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Send Some Mo' Zilla
Michelle Head sends news of an interview with Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org, even as 10,000 readers submit news of Mozilla Milestone 4,734,018 , available now for your downloading and crashing pleasure. Now you can crash with java.
I run RedHat 6.0 w/ a few packages from 6.1. I upgraded to glibc-2.1.3-21 and that made the previous Mozilla and Netscape PR builds much more stable.
Actually, the real reason CSS is avoided is because it crashes Netscape 4.x, which is still considered popular enough that you don't want to crash it.
actually, this is somewhat unique.
see, no other browser available lets you take the java plug-in from sun and make it the *DEFAULT* java virtual machine (which would be a very excellent thing... theirs are almost always stable, unlike the bundled v.m.'s)
if this is really the case, i'm TOTALLY for it.
down with i.e. and netscape's terrible JVM's!
Well, as an AOL employee, I shouldn't be posting this...
Yes, we're switching to Netscape 6.0 as our primary browser in AOL 6.0. The reason we continue shipping IE with the betas is that we're contractually bound to do so. That deal expires shortly after the beginning of the year.
That's why our proprietary builds include AIM and AOL mail integration.
Why the hell are you using this character: (©) for a period (.) character?
Or rather, what evil browser/OS are you using, and what are you doing to it, so I can avoid it like the plague?
This is the single fastest browser I think I've ever used (M18-Win32). And I think that a little bit of window-raising mis-code is hardly enough to bury this Milestone.
I shit ye not, this is finally it. The point where I can say 'Fuck it' to both IE5 in Windows and Netscape in Linux. Mozilla is FAST.
Lynx
As for m18, good job! The linux plugin never seems to install, and installing the PSM gives me:
JavaScript error:
line 0: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Failure" code: "-2147467259" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "http://docs.iplanet.com/docs/manuals/psm/psm-moz
Error was suppressed by event handler
But those are things that will no doubt be worked out RSN. This also means good things for the other browser I use (I avoid netscape now 99% of the time) galeon which uses the mozilla rendering engine (no, I haven't forgotten skipstone <g>). There's been a lot of discussion and preparation for the m18 release and API changes and whatnot.
Anyway, I'm glad that
Actually for me he's correct. I went to a page (tiktok.org) with java and it downloaded, installed, spat out an error and didn't give me the "completed successfully" that PSM did. I restart, go to aformentioned page, and boom, crash. Nuking my mozilla/plugins/* worked though. Guess I'll have to wait till it's not busted huh?
Oh stability is *great*. It's the java that was making it crash. I agree with you though, the memory isn't the greatest (hopefully a 1.0 release will be optimized optimized optimized!... I think that's what they have at the end of their roadmap however).
Response for me has been two things... 1 is the app itself. Replying to a message seems to take *forever* in the messanger, or just drawing all the windows in general, netscape is much faster, however the rendering is very nice. This is why Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net) and others that are using the rendering engine, but putting their own shell around it are a good idea IMHO.
it looks real good. it's fast. it crashes on me when i change the theme, but that's an easy thing to fix. i just won't change the theme. =)
i was hating using netscape and hated not being able to trush IE.
now i can wait a little longer for the final release.
bah. start over
No, actually they do it as a homework assignment, as a lab assignment in a sophmore level CS class. :) It was just a subset of HTML, but hey, you have to start somewhere.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Open source projects seem to need a critical mass before they can really take advantage of being open sourced. The mistake that the Mozilla team made was that they tried to cram in too much functionality instead of creating a small extensible browser that worked. So everyone took a look at it and said "This software really blows!" and moved on.
If M18 is reasonably stable many people will use it long enough to start coding rather than just submiting bug reports (which is important too).
As the number of people who have access to code increases the success of OSS projects will increase. There will probably still be a market for CSS but I think that will mostly be military work and extremely specific apps which can't draw the necessary number of users to take advantage of OSS (ie controller software for some fabulously expensive telescope).
it don't like focus follows mouse in win32 either.
I have just two curious questions:
1. The main problem with Netscape was that it was one huge program. Why is Mozilla still one huge package? Why not split things into different packages (libs and exe's: Mozilla-libs, Mozilla-browser, Mozilla-mail, Mozilla-news)?
2. Are themes really helpful?
KDE has themes, GNOME has themes, Windows 2001 will have themes, and Mac's will likely have themes.
So why not take advantage of that, and just let the toolkit do themes?
I think a good portion of the public wanted Netscape to be broken up into: a browser, mail, and news reader. This is what I assumed they would tackle first.
But the Netscape team was not much interested in that. Instead they were interested in changing the GUI in some new way, and componentizing everything, and making it scriptable. Read the roadmap.
But the original problem has not really been addressed.
This is leading some to splinter Mozilla projects, like Galeon that separate the Browser out.
Eventually, I would hope that the main Mozilla project decides to fix the big problem themselves, but if they don't, other projects will come out that fix the problem themselves.
My KDE2 desktop has been running for weeks until I upgraded to KDE2 RC2 yesterday. And it is still running with Konqueror and everything.
So whoever claims such things should make sure he installed the right package or compile himself.
Moritz
Have you *really* been using Mozilla lately? It does use the GTK theme; some idiot even submitted a bug about it to Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show _bu g.cgi?id=53723
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
If every broswer had rejected non-complaint code from the start, we would now have a bunch of standards complaint browsers. Unfortunetly, a standards complaint browser is worthless since the web is composed of non-standards complaint pages.
Frankly, I don't think Netscape should even bother trying to handle unclosed tables right. It's a gross violation of the HTML spec that nothing should accept. Just fix the code.
Try http://validator.w3.org on, say, Slashdot, to see how much standards invalid code Netscape accepts. At least let the line be drawn there.
Now the biggest problem with NS3 is lack of PNG inline-image support under Linux. There used to be a plugin, but it's no more available. Has anyone a binary copy? It looks like the sources are available somewhere, but recompiling them would require the reconstitution of a complete libc5 compile chain with many libraries: not an impossible task, but no small feat. Hum. Can anyone help?
Meanwhile, just a tip to prevent these nasty interferences between Netscape 3 and 4: edit your netscape 3 binary with emacs, and search&replace (ESC %) the string netscape with n3tscape. There you are. Don't forget to update your .Xdefaults
accordingly.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
I actually couldn't stand the last version available for Linux, I run a dual 400 machine w/128mb and it was still slow. I just tried out the latest and it is MUCH faster and works seemingly well.
- Bill
"seemingly well" was a misnomer. It sucks. Everything I attempt to do it crashes. I tried to import my Netscape bookmarks and it crashed, I tried to change some setup options and it crashed. Time for them to do some more work...
- Bill
stable released today. M18 or whatever it is.
in fact, I just tried to goto www.pimpwar.com and it told me I needed flash, fine.. Clicked ok, went to the page... fine. loads it up and fills the screen w/banners for the iPAQ.
I don't think that is the way it is supposed to work.
My honest opinion is that if you are going to release a milestone, it better have general working functionality. I want to be able to view my normal pages w/o a problem. Stop worrying about themes and such and work on the basics. That is my opinion though..
- Bill
> but, you have to admit that with windows being the Most Popular (TM) interface these days, wouldn't it make sense to have it look more windowsy?
uhm.. why? =)
one of the main reasons i escaped from windows (aside from the stability issues) was the fact i found the GUI ugly. i cant explain it, but i just find it terrible.. the win3.1 gui was nicer imho; win9x just felt clunky.
anybody else share these feelings?
bse - the cow that goes.. boo? ->
I've bitched about the other versions and said they suck. But, M18 is very nice on my Win2K laptop (haven't had a chance to test linux yet). Just wanted to give a kudos when it is well deserved.
I think we're both right -- the error I posted is a result of not being able to load the class, which is a result of not being able to load classes over HTTPS currently.
Does M18+Java not support https transactions in java? Apparently this is required. Oh well, hushmail is really the only site I use Java with. Though it will be nice to finally be able to do my online banking with Mozilla.
Now, I'm not complaining per se. Free is free, and I appreciate all they've accomplished. But we really have to revisit the assumptions that we've been touting as Revealed Truth to anyone who would listen: that Open Source development was the golden road to reliability and performance.
I think that it would be acceptable for minion #1 to non-obtrusively signal that the task is complete and is awaiting your attention. Like raising your hand in school (I don't know about other countries or even current practice, but this was the correct behaviour when I was at school) to solicit the teacher's attention.
This is really kinda dumb, but I was looking for some of that awesome slashdot insight.
Mail apps that are heavily HTML-ified (like Mozilla), and FTM most X11 ones, don't ever allow me to insert text from a file. Why is that? NO ONE at Netscape ever wants to keep their journal, notes, whatever in a file? Its something about "the modern era" that must be eluding me.
I just want a button (menu item, whatever) that says "Insert from file..." and have that be the end of it. That way I can work offline, so to speak, rather than using their crocked "drafts" stuff.
Does anyone else wish this existed?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Use the installer, it lets you pick the components you want. That sentence is informative.
This only goes to show that the above mentioned "designer" used the wrong tool or was otherwise clueless.
First of all HTML is a markup language: how pages appear is - or should be - defined by the browser's user, not by the author of the document. This is explicitly made obvious by the details of the HTML specification: HTML is designed that way, details of presentation are outside its scope.
CSS is the right tool to provide the browser with hints for the actual presentation of the document.
With respect to both HTML and CSS the gecko rendering engine which Mozilla uses is one of the most compliant around, alongside with the one used by Opera. You might not like its defaults, but - unlike what happens in some other browsers - you are allowed to change them. Properly authored, standard compliant documents look as they should. Mozilla is not and does not want to be a MSIE or Netscape emulator, and I certainly hope it would never reproduce their many pitfalls.
If you dislike CSS there are other alternatives for creating designed documents that look basically the same on all systems, such as PDF (which supports hyperlinks).
That said I'll cheerfully concede that Mozilla is not ready for prime time yet.
--
fB
Memo to self: better read the message I'm following up to next time.
Oh well, take the above as a generic rant.
fB
Except Opera 4, at least on Windows 95 and NT. For Linux, IBM's implementation is considered faster than Sun's except it may not support Netscape's plugin architecture.
