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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'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!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I have been using Galeon as my primary browser for the past week or so (before that I was using whatever mozilla that Debian's Woody includes), and I think that it is exactly what you are looking for.
It is basically the Gecko rendering engine wrapped in enough GTK+ so that it actually works as a browser. There's no HTML editor, nor is there a mail client, a news client, or an irc client. It's not skinnable, and it's even Gnome-ified so that it fits in well with your Gnome desktop (although it works fine without Gnome).
Basically it is pretty darn cool. I am quite impressed.
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!
Actually, yeah, that's exactly it:
-Go to Blackdown's site.
-Click on "OK" when the window pops up asking if you want to get the plugin (it's the standard plugin download dialog box).
-It will (should?) take you to a page where you can download the Java plugin.
If you want to do things the slightly harder way (like I did a week ago; I jumped the gun:), you can go to Blackdown, click on Download, pick a mirror, go into JDK-1.3.0/i386/rc1 and grab j2re-1.3.0-RC1-linux-i386.tar.bz2. Then you can install the Java runtime yourself; it includes the plugin.
Of course, if you just want to get to the tarball with no searching, you can just click her e.
Have fun! I am!
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Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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.