never the less.

    --
    The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
  15. more importantly... by macpeep · · Score: 2

    What I feel is much bigger news regarding Mozilla is the totally re-done Modern skin (the default one). This was quite possibly the worst problem with Mozilla because it made most people puke the first time they saw the app, which made for a pretty bad initial impression..

    The new skin is much, much, MUCH, *MUCH* cooler. Check it out at: http://www.mozillazine.org/jason/newmodern.gif

  16. Re:Mozilla memory footprint (offtopic) by Metrol · · Score: 2

    Why the hell does the windows binary of mozilla consume over 30Mb of mem while iexplorer takes 7,8Mb?

    I'd like to know why Mozilla is a 7meg download while IE is something like 40-50meg?

    To more directly answer your question, the Mozilla development has shifted gears away from functionality at this point towards memory and performance issues. At the moment on NT Mozilla is taking up about 30meg of memory. After a while this number will just continue to grow. The problem at this point is that they are just now addressing memory clean up details, which weren't getting the same level of attention as functions earlier. I would suspect that by the next milestone we'll be seeing memory usage that is far more in line with what you'd expect to see in a browser.

    --
    The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
  17. Re:Galeon really doesn't need Gnome by nd · · Score: 2

    Wrong.

    Sure, galeon _COULD_ remove Gnome dependencies and use just gtk+, but as the previous poster (the one you replied to) noted, it wouldn't be taking advantage of what's out there -- especially considering that Galeon has always intended to be a Gnome web browser.

    But you said Gnome isn't a big part of Galeon (sorta), which isn't true. Galeon uses lots of Gnome widgets (the modified gtk+ ones with all the standard pixmaps, the toolbar, customized menus), gnome-libs are used a lot (for configuration, quick dialogs) -- CORBA is used, and we also use standard Gnome libraries like libxml and libglade.
    How much would we really gain by removing the libgnome dependency? Not a whole lot, as it would only cause pain and wouldn't play as nicely with other Gnome apps.

    This comes up on galeon-devel more and more frequently, I'm thinking of adding it to the FAQ

  18. Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but by Chris+Pimlott · · Score: 2

    Great, you've found a bug then. Go tell them about it and the next version will be better.

  19. Theme, schmeme. Where's the "Open" button? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2
    In Netscape 1.x - 3.x, I used three buttons almost exclusively: Back, Bookmarks, and Open. As of 4.0, the Open button was gone, replaced with essential functionality like "look everything up on search.netscape.com instead of just adding .com" and "go shopping".

    Not to mention the way they buried the "don't load images" checkbox in the Edit-Preferences-Advanced submenu (yeah, that's real advanced).

    And do the words "incremental rendering" mean anything to these people? The best way to read Slashdot is still Lynx if I don't want to wait for the entire 500K page to load before I can see the first paragraph.

    Grrrrr.

  20. Theme Builder is *NOT* a part of Mozilla. by jelwell · · Score: 5

    First off, some comments are suggesting that "Mozilla" should be focused on X rather than a theme builder. This is just mis-informed. The theme builder was created by a third party, and is not part of the Mozilla tree. Alphanumerica (now owned by Collab.net) created this theme builder as a demonstration of how the Mozilla platform can be used to create applications. In this case an application that helps configure the look and feel of Mozilla itself.

    There are many other applications that are being developed using the Mozilla platform. A few of note are: a Jabber client, a News Reader like interface for web forums (such as Slashdot), and various games (mostly 2d recreations of classics).

    Just keep in mind that these *third* party applications being developed using the Mozilla platform does not slow down, or detract from the development of Mozilla. In fact, they can actually help: these new, outside, developers are actually testing and submitting bugs on the Mozilla platform (Html Rendering Engine, Networking code, etc.) while creating their applications -- which in turns helps Mozilla developers increase the stability of Mozilla itself.

    Joseph Elwell.

  21. where's the grammar nazi when you need him? by Shoeboy · · Score: 2

    Yawn wide as I ram my giant manmeat down your throat, veteran cockgobbling loser.
    It's man-meat you moron. Don't let me catch you leaving out the hyphen ever again.
    --Shoeboy

  22. Re:Theme, schmeme. Where's the "Open" button? by crumley · · Score: 3
    Because when I have text selected from an xterm where I'm reading news or mail or whatever on a different system, I can just left-click the open button then middle-click the URL into the window and left-click "Open" without having to use the keyboard at all. Three clicks - no waiting.

    But it can be even easier than this! Just select the URL in your xterm, and click with the middle mouse button almost anywhere. (The only places you can't click are places where the middle mouse button already has a different meaning - i.e. text boxes, scroll bars, etc.)

    This is much quicker and easier than waiting for a dialog box to pop up, and having to click right in it.

    --
    Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
  23. hmm.. sorry :) by Pengo · · Score: 2


    Ok, I guess I have not slept enough later.

    Sorry for the rant. :)


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

  24. Re:Clue by cylab · · Score: 3

    no no, mozilla is not dead...
    it comes slowly, but powerfull. what you hear now is the sound of a stampede, just hiding behind the hill.

    there are numerous reasons for that:

    • mozilla runs on nearly all platforms
    • mozilla is much more stable in m17, so there is MUCH progress at this issue
    • mozilla is much faster in m17, so this point will be improved, too
    • the mozilla-exe can be run without installation
    • mozilla can implement coporate design
    • mozilla makes the newest technologie (like xml and componental-structure) usable on every platform

    i had a discussion with a friend about a project, where large amounts of preformatted text must be categorized and made searchable for cdrom publishing. the view application and the displayed text shall have the corporate design of the publishing company.

    it all comes down, that we need to categorize the text with xml-tags and make some stylesheets for diplay of the categories and their content in the different search-masks. than we need to find a offline xml-viewer, that runs on all desired platforms and some kind of script language to implement the functionality. nice would be a sdk for changing the viewers look n feel, to match the corporate design... and it should be really cheap..

    hmmm... think for your self... mozilla is not only cool, because its ..eh.. cool; its cool, because it implements features, that are really needed by companies... at least needed in the near future (..ok, this is good for mozilla ;) )

    cylab