I've been pretty impressed with mozilla's progress the last few releases, and I'd love to be able to switch over to using it as my primary browser under Fbsd (it's not quite good enough to replace IE under windows) - but in my line of work, I have to access a slew of sites that use ssl, and it'd be silly to run netscape and mozilla side by side.
I know the netscape 6 pr3 supports ssl, but the installer breaks under slack and free. So, the question is, what's holding mozilla back from releasing m18 with ssl? I mean, the code can obviously be slapped in, the laws have changed, and the patent's expired.
Pleeeeeze?
-lx
I'm a little bit curious...
Are you building it from scratch with a GTK-based front-end or is XPFE now inheriting the GTK theme.
I just ask, because up until now, I've been running M17, and while it inherits the GTK color scheme nicely from the engine-based theme I have, it still uses the Windows'esque scrollbar, and generic XPFE widgets themselves...
I just tried M18 on Linux. After using nightly builds on NT I have to say that there's a huge difference. The Linux version is lagging badly. It's slower and there's clearly more missing functionality. Even the skin is different.
If I remember correctly, there's more Win32 developers working on Mozilla than developers on Linux. I guess Mozilla could use some more contribution from Linux hackers.
You got it - nothing beats an IE bug for pure enterntainment value. Just yesterday, the guy in the office next to mine used the Print Preview feature to check if a web-page he was printing would fit on one printed page. And indeed it fits - with scrollbars! Scrollbars in hard copy, how's that for innovation? Think of all the trees it would save! But seriously, things like this boggle the mind. How in the world can a GUI element end up being rendered in a print context? Only at M$...
Actually, it's not every time it loads a page, but every time it loads a page with a textfield. That's bug 41813, and it's being worked on.
Don't you just love being able to see what the developers think of the bugs that annoy you? :)
© 2000 Ilmari. All ritghts reserved, all wrongs reversed
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
Slow.
Huge.
Mosaic is neither; unfortunately it also has 1/100 the features.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I don't believe that I specifically said "markup" but some features that I wanted to implement, but couldn't were PNG graphics with IE4, and more code related, I wanted to do a hovering menu system that worked "smoothly" with IE when scrolling but couldn't, maybe this will change. This is compared to Moz in which I could code my menu system with CSS-P perfectly. See http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ WITH MOZILLA and then with IE to see what I'm talking about(The red nav menu thingy.)
With that, IE doesn't do CSS-P very well. From your demeanor, you are probably a Microsoft developer so go ahead and add better CSS-P support to IE. Thanx!
i like it... its getting very close to final release...
....................
> If the women don't find you (+1, Interesting), they might as well find you (+1, Informative).
Just so long they don't tell all the other girls in town that you're (-1, Overrated).
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In which case, Mozilla wins again. IE5.5 = 15 meg. An embedded ver of Mozilla comes in below 10 (usable by Galeon or Skipstone or whatever else). That's just the browser, no mail, news, etc.
Bloat?
When was the last time you ever told a Win95 box to go get IE5 for it? I totally disagree that IE5 is any smaller then Mozilla. A typical IE5 install can run you 50-100 megs. Uhm, no.
It's finally in there (though if you can figure out how to get it without it crashing, you're doing well). I've seen it sort of work in some of the nightlies, but not in this milestone. However, this project continues to get better and better. If you're intrigued by the milestone, start working with nightly builds, they rarely explode, and usually give a good indication of how things are improving. Now, if I can visit a newsgroup without it going ka-boom, I will be pleased....and yes, it will be the ie destroyer....
I assume you are not using Win2k. This "feature" has been removed from the OS, and I sometimes find it annoying that some windows do not Pop-Up when expected
when did Mac IE 5.5 come out?
-- Adam
One would assume that web developers would develop for the most dominant browser. With AOL hopefully planning on incorporating Netscape 6 into their AOL software, that should be a fairly significant influence. How many subscribers does AOL have now? With Mozilla's more or less modular design, how easy is adding new features into Mozilla/Netscape to deal with whatever curves MS may throw on the browser scene?
It would be so easy for AOL to see a decent box in the $200 range, as long as you agreed to a few years of AOL. And why wouldn't you? Its the only thing the box is good for.
I'm not talking about a normal linux box like yours or mine. I'm talking about a set-top appliance, where you turn it on, and it says "Welcome to AOL" just like my Tivo does.
Your third point is valid. It is the current barrier to entry: not enough web software runs on linux. But that is exactly what Mozilla is going to fix! Once Mozilla is done, all that's left is a few trivial plugins, like Flash and Realplayer. And those companies would come around quick with a little help from AOL, and then everyone else would have to get on board or face losing all the AOL customers.
Mike
I see no "npjava*.*" in the jdk 1.3 release??
I had this problem as well. I installed the plugin, and didn't seem to be aware that it was installed. However, after a reboot, it seemed to work fine. I'm still waiting for this "reboot for full installation" feature from Linux. Maybe in the 2.4 kernel?
Linux has still a long long way before it can compete with Windows on the Destkop. X is slow and bloated, as are KDE and GNOME wich are build above it. It will be a long time before it's performances can decently compete with Windows
Then it should be an option, right? Kind of like when IE finishes a download in the background. You can tell it to notify you by opening a dialog box with focus, or just go away and don't bother you.
load "linux",8,1
im real problem is that when d/l the source from CVS, mozilla is 1.2gig! i mean what the F? a gig?
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
n/t
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
yea, but way is the source a FREAKING GIG-and-a-haft!?
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
thz i will do this...
my disk was geting much to full, w/ just updating from CVS...
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
I'm sorry, man. You and the other four Netscape 3 users should go sulk in shame. I just uninstalled my copy of SPRY Mosaic yesterday, after the 1,000 web sites I e-mailed never got back to me about making their site compatible for my browser.
Netscape would be so much better if it were designed by a company with a clear Internet strategy, not some bunch of ragtag volunteers who work on it in their spare time.
For more information, click here.
This is why good DHTML coders are hard to find and harder to keep.
CSS, on the other hand, is about a lot more than the writer's intended display style and acessability is one of those things. Good web developers know this and they cope. Yet another reason that good web developers are easy to spot, they aren't afriad of the undefined, their designs trive on it. Is DTHML too easy to break with a user defined sytle sheet? perhaps, but such is life, and such is the web. Since when were we ever able to use the standards the way we would like too?
-----------------------
Widgets for the web
(or something like that)
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
I just thought I'd mention quickly that I moved to Xi's X server from XFree so I could switch to my external VGA port on my laptop.
An amazing consequence is that Mozilla is now a *very* snappy performer. Scrolling and incremental refresh are much better than they used to be. I don't know what motif libraries 4.x is linked against (lesstif?), I know it's the commercial libraries on other platforms. Anyway, it makes me wonder about the efficency of XFree or GTK.....
For others in search of speed, you may want to try it.
I've already got Sun's 1.3.0 release JDK installed on my system. How can I make mozilla use the JRE that the JDK contains?
less usable than M17 ??? I fired it up, clicked the interview link( http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=43), pressed the down arrow on my keyboard and it crashed. Fluke, right? Well, it's a repeatable fluke here.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
so, to be fair, I delete my package and ~/.mozilla directories, into which I've been sticking nightly builds since M14 or so. Then I download another tarball and try again. It hangs.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Last time I checked this out (prolly a couple of builds ago), it was suffering some fairly extreme memory usage, like about 20+ MB of ram. Is this still the case, or should I wait till the final version before worrying about this?
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
See above.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
If you could give some views on why you think mozilla currently sucks I'd appreciate it. If you could also tell me those versions for windows that are bigger than IE without good reason I'd also appreciate it.
Thanks in advance.
Sorry, had to say it....
I run Netscape all the time and its nowhere *near* that buggy for me. Is this Windows you're talking about? Maybe you don't have enough RAM to be a multi-taking demon or maybe I'm not visiting the same sites as you. What's your CPU, RAM, & OS? Are you visiting sites with alot of long tables? Just curious...
Anyway, just to note I like Mozilla alot and I've been using it more and more instead of Netscape 4.x. Also, I think its important to note that at least with a crash in Netscape or Mozilla those crashes don't require a reboot like IE. That sucks!
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
i mean, how could a BSOD not steal focus?
, eh? ;)
-------------
Peace Out [xplo]
Agreed. I work as a web designer/developer for a fairly large manufacturing company, and right now we are in the process of completely redesigning our web site. I put together a page that uses DHTML to create "layers" that pop up when you roll over a certain page element. I discovered that if you use proper standards-compliant code, it works *perfectly* in both Internet Explorer 5 for Windows *and* Mozilla M14 and up.
I was very impressed -- it's not often I see advanced web technologies like DHTML that work correctly in more than one browser without having to use browser version checking and multiple code snippets using if statements to work around browser incompatibilities. If this is the future of the web, where do I sign up? :)
Granted, it would be nice if the Mozilla folks would concentrate on releasing a browser before worrying about adding stuff like an IRC client (I'd use ircle or X-Chat for that depending on what OS I happen to be running at the moment), but at least M18 of Mozilla has reaffirmed my faith in the project. It definitely has promise. And, just for the record, this comment was posted using Mozilla M18 for the Mac -- no problems that I've seen so far.
On a somewhat related note regarding standards -- we've been working to follow the XHTML 1.0 standard as strictly as possible on our pages (although we are using HTML 4.0 DTD's because there's a bug in Mozilla that blows up our table formatting if we use the xhtml dtd). I'm very impressed with gracefully standards-compliant HTML code degrades in older browsers. Our site displays and functions exactly as we want it to in IE4, IE5, and recent Mozilla milestones. It looks acceptable on Netscape 4.x (since that at least supports some CSS attributes), and while it's a bit ugly on Netscape 3, it's still functional.
But what really impressed me was when we viewed it in Lynx and it was perfectly usable -- I guess we won't need to bother with a text-only version after all. :)
IE's channel bar doesn't do one-tenth of what the new sidebar does under Netscape (try using the Google integration, it's very cool).
Just for those of you that are stuck with IE at work, or whatever, there is an extension to allow google to be used as a "sidebar" for IE.
Download it from the Google.com website here:
http://www.google.com/winexplorer.html
Steve
---
Sorry to say this - but I've never seen MS Internet Explorer crashed. And never seen any serious bug or "feature" which could be annoying. Have you ever really used MSIE or just know its made by Microsoft which is an easy target for blaming here?
Well I sticked with 5.0 and never used 5.5 on regular basis... but: once I was using Indy machine and after short period of quite stable behaviour IRIX started crashing like hell for every 10-20 minutes. I was blaming SGI and telling everybody what the crap is IRIX. And you know what? Folks from SGI just replaced broken CPU and I never saw a crash again.
That other feature was the `download entire HTML' page, which is a rather important feature. Still, Mozs themes rock.
Somethign that *still* seems to elude every browser maker is a button to turn on a underline spell checker in large text entry boxes, just like the one I'm typing in now. Which would stop me making all these damned tpyos.
It's a wet dream!
OTOH, I have a SQL editor (SQL Navigator) that pops up when a query is finished. While I should be annoyed, I actually kinda like it. I kick off a mambo query, switch over to Slashdot, and it lets me know when it's done and I can get back to real work.
I've used IE maybe a dozen times. It's crashed within 15 minutes for me every time I've used it. This includes 5.5 on a couple of machines. It always takes out the desktop and usually requires a reboot to completely clear.
Navigator I can at least go maybe a couple of hours with before it crashes (days sometimes with Java turned off).
Yeah, bad hardware will kill you. Unfortunately, IE crashes consistently on lots of different machines for me ...
Nah. User-defined keyboard shortcuts and context menus would provide the ultimate browsing experience.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Mozilla is a vision. It's a great vision that is coming oh so close to becoming reality, but it's still just a vision.
I downloaded M18, installed it, ran it, tried a few different web sites, played around with the preferences and then found M18 impossible to control in a normal fashion. The "home" button wouldn't work; the "OK" button in the preferences window wouldn't work; not even the "Back" button would work.
The improvements that I see in terms of efficiency and design are tremendous and very impressive. I have visions of a great and wonderful web browser being released from Mozilla some time in the near future. However, for the time being, this great and illustrious web browser is a vision and nothing more.
Jason
If you get an account, Slashdot allows you to set your account so that you never see signatures, unless they've been typed in with the comment.
Make for much easier reading. Espsialy since people don't seem to see anything wrong with 5+ line signatures.
-Andy
Still doesn't work for me. I got the plugin, installed it, rebooted, but still no java for mozilla.
I'm not sure about bloat, but Mozilla/Netscape 6 beats IE or Netscape 4.7 hands down on standards compliance.
I fed my personal home page throught w3.org's validator pages for xhtml 1.0 and css. (validator.w3.org and jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator, respectively). After everything passed validation, only Mozilla/NS6 rendered the page correctly in all aspects.
In case you're interested in seeing for yourself, I should point out that my personal page is on Geocities, not the business page I list in my user info. Another interesting thing is that Mozilla, by choice, doesn't suppor non-standard html, e.g. the BS that Yahoo adds to the bottom of my page.
No comments on my artistic skills, please.De-facto standards are based entirely on the current state of the market, and as such are quite fluid. If AOL adopts NS6 (and why wouldn't they), the balance of power will be transformed overnight.
Now, I don't mean to imply the IE would cease to be widely popular, but there would no longer be a single dominant browser. In that circumstance, w3.org's concensus standards are likely the best choice, ever more so because mozilla intends to support them.
umm... you have a debug build. There is a hell of a lot of fairly useless junk in a debug build (yes, that's still the default) read the ./configure --help, turn off debug, turn off tests, enable optimization, (if you want to) turn off mailnews, and see a much more reasonable build :-)
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
I would seriously dislike AOL shoving down an Open Source product down people's throats. Hell, I dislike any shoving down throats. Why should this be positive? People will only learn to slash back at such behaviour and Open Source comes into a bad light.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You are probably not serious here but some else might not realize you were just kidding around.
Web servers are actually dead simple to make. Back when I was learning about network sockets (on my own free time) that was the first thing I made. Sure my web server wasn't very complex but at least it served web pages.
But there is no way a comp sci freshmen could ever create an html renderrer just for kicks.
All you gotta do is remember three rules:
another way to crash!!
just what i wanted for christmas =P
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
It crashed on my WinNT office PC just yesterday, for the second time in 4 months. Luckily, it did not take the system with it ( It did it the first time, still on NT).
OTOH, M17 on my Linux box crashed consistently at least once every 2 weeks in the last few months (twice while posting on /. ). Running the talkback, I have been able to file several bug reports.
Despite that, I still use M17 as my primary browser at home. I quite like it. I hope M18 is really less buggy and faster, as someone says. I'll try it this evening.
Ciao
----
FB
I mean, really, if it weren't for them, we'd have all the cryptic command lines, zillions of virtual desktops, and enough config files to shake a stick at. Then maybe I'd be happy.
Personally I enjoy the challenge of setting up a new app, usually lots of neat new stuff to learn. Then I can rip it apart, find the problems, and fix it blind-folded. But alas, the average Joe has no interest in this. They only want it to work.
Now really, that's no fun! Think if linux 'just worked' the first time. I probably would have passed. That's also probably why I strive to get my FVWM working with Gnome and run slackware all the while throwing in KDE apps for this and that, because, after all I enjoy burning bandwidth, downloading tarballs, and trying to figure out just how the hell they're trying to get this thing to do what I want just so I can rummage around the source and inevitably break it.
And of course, the majority of the mass consumers would disagree with me here. Maybe that's why they aren't running Linux on the desktop just yet. ;-)
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Too many sites use CSS. And most are using it properly (as a replacement for font tags).
Name three in the top fifty.
Alrighty then:
Google
Excite
AltaVista
CNN
ESPN
Go.com
ABC News
These all use CSS.
Your term of 'Significant use' is subjective and thus irrelevant. CSS is used on these sites and used well with the exception of ESPN which is obviously developed and targeted for IE (the site uses CSS Positioning)
These are all high-traffic sites but I don't know who's on your Top50 list.
Regarding mozilla's speed (I mean the overall speed, including, but not limited to loading time), couldn't it be done a daemon that users could have running in the background, so things loaded faster, like emacs users do I believe.
Is there already something like this? Can it be done?
~
~
~
~
:wq
So here are the two things that I'm hearing.
1. We should all abandon PC's and move to the Mac so we can use IE 5/Mac since it's the most standard compliant production browser to date.
2. That any company should avoid puting any product or requested feature into a product until all of their competitors agree that it would be nice and they'll all put it in too.
For some reason the logic just doesn't quite work for me.
What people fail to take into account is that the organizations that produce these 'standards' are 1. Made up of competing companies/groups that will do anything to screw over their competitor (even if this means holding up a standard (see AOL)) 2. Typically months if not years behind market demand (see issue 1).
Personally I use IE, I develop html using the 'standards' and I've found that if I do that everything looks fine in IE, fine in Mozilla and like shit in Netscape 4, so see the problem with the standards isn't MS's extensions (which you DON'T HAVE to use despite popular opinion) but is Netscape 4's almost complete lack of adherence to standards (CSS-P, layer, LiveConnect/Javascript, anyone, anyone).
The problem with standards though is that they are worthless if the consumer doesn't want to use them or finds something non-standard (*cough* IE) easier to use or more robust. There are alot of people out there coding pages for their own entertainment, they don't get reports that show 25% of their users are using a browser that doesn't support tag 'X', and honestly they could care less. They want to create something that looks cool to them and that they like. It's called being selfish, and it happens. Businesses look at it from the financial perspective of "Well 75% of our customer base really likes this page and it doesn't completely screw up in the other 24%, and the remaining 1% it isn't cost effective enough to fix the problems, wahoooo, we're a success!"
Just my $.02
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
the 10/10 build broke css. the 10/11, and 12 builds have it. M18, doesn't. it doesn't make sense. wouldn't they want to include that in a milestone?!?!
note: for anyone who is complaining about CSS stuff, grab the 2000/10/12 nightly. it has it. i just went back to it after trying the milestone.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/lates t/
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
So basically, you are saying that Apache Web Server rocks and that Mozilla sucks. Such a small sample does not yield a strong indicator on the software domains where open-source performs and the ones where it fails.
It is not possible to answer the What is better? question on a rational basis. Something more appropriate is What do you need. The commercial software is backed up by an army of marketing people ready to say anything to convince you and your boss that their products is better. This may involve many stategies like selective benchmarks, false claims, buzzword attacks, etc. How can this not lead to deception? With OSS, no such promotional effort is done. OSS has to proove itself in the concrete world which is a harder task. So it may seems that open-source is not good as commercial but it does not imply that this is always the case, it depends on your needs. Do you need a 24-hour support hotline? Do you need control over the software? Do you need Warranties? Can you afford to wait for the purchase order to be processedor do you need to be able to download it right away? Open-source, as well as commercial software both have their natural advantages. You have to take the better fit for your needs. This is not about choosing the one having the higher god-gifted index-of-software-goodness.
Mozilla is [one of] the most ambitious open-source project. It took a while to clean up the code (and I'm talking about the closed-source legacy). I'm impressed with all the features they have realized so far. You've got to admire this management complexity.
Also, I really think that Mozilla will soon be of great help on this corporate-controlled www. Contributors to the Mozilla project actually share our interests and they will surely protect them. IE or NS can never compete on this point.
All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Socrates is dead.
The only real problem i've had with mozilla is once in awhile my HD goes nuts and my processor graph skyrockets to 100%. Restarting it seems to fix it though...
Since McDonald's is the most popular place for food, shouldn't all food taste like McDonald's burgers?
-- My comment is above.
I had at least one web page, www.saabusa.com which Mozilla coudln't display - ever. The old Netscape (3.x and 4.x) works fine, but Mozilla and Netscape 6.x fails. Contacted both mozilla and netscape several times, with no avail. The problem is still there - it displays a blank page. So I am using Netscape 4.7x instead. Even if it crashes every once in a while.
That's from the release notes. Why can't linux users have the fun of crashing with java? We're always left out... pout.
Too bad. Java installation worked nicely in yesterdays nightly build and I don't care much about the milestones myself. ;)
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
I use mozilla at home, and it'll pick up your GTK+ theme colors, but not the pixmaps. This is not as bad as it sounds, it actually looks fine.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
I really can't understand why you have to wait a lot of time to find the sources. What's wrong with the Mozilla team that first release binaries? After all, Mozilla is released under the GPL.
How to contact me - http://www.pervalidus.net/contact.html
I have been browsing the web with Mozilla M18 since about the time the story appeared on Slashdot, and I must say that the stability is much improved from M17 and previous milestone builds. I have had one crash in the last few hours. (While trying to install the Java support.) Probably due to operator error. :) I have been able to access corporate web sites with lots of Java apps with no problems. The speed of web page rendering has also surprised me. :) Congrats to the Mozilla team and keep up the hard work.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines
Oh, oh, oh make the laughter stop! This is too funny. But I thought it was the posters intention to post the message in plain text to be funny. I guess not because the BrowseX thing is for real. This is maybe even funnier! Oh, oh, ok(laughter under contrasjdaskidjaiosdj ha ha ha mmm ok).
KidSock
The problem with your statement is simply this:
(1) Why would AOL willingly subject themselves to the displeasure of supporting a Linux Operating System Distro? Look at the common caliber of AOL Users - enough said.
(2) If Microsoft hates AOL so much, why have they included the AOL Client binaries in Windows 95,Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows ME? Because it promotes competition and for Microsoft thats a very healthly path to be following right now.
(3) Have you ever been on AOL? Do you realize just how much AOL will lose in the translation to Linux? ALOT. How about all the premium online gaming sections? - I doubt those will work in Linux. How about AOL 6.0's dependence upon the most recent versions of Flash and Realplayer? Hmmmm - I dont think so. How about the easy configuration and sign on process that has made AOL so damn popular? hmmmmm.... I dont think so.
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
... to complain that it still isn't finished after X years/still crashes too much/is still too slow?
-[z].
Who cares? Anyone who wouldn't try it just because of the rep is a dingleberry who doesn't deserve a good browser anyway.
In defense of Mozilla, I'm using a nightly build from a couple nights ago, and it's MUCH faster, filters work (most of the time - Sometimes the wrong filter catches a message) and most of the bugs that have been plaguing me are gone. Hopefully that's in part because I run that Talkback piece of shit nonsense that seems to make software less stable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
IS THAT FUCKING IT?
Okay, okay, I'm not trying to be a troll, but I'd like a more complete changelog in the release notes. I really don't wanna have to wade through bugzilla.
I forget what the other one was.
been a while since I've used Moz, but some of my biggest wishes are: CTRL-N clones the current window, not just open a new blank one; to File > Save As > Web Archive (or equivalent) like IE5 does, which saves a page, images and all, into a single file; full screen mode is nice though it's only really useful for demo/monitoring machines; and i want to bind the Previous button to Backspace and/or one of my mouse buttons.
You make it sound like it's important that everyone uses the same browser.
:-P
If they were all standards-compliant like they should have been in the first place, browser-specific pages wouldn't even exist and what browser everyone uses wouldn't matter one bit.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Consider the fact that the browser with the majority market share has a broken CSS implimentation may well be WHY nobody uses CSS.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Actually, not only does mozilla not bring you back to the same spot on a previous page, links to placeholders within the same page also don't work, as well as an annoying bug where mozilla will lose your place on a page if you minimize the window.
These bugs are probably related and will hopefully get squashed quickly.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
If you are searching for a non-gnomified Browser, try Skipstone (http://muhri.net/skipstone). It uses Gecko as well, but is pure GTK+ AFAIK.
I can't stand Mozilla... I really can't.. I'm sorry, but it's just.. loose code.
And I hate to say it...
But I really like Mac IE 5.5..
::ducks!::
I tried out the new Mozilla Milestone xxxxxxxxx, and I dunno.. it just isn't a very tight browser. Didn't crash, but.. I'm just not excited about it. And as for Netscape 6... heh. Good job AOL... yeah........
I'm all about opensource.. but Mozilla's a joke. Anybody agree with me? Am I being too harsh? Iknow it's a massive project.. but maybe that's the problem. You know, Apple dumped 1000 engineers on Copland in '94/95 and it went nowhere. But it took 125 developers to make Mac OS X(which I'm runnin and lovin!). Maybe Mozilla is OVER-engineered?
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
About http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/:
IE 5.5 puts the menu on the wrong side of the page and not in a constant position, but the mouseover effect is definately much smoother than Moz M18. In Moz, the black bar usually just flashes breifly and then disappears, and only by bumping the mouse around can you get the effect to work properly.
Yes, I've been there and IE's CSS support sucks (it's especially painful if you are trying to do dyanmic stylesheets from javascript - I have to check to see if Mozilla makes that nicer.) But your object example just seems to show that Mozilla might have all the interfaces in place, it's is still glitchy in execution, which makes it difficult to want to run out and use it.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
On my windows box IE crashes about 3 or 4 times per day.
-Compenguin
Well it is getting harder and harder to find showstopper bugs. However, the ever present big bug that plauges all monsters that dare jump into the linux browser market is still hanging around -- and that is the old fasioned "now your surfing, now your not -- total meltdown -- dissapear, dump core, elvis has left the building bug....." I look forward to the days when I can search for the type of bugs that are more in the cosmetic scheme of things.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
AMD K6-2 550, ~320megs RAM, Win98. Netscape seems to crash at random times after I open at least 3 windows. Yet at other times I can leave 10 windows open at once with no problems. It's quite frustrating...
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Earlier today Netscape crashed on me. Again. No big shock really...it happens a few times a day.
The semi-shocking part? I actually looked for the details in Crashguard. It was Netscape's 571st crash, and it has been only a month since I re-installed it.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
"Now you can crash with java."
/. today!
;-)
My, we're very optimistic on
Are all of these duplicate news items gettin' to ya?
-aardvarko
webmaster at aardvarko dot com
They believe the one and only reason Netscape lost the browser war was because Microsoft had a monopoly. Everyone wanted the bloat Microsoft just used it's monopoly power to push Netscape out.
Of course tbey never explain how IE defeated Netscape in the mac market, even though Microsoft doesn't have monopoly power there
and what about éèàëùê ? ;-)
The Win32 build I just downloaded (installer version) in 6.71MB. On MS' site they list a typical IE5.5 download as being 17MB. IE5.01 is listed as the same. Last time I installed it it required 60MB of disk. If you can get smaller please tell me where.
No it isn't, DHTML is 100% client-side.
sounds interesting ..
....if only they were more imaginative with urls
could not get the site though
http://www.brow`sex'.com
my proxy blocks it
that's some mo' betta zilla. um. mozilla's good and all, but i really don't get the feel of the interface. maybe it's from years of being win-spoiled, but, you have to admit that with windows being the Most Popular (TM) interface these days, wouldn't it make sense to have it look more windowsy? i dunno, maybe change is necessary in the long run. that way we won't end up with a 64 bit patch to the 32 bit patch to the 16 bit file manager for an 8 bit operating system that windows is.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
No doubt, this is true. Monopolies do do it better.
This is probably due to the fact that monopolies have a captive audience that has to buy a product from a monopoly that can charge whatever they want.
It then follows, that since monopolies are swimming in ill-gotten dollars, a monopoly is able to pour literally buckets of money onto development projects. Furthermore, they can throw hundreds of millions of dollars into a product that they never intend to make a profit on!. This is the very definition of predatory behavior. (I think only a mere $150 million if I remember correctly from the antitrust trial. But who's counting. What's a few hundred million $ among friends.)
Of course, once there is no competition remaining, then other motives will eventually surface. Either in the form of the only browser in town is no longer free, and far from free $; or, in the form of arm twisting (extortion) of the flavor, you don't get browser X, if you don't do favor Y for me. Where Y is probably something that helps establish a new monopoly in an important new market area. (This is called leveraging a monopoly.)
But all that aside, in the short run, you're right! Monopolies really do do it better!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Behind you Jim! He's got a knife!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
In his test page for the job he used deeply nested tables with image mouseovers (breaks N3) and as I said, he got the job.
I hate you all. Bar the parent post, but everyone else, I hate you all.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Is it just me or does having the ability to override css completely defeat the purpose of having 100% css complatable browsers?
I mean, sure, they're usefull for "accessibility"... but if I go to the trouble of having a seperate page for 100%CSS1 browsers, it'd piss me off to have someone's "customized browsing experience" break my dhtml...
...or at least that's MO.
If I had anything witty to say, I wouldn't put it in my
"If 'if's and 'but's were candy and nuts, something something something.."
I guess that fact is, it does matter now. MS levraged a lil' monopoly power and made it matter.
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end communication
Except for the fact that Johnny Sixpack gets a free IE with his computer.
Your average user has trouble checking e-mail, let alone changing browsers because "It's the right thing to do". The only hope Netscape has is if AOL shoves it down people's throats.
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end communication
mod_python rules !
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
Of course tbey never explain how IE defeated Netscape in the mac market, even though Microsoft doesn't have monopoly power there
Microsoft made a deal with Apple that IE would be shipped as the default browser. That might have something to do with it.
I don't think mozilla has to be rock solid stable to beat that...
George W. Bush is god.
GW Rules and everrything else drools.
Jason, you suck ass. Yes that is right you are an ass lover. Not that your gay or anything (which would be ok) just that you suck ass.
When I first heard of of Mozilla I was under the impression that it was trying to fix all of NS's mistakes (a big one being bloat) and to be open source. It seems to have missed the first goal by a large margin (I can get versions of IE 5 that are smaller than the windows version), but the second is still there.
First of all Mozilla is beta Beta Beta! Got that! It's not done yet!
Second Show me a current version of IE that's smaller than 7.2 megs.
Bloat is an easy word to throw around. The biggest a Netscape down load ever was about 17 Megs. Is that bloated? Quake was 25 Megs, Quake II was 400 Megs and Quake III bigger! Is Windows 2000 more bloated then Windows ME? Wow! what a piece of bloat that Win2k is!
I guess it depends on what it does eh? But you find that since there is a version of IE for windows that's smaller than Netscapes, Netscape is doing something wrong. Are you sure your not looking at the service pack for IE and not IE?
Just the fact that we are talking about OSS here means that it's succeeding.
Mozilla's designated "Chief Lizard Wrangler" seems pleased with the maturity level the organization's two-and-a-half-year-old pet project has achieved.
Mitchell Baker, whose other titles on the mozilla.org Web site include "manager, problem arbitrator, and speaker to suits," recounted recent happenings within the organization and described some of the development criteria and expectations that will shape Mozilla's 1.0 release.
In keeping with its new roadmap, the new and improved browser is scheduled for its 1.0 release in the second quarter of 2001. "Mozilla 1.0 will, of course, include the features developed for the browser/mail/news application," she said. "Enhanced performance, reduced footprint, improved stability, and architectural correctness and even better standards compliance are additional goals for Mozilla 1.0."
These features are important to Mozilla's present role--and vital to its expansion into new areas, Baker said. "These aspects are important not only to those interested in the browser/mail/news application, but also to that portion of the Mozilla community that is interested in embedding the Mozilla layout engine in other applications and devices, often in combination with a Linux distribution," she added.
Galeon may be nice, but the supreme browser is SkipStone. Galeon without the Gnome fluff. Check it out: http://www.muhri.net/skipstone/
The Caballero
Mozilla ignores GTK+ theme engines completely, at least for me. It does appear to use the colors of the theme, but buttons, scroll bars, menus, etc. are completely custom, defined by the Mozilla theme you use.
My bad, I should have said "Windows95isms," I was thinking 9x when I wrote that, it just didn't make it to my fingertips.
slashdot broke my sig
Not quite right. All components need write access to the binary directory. Check out the bugzilla entry linked in one of other posts in this thread for more information. This is a real problem for folks who want to install Mozilla once for several users and want a secure system.
I've always been a big mozilla advocate, but I'm disappointed that this error wasn't flagged as a showstopper the moment it was discovered. How many other "Windowsisms" have made their way into the Linux build?
slashdot broke my sig
Nice work guys. If you can let me scroll before those long pages are entirely rendered, or at least just display the first screenfull statically, it'd make things even more slick.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless.
I will never have firsthand experience of the IE source code because it is closed-source: that's *the* *reason* that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. The comment is not baseless.
--
"IE hangs EXPLORE.EXE under Windows"
Urrr, I've never had it do that, although I've made it lock up many times. Try changing your settings so that each instance runs in its own process space.
Yep, I've been using X-mouse for years now. It seems like I saw this bug in bugzilla years ago! I have to hold down the damn mouse button or the menus vanish!
When will the theme support cover more than just eye-candy? When I hit Ctrl+O, I want don't want a file open box, I want to be able to open any document, whether it's local or not. Give me a damn URI input field!
I whilst I'm ranting: (although the modern look is priddy) why does half the text run off the side of the controls?
Really, good for them. It is about time that code reuse was actually practiced by a Linux project.
Of course, I actually like Gnome so I might be biased :).
Actually, for some time, the Mozilla scrollbar was considered part of the page context :) I remember when my CSS decided to start rendering itself over the scrollbar, and stay there. That lasted a week or so.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
It actually requires gnome, libglade, and libxml. It won't run without a whole mess of gnome libraries. Not such a bad thing though, since it speeds development.
Maybe Mozilla still crashes on some pages, but then again so does Netscape Communicator. Stability, for me at least, isn't the Mozilla show stopper anymore. Communicator crashes more often on me nowadays! But I don't visit a lot of Java-rich sites..
It's still a memory hog though, and doesn't always respond well. Sometimes it's really slow.
I've been running last night's build all day (and, of course, it isn't "integrated" into my system; I can swap it out for any other browser I want to) without a single problem. Everything works just great (I haven't used the e-mail or composition stuff; just browsing). My system is a Celron 400A with 128MB of RAM. Mozilla is quick and responsive. It uses about 10MB of RAM while running and about as much shared (it is a GTK app, complete with GTK themes; so my Mozilla looks like Aqua now).
I don't understand your complaints. Perhaps the Windows version is worse, but I doubt it. Internet Explorer is a cool product, but not one that I'd point to as any epitome of good design. You can crash your Windows system by highlighting a bunch of pictures (on my system it takes about 30), right-click on them and then click 'open'; as long as IE is your default picture viewer, which it does by default upon installation. IE doesn't tell you what it's doing on the status line, so you have no idea if it is hanging on a DNS query or simply loading from a slow site. IE has ugly buttons, which cannot be themed (apart from the lame Windows color "themes"). IE takes control of all "multimedia" mime-types every time you install it. IE's channel bar doesn't do one-tenth of what the new sidebar does under Netscape (try using the Google integration, it's very cool). IE hangs EXPLORE.EXE under Windows; so if it crashes it takes the entire desktop environment down with it (Start Menu and all); Mozilla does no such thing. IE waits too long to display pages; Mozilla will draw any page as soon as it can -- the picture sizes be damned. IE has special extensions developed by Microsoft for internet exploring; Mozilla is (ahem, *will* be) fully compliant. IE's ultimate goal is to get you to rent your software over Microsoft.NET -- Mozilla just wants to do what YOU want it to do.
I don't see any speed problems on my system. I haven't crashed it at all today (which is more than I can say for IE, half the time I use it). I don't understand your complaints.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Browser/Mail/IM/Skinnable/Everything
Okay, skinnability was not an add-on feature. It's a side effect of using the browser engine to render the widget set, itself a side effect of deciding to make the front end platform-independent.
I mean, they could have added code and spent time to make it non-skinnable, but what would have been the point?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Hi.
l a-i386-unknown-freebsdelf4.1.1-M18.tar.gz
I built and packaged M18 for FreeBSD. I used 4.1.1 to build it, but I ran it on 4.1 without a hitch too. I sent in my tar.gz file to mozilla, but until it shows up there you can get it from:
http://unixstuff.penguinpowered.com/files/mozil
M18 sure seems fast, I can't believe how much mozilla has progressed in the last few months! I've been using it and promoting it since around M8, and my friends are finally starting to listen to me..
Cheers,
Ben
> There are professionals who can help you deal with the disappointment of not having total control over the experience of those who enter your site.
Yes, when you're a graphic design professional, they're called unemployment officers. This is why so many have just given up entirely and gone to using Flash instead, which of course the "tty at 2400 bps forever" crowd really hates. Not my market, but it gets really annoying filtering out their screechy emails.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Netscape would be so much better if it were designed by a company with a clear Internet strategy, not some bunch of ragtag volunteers who work on it in their spare time.
Yeah, their "clear Internet strategy" reminds me of Stephen from Braveheart:
"It's mine, I own it."
Jay (=
...and no, that's not a typo.
.deb to an RPM) to try out the old M17 build -- hopefully we're getting an idea of what the final product will feel like. And I'll be waiting anxiously for Debian to get an M18 .deb out there...
Was the Debian M17-3 package in unstable compiled without all of the uber-bloatish debugging stuff? Because it seems a lot more responsive than any of the tarballed binaries or RPMs I tried, of any milestone.
If it was compiled without debugging and with some optimization, I urge everyone who has access to a Debian box (or can use alien to convert the
Jay (=
On a serious note. I do like it, if it were only a little more stable. I have noticed it is pretty fast. It does have alot of features that are working rather nicey. Themses are working and I have installed a few. The install is okay. i have had a few crashes, but I find I like it better than 4.x. I have had problems with yahoo mail though, but not sure why. Cookies I think. Looks pretty sweet I am looking forward to the released verison. Oh and it does have 128 bit encryption built in.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I don't think you understood my question. Yes, X is a rather bloated protocol and somewhat clunky, but that's not the problem with mozilla. I have a very fast machine, video card, and X server. I run dozens of X applications daily, including Gnome and KDE apps that are blazingly fast in terms of responsiveness. What I'm wondering is if anything will be done to improve mozilla's responsiveness under X.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
I remember compiling pre-milestone Mozilla builds on Linux oh so many months ago. Mozilla has become noticeably faster and more standards-compliant every milestone. I am afraid though that they may be too late for normal consumers because I'm sure Microsoft is working on a another rehash of their non-standards compliant Explorer with some proprietary gee-whiz feature x that consumers will crave. This will most definitely impact Moz... err Netscape's browser usage. As a web developer, I would love to write cross-browser code but Microsoft is the dominating browser, so I have to write individual Cascading Style Sheets for each browser since their support varies.
it crashes a lot less than netscape 4.75. and its dhtml capabilities are quite a bit nicer... if your into such things...
....................
> "Non HTML4 Strict documents will try to be rendered the way the author intended rather than according to the specification."
t e>, etc., as hints.
> How does it know?
If you're going to go the non-standard route, you should use tags like <MakeThisPartExciting>, <AddSomeFluffHere>, <DontLetThemKnowThisIsAnAdvertismentUntilItsTooLa
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Under Netscape 4.x, if your existing browser window is maximized, any new browser windows you create are also maximized. If your original window is not maximized, neither are the new ones.
But under both Mozilla and Netscape 6pr3 new windows are not maximized. This is just like IE and is in fact one of the reasons I avoid using IE in the first place. I'd really like to see this set back to the way that Netscape 4.x works, or at least have some kind of an option in the control panel to control this behaviour.
Speed wise the browswer does seem to be getting there. I suspect this is largely due to the removal do debugging aids in the code itself which slowed everything down but helped the developers see what the hell was going on.
I'm hoping that the final product will be compatible with pages optimized for IE. It has XML and CSS support of course, but what about all the funky javascript and DHTML stuff that IE has? It's time to "embrace and extend" Microsoft's stuff lest we be left behind.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active,
.mozilla/default/chrome that defines how Mozilla should render pages. I dunno whether this is possible under Windows, or where you'd put the file if you can - mostly likely in whatever the user preferences directory is.
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
I actually have a stylesheet set up that eliminates underlining, and italicizes all links. If you're in *nix, you can place a stylesheet called userContent.css under
it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left,
Strangely, I recall this feature being in a few nightly builds during the M18 cycle, though I'm not sure if it was taken out or it doesn't work on all pages.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
It doesn't. It never has. Neither in Windows nor Linux.
/home/$USER/.mozilla/default/chrome:
Awright, then drop the following pair of lines into a file called userContent.css under
A:link {text-decoration: none}
A:visited {text-decoration: none}
If you're in Windows, I dunno where the userContent.css file goes - probably whatever dir the user prefs are stored in. Either way, it should go in a chrome directory.
If that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas. I only know about this because I always run new builds in a console for the first time, and they used to mention looking for the userContent.css file (among other names and files).
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
This has really got to get fixed. I cannot believe that mozilla must be *LOCALLY* installed to function properly.
I support a few thousand unix boxes that mount 99% of all their non-os programs read-only from NFS servers.
Nobody's going to be using mozilla here until this incredibly dumb oversight gets fixed.
And a minor request: Can you provide binaries with gtk/glib statically linked in so that there are not requirements for non-system libraries on the client-side? (maybe not a big deal for linux, but a hassle for other unix versions)
I'd say this is a bit of a mistake in the release /usr/local/netscape, then ran it once as root. That was enough. Since then I've been perfectly able to run it as a user.
notes. It just needs to write once (the first time
you run it) to the install directory. I installed
it using the installer to
I don't like responding to trolls but I'm going to say it till I kill myself.. slashdot = what rob and the other editors like, they seem to all like mozilla, therefore mozilla milestones get posted because they like mozilla. I had actually heard that M18 was supposed to be out late next week so I'm glad this got posted, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it till tomarrow. That being said, the nightlies for linux are rock stable FOR ME. 2000101021 hasn't crashed in 3 days of use after I chown'd psm.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
The problem is that once the monopoly gets ahead, they stop innovating because innovation is expensive. You can see this with Office and then Win9x series.
This is complete and utter rubbish.
Every browser vendor is working hard on improving their CSS support.
If you want to style documents, what are the alternatives to using CSS? Today people use TABLEs, FONT tags and other presentational markup, but that's not nearly as powerful or easy to use as CSS. As the baseline level of CSS support in GUI browsers increases, designers will use it more and more. They'd be crazy not to.
The other alternative is XML+XSLT+XSL-FO. But this is far in the future and there are unresolved questions that so far make it a less than complete solution (e.g. how to support dynamic documents).
An AOL-on-Linux box would come preinstalled and need not ever drop the user down to a command line. It could be more like a Tivo. They don't seem to have problems supporting Linux --- because the user never even realizes that they're using Linux.
Microsoft wants to destroy AOL just as much as they want to destroy every other serious competitor. But they signed a deal with AOL where AOL keeps using IE (and hence keeps IE's market share up) in return for AOL having their client on the Win9x desktop. MS sees that as a win for now, but that could change anytime.
AOL could easily twist the arms of Macromedia and Real to keep their plugins up to date on Linux.
Going back should return you to the correct scroll position. That feature broke recently; it has been fixed, but maybe not in time for the official M18 build.
Like the other poster said, if you really want to configure the way Mozilla renders Web pages, go wild with user style sheets. Try something like this:
:link { text-decoration: none; }
User CSS really provides the ultimate customizable browsing experience.
> Now, I don't need a mail client, but if I use
> Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me,
> regardless of whether I want it or not.
Unless you uncheck "Mailnews" when you install Mozilla.
It sniffs the DOCTYPE.
I tried too, but things fail in weird ways. You may not see it right away. For example, Access Wizards required write access to a few files in the office directory.
There's a Microsoft KB article about what needs write access on C: for Office 97. It's a disgrace...
q169387
Office 2000 is a lot better. NT and NTFS came out a helluva long time ago (when, like 94ish?). It's a shame that several years later, Microsoft Apps still don't behave well in R/O environments (and now Mozilla gets to continue the tradition...)
Programmers, no matter what system they write for, should never ever assume they can scribble to files and directories in any place other than a defined temp directory,a user-defined directory, or some directory configured by the systems admin in some global preferences location.
The same kind of thing could be said for the Windows registry. Programs should never assume they can write to HKLM keys. Stuff in HKLM should be defined during install time or via system policies. Any user data and settings should be recorded to HKCU only...
And this is NOT just a linux/unix issue. System Administrators of NT/W2K boxen also expect that programs don't write into the program directories...
This one is a real killer. Years of work and because of this, those of us that deploy desktops that number in the thousands (in my case) will decide it's not worth it and not bother... Too many risks, too many hassles...
Well, maybe 5 mins. I just wrote a script that updates my nightly build every night. That way I have a fresh copy of Mozilla waiting for me every morning.
I was reading thru the known issuses and found this.
"Non HTML4 Strict documents will try to be rendered the way the author intended rather than according to the specification. "
How does it know?
AdFuel
Good point, some parts of it still do use the GTK+ settings. However, they've been moving away from GTK+ at a furious rate, and it won't be long till there's nothing visibly recognizable(although we'll probably always see little things like GTK+ menu behaviour).
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Well, it could be a window manager issue, but I tested it with BlackBox, Enlightenment, IceWM, and Sawfish. The results were the same. Mind you, I didn't get a chance to try the KDE Window Manager. What are you using?
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Crap, you see that too? Hmm... Is it Slashdot, or my browser? Upsetting.
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Testing this with Mozilla M18© Hoping to see if characters are proper and such© !@#$%^&*¥
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Why is is that people always fail to see that Mozilla and Netscape Communicator have NEVER been intended to be a lightweight pure web browser.
They have always been intended to be complete internet communication suites for the masses, which implies WWW, FTP, News, Email, IM, and the rest.
Of course you dont have to install everything if you dont want it, but it has still been designed with doing everything in mind.
THIS IS NOT A BAD THING...just not what you and a few others want.
A lot of people DO want this, which is exactly why they are making it that way.
If you want a speciallized application, why are you looking at Mozilla at all?
Advanced users are users too!
Can I burn Mozilla onto an EEPROM yet and boot a Mozilla OS yet?
Replacing '.' with '©'! Talk about inovation!
Still... Somehow I expected MS would be the first with that one.
Alright, how do I get mozilla working with Java? I've downloaded the Java plugin, it installed, but still no Java. I'm using windows.
Cheers //Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
I think there should be a balance between Standards Compliance and Standards Forcing. I'm not sure about mozilla, but not closing a tag in Netscape 4.x makes the entire table unreadable as if the data itslef isn't there. Sure, it's sloppy to not close tables, but IE still renders the page 'ignoring' errors, it doesn't just stop
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
The reason Netscape won the browser war is this:
Netscape = Shareware on the net, 40 bucks shrinkwrapped in stores when IE 3 hit the scene.
IE 3 was when IE really started to compete...
and IE was free. Netscape wasn't. IE was.
Remember that short time when Netscape said "screw this" and left the browser market?
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Actually, not only does mozilla not bring you back to the same spot on a previous page, links to placeholders within the same page also don't work, as well as an annoying bug where mozilla will lose your place on a page if you minimize the window.
The scroll bug is fixed and in the current build tree - I filed a bug report about 10 days ago and it was fixed in the last couple. Whether it made it into M18 I don't know - I run the nightlies now.
As for the minimising bug - have you checked Bugzilla? See if someone has reported it? (I can't reproduce it with build 2000101109 on Linux). There is all this great bug reporting and tracing available at Bugzilla to allow you to see what problems are known about - make use of it, and help the Mozilla team get rid of things that annoy you the most.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
You know, I was just reflecting on Mozilla. It is a good browser and it's open source, but the thing is, it can get kind of boring. I mean, if there is a bug on it, you can find out what's causing it and prevent it from occurring again. On the other hand, with Microsoft Internet Explorer, there are so many different ways of crashing that it never gets boring. No one can take away that joy from me, because they can't search for them and remove them. Microsoft is a friendly giant and one that obviously wants me to enjoy my web browsing.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
I just checked Mozilla.org and it seems M18 actually is out. I do not understand this. Why were we not given a false alarm a month in advance about the upcoming release like /. did for M16 and M17? C'mon guys, get with the program :-)
>You kids have fun chasing those tail-lights, though.
You know what they say...
It's better to be behind a moving car than in front of it.
[SmusH]
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Please dont take me as a troll but... There are already many programs that do what the components of Mozilla do, from good ol pine for mail, to jaim for integrated instant messaging, to vi for HTML editing, and any of hundreds of other apps at friendly freshmeat.net.
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
On the galeon web site i found the following text "It requires Gnome and MOZILLA M17.", now i see where you are coming from, and to tell the truth i agree with you, but i am just to lazy to do anything about it. (I bolded it to bring out the whole point of this ramble)
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Sorry, that comment verges on flamebait. But so does your post. Please assume that people who disagree with you have some basic intelligence. It won't always be true, but you do want the benefit of the same assumption, don't you?
Now then, I've downloaded all the recent lizards. It is true that every Mozilla "milestone" has been slightly better than the previous one. But there have been eighteen milestone releases over a total of 33 months! And the product is still barely alpha quality. No, it's worse than that -- each milestone seems to have a fair number of regressions, many of which affect basic functionality. I don't suppose you've heard of Sisyphus?
They also seem to have started paring down features in an attempt to make the product manageable. Which would be fine -- if this didn't include very basic features, like LDAP support. People in large orgs will not use an email client that doesn't support LDAP!
As for bug reporting, this is an issue I know a little about. I was once (for my sins) the technical editor of a major corporate tech support site. This job required me to spend a lot of time reading bug reports. Now, if there's one thing that wastes everybody's time, it's a lot of duplicate reports for a single bug. In order to avoid dups, you have to track existing bugs on the product you're testing. People who don't have time to do this would not be helping anybody by filing a bug for every little crash and problem.
And these same people have every right to download the product, run it through its paces, and report to the world that the product ain't ready for prime time. That's not product bashing, that's a simple, honest reporting. You're free to argue that the lizard just needs a little more time. But as the project stretches on and on, that argument is looking pretty thin.
__________
Name me one site in the top ten sites that make significant use of CSS.
Name three in the top fifty.
Once again, you can blame netscape or microsoft for not supporting CSS when it was in its infancy - at this juncture its a moot point - no site is going to bother with it. Its now a dead technology that browser builders can safely avoid supporting.
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless. Once again, in the real world, the production IE code is far far ahead of anything out of the mozilla project in every way that is meaningful to common users.
No one is ever going to win the browser market with better CSS support, because 99% of the users out there have no use for CSS. Name one major website that makes effective use of it...face it, mozilla conforms to more dead standards than any other browser. Most users would have settled for functional javascript support.
I must say, I'm very disappointed in Mozilla and Netscape. Not only has this "cutting edge" browser taken so damn long to get this far, it's still not very good. It still lacks needed features, is unstable so much as to almost make Windows seem bug-free, and it's bloated beyond belief.
The previous Mozilla milestone I downloaded would freeze up at random points, mostly while viewing large pages, screw up images (actually inserting images from OTHER sites), etc. And, when I tried to use Netscape 6 Preview 3, I spent two hours downloading the damn thing over my sucky 33.6 connection, only to get an indecypherable error when I try to run it.
This reflects very badly on the open source community, and while it was a nice try, Mozilla and Netscape only have a few more nails to go in their collective coffin. Hopefully some other open source project will do better, or (*closed source shudder*) maybe Opera, which is shaping up nice.
*sigh*
-----
Yeah it's a troll post -- a real old and boring one, but one that's sure to get responses. Whine Bitch Netscape has Mail Support Bitch Whine Easy Karma Bitch Whine.
Look: Netscape has almost always had e-mail support. In fact lots of people (still) use it. Fairly large corporations have standardized on Netscape mail. I know of at least two people that use NS Messenger and browse the web with IE (even mailto: works properly with IE/Messenger, where it's still broken in Mozilla/any other MUA).
There is simply NO way that they could ship a product that is missing a huge amount of functionality thats been there since 1994. Real users (as opposed to you elite posuers) would rip them a huge new asshole. Get over with it.
Furthermore, Netscape Mail one of the only usable GUI mail clients on Unix, and yet all of you lamers are on a jihad to have it killed, presumably. And don't tell me about KMail or GOutlook or whatever, because it just ain't there yet.
But of course, you goobers don't need a GUI mail client because you are soooo happy with Pine or Mutt. Yeah that makes you superior... What? Pine was designed for drooling state school freshman internet newbies? Huh? What? Pine is just like a GUI client except without the mouse bindings? What? I can't heeaaar yooooou! All real UNIX gurus use 'mail'? What? Wha? Uhhh, doesn't matter because I use text mode and am soooo elite for doing so. Keep telling yourself that, and keep on trolling.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
216.86.109.135
/. you may want to do something similar)
For the proxy challenged (as myself, also). I just went and puttied into my bsd server pingeded it and opened it up in lynx to make sure I wasn't tripping their proxy alarms for a good reason (If you don't trust blind links or IP's from
HTH
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
Some versions of glibc have a threads problem causing The Lizard to hang while starting up. I had problems with glibc-2.1.3-17. Upgrade to glibc-2.1.3-21 and the problem goes away.
I used the aphrodite chrome when the modern was too ugly to look at. I think people don't realize how versatile moz is.
ObComplaint: It doesn't play well on 8-bit graphics. How do we do settings that were in .Xdefaults for Netscape? Like Netscape*maxImageColors
CC
Shut yer piehole, rookie. You have obviously never used a real browser before.
Try using Lynx.
Lynx does away with all those pesky bloat things like Java, Flash, skins, JavaScript, images, and all that. Netscape 3 is a fucking tanker truck compared to Lynx; I can be halfway through my web browsing on a dumb terminal while you're sitting there staring at a pretty little ship's wheel splash screen (not to mention the bloat of including that image with the browser--TOTAL waste of my hard disk!) Best of all with Lynx, you don't need to worry about what those candy-ass, brainless designers want to cram down YOUR throat; everything comes out in pure, beautiful ASCII. It has a way better status indicator than that piece-of-shit bar they put in Netscape 3 (did I ask the status bar to start rounding the number of bytes downloaded to the nearest tenth of a kilobyte? Did I?) Netscape 3 is just 3.5 megs of slow-ass, eye-candy bloat.
Get a real browser, ya putz.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
ForumZilla is a XUL application that provides a Usenet newsreader-like interface to web discussion forums like Slashdot (although you can't read Slashdot with ForumZilla yet). Get more info at the ForumZilla web site:
http://www.forumzilla.com/One thing really disturbs me, however. The performance under Linux on a comparable machine is substantially worse than on Windows. I'm primarily refering to the responsiveness of the widgets. The menus are sluggish under Linux where they are blazingly fast at updating on Windows. Opening the sidebar is quick and speedy under Windows but under Linux it's slow and ugly.
I'm not posting this in order to bash anyone or the project in general. I'm wondering if anyone has some feedback on the reason for this. Has there not been as much work at improving performance on Linux as there has been for Windows? Will this improve in the future?
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
if I go to the trouble of having a seperate page for 100%CSS1 browsers, it'd piss me off to have someone's "customized browsing experience" break my dhtml
There are professionals who can help you deal with the disappointment of not having total control over the experience of those who enter your site. In the long run, letting go of this need to dominate others will inprove your happiness and self-esteem.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
> Now for my weekly (-1 troll) post.
/.ers may be happy with a pile of app-components (apponents?) that we can built our Rube Goldberg contraptions out of, but not everyone else on the planet is. For some, a browser is just a make-do until they can get a WebTV. Or maybe just an ordinary TV.
I don't think you a troll, but I do disagree with you. (Or rather, I see why Mozilla might disagree with you.)
And that is because, for Joe Consumer, the PC is an internet appliance. Mail, newsgroups, Web sites - that's the internet experience for most people, and thus the PC experience for many. Why confuse them with a pile of separate applications?
Many
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As linux matures, the programs get bigger. So, it is only logical that development starts to suffer from the same problems windows develop suffers from. I was reading something about the KDE release candidate yesterday. Somebody was complaining that he couldn't keep konquerer running for more than a day.
That doesn't surprise me, it just takes a certain amount of time to do proper field testing. Open source is not a silver bullet when it comes to software development. Software quality problems don't just go away when you GPL your source. So yes, as linux is maturing you are experiencing the same problems windows has experienced.
To get back to mozilla, everybody is complaining that it takes ages for mozilla to be released. However, I think less then two years (I'm counting from the moment they threw away the old netscape sourcecode) is very reasonable for such a complex product. The main competitor (microsoft) has only done minor bug fixing and minor feature additions to their product in the same time.
Jilles
AOL has a few very good reasons to want to integrate Mozilla into the AOL client.
First, if they sell a custom box running AOL on Linux, the profit is all AOL's.
Second, relying on IE and Windows creates a massive strategic weakness for AOL. Microsoft can and does try to direct users to Microsoft content rather than AOL/TW content. Furthermore, AOL is vulnerable to whatever new tricks may MS decide to roll into IE. Depending on your fiercest competitor (who wants you dead) for the most important chunk of your software, with no plan B, would just be suicidal.
Third, AOL-TV. Mozilla lets AOL move in directions that Microsoft doesn't want to go, or more likely doesn't want AOL to go.
Some people built a thing called Forumzilla, which is pretty close to a Slashdot-cruiser written in XUL. I haven't heard of any plans to roll it into the standard Mozilla distribution, though.
IE doesn't have tons of debugging code. If you compile from source with the debugging stuff disabled and without mail/news, you get a 6 MB tarball. My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active, it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left, and... well, I forget what the other one was. I guess it wasn't that big a deal.
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
It doesn't. It never has. Neither in Windows nor Linux.
But I did remember the other "feature" that I dislike, and it turns out to be the one that annoys me the most.
Mozilla steals focus (well, steals the top of the desktop) every time it loads a page.
One of the main reasons I avoid Windows is because the apps are always stealing focus from what I'm trying to do. Apps should treat start up like what I'm doing can not be inturrupted or humankind will perish. They should never, ever, ever, EVER (ever) steal focus when they do something. Mozilla does it on every single page load. It's annoying. It could not be more annoying if it came with a plug-in that squirted water in your face on every page load. It could not be more annoying if it repeatedly poked you in the forehead. It could not be more annoying if it defaulted to bright pink background with flashing green text. It could not be more annoying.
Woah. I guess that was a rant.
Yes it was, but it was a rant after my own heart. I cannot tell you how annoying I find programs that claim focus to be. To use a real world analogy:
Programmers should try to relate program behavior back to the real world as much as possible (that's what I do!): if it would be rude to do it in the real world, it's rude to do it in my computer. That means interrupting me (focus stealing), spying on me, trying to fasten a radio tracking collar on me when I enter a store (needless cookies), or anything else.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I dont mean for this to sound like a troll, but...
When I first heard of of Mozilla I was under the impression that it was trying to fix all of NS's mistakes (a big one being bloat) and to be open source. It seems to have missed the first goal by a large margin (I can get versions of IE 5 that are smaller than the windows version), but the second is still there. This begs and interesting question, are OSS projects always (or ever) better than their CSS counterparts? In this situation it seems to be that the answer is no, but in other cases (like web serving) it seems that the answer is yes. Any thoughts on this?
Mark Duell
I'd personally prefer less, to 'Mo'. While they've spent years making this, and it is a great program, I would rather have a BROWSER. Not a Browser/Mail/IM/Skinnable/Everything you want but the fabled sink. The only thing missing is a kernel. Joking, but on a serious side, why be a jack of all trades yet master at none? And on top of that, you need a "big honkin' machine" to run it!
If I wanted to do everything from one program, I'd just use emacs. But I like smaller programs that do their job well, back to the old unix philosophy of the toolchest of flixible tools.
For example, I still use pine to read mail. Why? Because I like it. It's fast, uses little resources, and I can use it through telnet or ssh. Now, I don't need a mail client, but if I use Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me, regardless of whether I want it or not. And I don't.
There are already many programs that do what the components of Mozilla do, from good ol pine for mail, to jaim for integrated instant messaging, to vi for HTML editing, and any of hundreds of other apps at friendly freshmeat.net.
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
When I do have days that I feel like running a monolithic program to browse, mail, and chat, I'll stick to xemacs. At least then I can still hack code. :)
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
The modern theme looks like it comes from Aqua or TNG!
Hopefully it'll let me post this article properly! M17 had some problems posting to K5 and here, for me anyway...
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Yes, it's very late, and may be even later than they think. But I'm inclined not to believe those who say that the window has closed for a successful launch. It's certainly going to be a while, years maybe, before Mozilla takes any significant market share (unless AOL starts distributing it - they might be good for something).
:)
Micros~1 hasn't done anything "innovative" with a browser for years. Even Mac IE5.5, which has awesome standards support, is just a re-bloat^H^H^H^H^Hwrite of IE4 - it's what they should have released as IE4 in the first place.
Once Mozilla is released and stable (events which I hope will coincide) it's going to be much, much easier to modify and update for future standards support, look-and-feel, rebranding (AOL) than IE5. Mozilla is "front-loading" future work into this release, while Micros~2 is stuck making little patches and calling them new versions.
Imagine a web development shop landing a large Intranet contract. "Hey - how'd you like us to whip up a custom version of Mozilla for you? Not just a lame-ass IE 'rebrand' with a couple different icons, but a serious web application with support for your [insert buzzword here]?"
It's going to be a beautiful day, folks. Micros~3 has the technical resources to do something like that, but they never will. Geeks have run the web for a long time, and Mozilla's going to make it easier.
On a web development note, it's very nice to use a free (and Free) browser to check bugs in my pages, rather than the reverse (using my pages to check bugs in a free - not Free - browser).
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
The following is a wake up call for the Slashdot community in general:
AOL has no plans to adopt Netscape/Mozilla/Any other crappy browser the Open Source community uses as its primary browser. While this may happen for the Linux version of AOL its certainly not a planned feature in the windows versions of their client.
How do I know this? Could be that I've been beta testing AOL 6.0 for the last 6 months (for Windows and 5.0 for Macintosh) and they've done nothing but work to intergrate IE deeper and deeper into the client.
And yes even if AOL does integrate Netscrape/Mozilla into their client for Linux it won't make a damns worth of difference. This is simply due to the fact that AOL on Linux is a paradox in and of itself and can provide no reason at all for its existence. (Except perhaps to convince the Linux Zealots - AHEM CmdrTaco that Windows/IE is going to just suddenly disappear in a big puff of smoke one day and suddenly be replaced by Linux)
Another thing - why in god's name does it take TWO years to develop a browser? Just think about where we would be today if it took two years for IE to be created - wait.... ummm... hmmm... then we would all be forced to used Netscrape or maybe if everything took that long we would all still be using that crappy Linux 2.2 kernel (oh wait - we are!)
Seriously though - its time for the Mozilla team to kick it into high gear - even though I've already sworn off Linux for Windows 2k and Mac OS X - Linux requires a decent browser if its ever going to make any headway in the desktop arena. You guys can talk all day about how Linux kicks Windoze and Mac OS Xcrement's asses all day - but how many prebuilt, preinstalled Linux boxes have you seen that within 15 minutes of turning on the computer for the VERY FIRST time the average user can be surfing the web?
Also - I dont know how many of you (I would guess zero) have gotten inside looks at Windows 2001 (Codename: Whistler) but its finally going to mean the end of all this win9x instability you guys like to rave on about (I've got the latest development build of 2276). Yeah - they are combining the stability of win2k with the juicy little consumer features of Windows ME to create what the Linux Community will only refer to as in the coming years as "The AntiChrist". Theres some food for though for you guys....
Gamorck (darkgamorck@home.com)
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
> a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended
Good: the web is not about making some lame-assed and incompetent designer who doesn't have a clue about UI design make the web look how HE wants it. No, it's about ME. ME goddamn it. He doesn't make the pages for his benefit - he makes them for mine. So he can fuck off with his bullshit design intentions.
> in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Shows how much you know. Netscape 3 is *the best* browser and certainly the most useful one. Why? Easy for me to disable JavaScript (alt+o n alt+s enter - takes under 1 second) - IE takes twenty seconds while I scroll through the biggest pile of shit this side of the Windows source code repository; easy for me to disable images (just one key stroke); fast, and not bloated like v4 or v6; doesn't crash; easy to disable Java (or don't install it in the first place); tells me what it's doing when it's downloading (e.g., 36% of 27kb); nice mail reader; good ftp client. It also supports everything I need to do - cookies, JavaScript, file upload etc.
IE for me is worthless trash - FTP client always hangs the browser window; browser windows often hang for no reason; no file download status indicator; bloated and slow.
Same for Netscape 4; Netscape 6 is ok, but I want the classic skin by default, and I don't want the AOL shit (that's why I use Mozilla), I don't like the crashes, I want to be able to disable crap like JavaShit when appropriate without fucking around with slow loading preference menus, and most importantly:
I WANT A FUCKING STATUS INDICATOR.
[BTW, NN3 does do Flash and Java, but you don't get them bloated in by default; the only thing you don't get is fucking annoying DHTML, which is COMPLETELY USELESS (Java and Flash suck too, but sometimes content can't been seen without them.)]
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
I'd like to complain about Mozilla too: lately, Mozilla has gotten too fast and stable and standards-compliant. I miss the old days when everything was obviously broken, and it was easy to find bugs.
:)
Therefore, here is my advice to you: install Mozilla for Windows. No, no, don't install Windows, unless you already have it. Just make sure that you run Mozilla for Windows under Wine on Linux. THEN you get all your old bugs back, for free! Oh yeah, it still browses the web, but at least you have some real, obvious, fixable bugs. And then you get to help out the Wine project, too!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Be still my beating heart.
Just what I've always wanted - a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended, and the other half not work at all. Sure, having a browser written in tcl has some degree of geek-cool, but in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
I know you need to do it for PSM. There is a bug opened about it.
Basically, any user who runs mozilla needs to be able to write to mozilla/psm/components/xpdi.dat Yes, it's a bad bug. And it looks like the mozilla guys are still arguing about whether it should be fixed!
Why? This is a big problem in the Windows world, and now this just perpetuates it.
It's a very bad idea to require this. It prevents secure multi-user access. For example, student computer labs that I am responsible for have NT Workstation installed with feeble attempts at tough ACLS to prevent deliberate or malicious damage to C: drive. So many programs require full access to the program drive. Worse, a lot (like office 97) require the ROOT directory to be writable and then there's NT itself which requires %systemroot% (basically /bin) to be writable.
I don't buy this "you can't secure a computer you have physical access to" routine. Maybe not 100%, but getting close to that sure saves a lot of support costs over leaving a lab machine wide open...
Well, I've been using th nightlies for a while, and I must say I am extraordinarily disappointed with Mozilla M18©
Why? Well, before I go into this, lemme tell you what I like about it :
a Must faster© At least on my machine, Mozilla resembles Netscape in speed© Not bad, considering that Mozilla is incredibly more sophisticated and featureful©
b Prettier© While I would prefer Mozilla to adopt my GTK+ theme, it probably won't be too long after 1©0 when someone releases a program to do just that© That said, I think the new "Modern" theme is nice©
c Stability© This is the first time I've ever been able to say this - Mozilla is at least as stable as my current Netscape distribution© 'nuff said©
Now, you're probably still wondering why I am disappointed with this Milestone© Well, use it for a while and you migt understand© If there's one thing every application - no matter how big or small - should keep in mind© The chances that it's the only application the user has open are next to nil© As such, they should take care not to throw themselves in front of the user every few minutes© Unfortunately, Mozilla has broken this rule - it will raise a window when pages have finished loading© Not all pages© And not consistently, either© What's worse is that under Linux, the raised windows arn't focused - they're just now sitting in front of whatever you were using© Now, you have to go over to the offensive Mozilla window and click on it to focus it, and then switch back to your old app© Now, when you're coding, you've just lost your train of thought, and you might never get it back©
Before I get flames about this, I'd like to say that, *YES* I could change my focus settings© But should I? Should I *have* to? Just because Mozilla wants me to? No, of course not© While many might not think at first glance that this is a show-stopping bug, it makes Mozilla extremely irritating to use©
Ah well, I've had my rant© : I've submitted a bug report : After all that has been said, I still have great respect for the Mozilla team and all their contributors© I wish them well© I wish them happiness and prosperity© I also wish they'd fix that bug ;
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
This is cool. Now we even have trolls submitting stories. How can I mark the story as -1 flamebait?
MSIE is not open source, bad Microsoft, bad bad..
Mozilla is open source, bugs, bugs, bad, bad
Sometimes I think that nothing is good enough for some people. You're damned if you don't release your source code and you're damned if you develop your software openly giving full access to CVS.
Mozilla bashers should really look deep in the mirror. www.mozilla.org, www.mozillazine.org and especially bugzilla.mozilla.org contain everything you need to know about Mozilla. You can find out why the tarballs are big (several skins, debugging code), why the memory footprint is big (not optimized yet) and what bugs are still to be fixed (a lot). If you're lazy, stop by at #mozilla on IRC and ask. You'll get a fast answer, I guarantee you.
People, understand your responsibility. Go find out before climbing on a soap box and starting to complain. All this complaining about Mozilla crashing will hurt it's reputation. And Mozilla or Netscape is not to be blamed for it. Mozilla has been pre-alpha, alpha or beta all the time. Any programmer knows that it's still far away from a rock solid Mozilla 1.0.
However, I do use Mozilla more than Netscape now. I love Mozilla's speed on NT and how it renders correctly pages that the old Netscape can't even dream about. That's very nice for a beta-version, isn't it? Let's see how the memory footprint and stability is in another six months or a year.
The bottom line still is that Mozilla looks good. It has got a lot faster lately. It's getting better and better every week and when it's ready, it will be fabulous. I just hope that this Mozilla bashing won't give it a bad rep so that people won't even try the final product.