Mozilla .6 Released

jensend writes: "Mozilla's .6 milestone has been reached. This should bring the functionality of Netscape 6 without the marketing stuff and performance hit. Details at Mozilla .6 Release Notes."

Comments

Re:*sigh*

[giberti]

• "skin"-ability might be nice, too.

<rant>

• Why do we care if we can change the skin on a software package?
• Is it really necessary to put some akwardly designed UI over essentially functional package?
• Why can't the UI be thought out from the get go?
• Do I really need a skin to match my favorite superstar/sports team/softdrink?
• Do I really have time to spend looking for all these "skins" or better yet should I stick with the branded one that will eventually come with my computer (gateway/dell/compaq/ibm)?
• Why do we insist on throwing out all of the design research that has been put into things like "windowing" technology by Xerox, Apple and M$, in favor of things like ie's new "head" skin for viewing streaming media?

Perhaps we should focus on more important tasks such as security, speed and _actual_ functionality and stop developing fluff like see through windows, skins and all in one clients!

</rant>

How its going so far

[DaSyonic]

Mozilla has really come along way. Ive been using the nightly builds for the past 3 months (upgrading daily, missed very few builds) and the quality of Mozilla is really improving

Ive now just gotten .6 and tried it out. The first thing I tried to do is install the Java plugin from netscape. Amazingly enough, went without problem. This has been kinda tricky, even in the last few nightly builds. PSM (to enable SSL) installed nicely, but thats nothing new. Then I fired up Mozilla mail and the filters still work (my filters died for some reason a few nights ago)

In conclusion, Mozilla is very stable. Its not perfect, it might just crash on you, but it does it, and does it well. I have not used any other browser in several weeks. I get all my email (including a subscribtion to linux-kernel mailing list among others) through mozilla mail, and it filters it nicely and loads the spool (sometimes over 1500 messages) quickly. Even if your not ready to throwout Netscape just yet, give Mozilla a try. Im glad that this Milestone is stable, the past Milestone (M18) was really awful, and I recommended against it and told others to just use the nightly builds. This one seems to finally be the one to work, and work well.

Web Standards Project Applauds Netscape 6

[Chuck Chunder]

In related news it seems that the WaSP have changed their minds about Netscape 6.

Unacceptable limitation

[rknop]

From the release notes:

If you are installing Mozilla on a multi-user operating system such as Linux, Unix, or Windows 2000, you should install it separately in the user directory of each user who plans to use Mozilla.

Forget it, I'm not even going to try this. The last thing I want to have to do is have a HUGE program installed once for every user on the machine. Sure, at home, I'm mostly the only user, but not entirely. And at work, we can't afford that kind of disk space in everyone's home directories.

Why is it so hard to get a Mozilla with SSL working with a true multiuser install? I mean, hell, Quake 3 has a true multiuser install nowadays. Older browsers never had trouble with it. I like what I've seen of Mozilla, but I'm not going to consider it a viable option until the thing works on my Unix system like a Unix piece of software, not like a hacked-over piece of Windows 95 or MacOS 7 software.

-Rob

Java runtime for Linux

[mtsirkin]

Hi! To get Java running, you need the java VM plug-in. And the Nescape page linked to from the Mozilla release notes does not seem to work in netscape nor explorer (maybe they want me to use Nescape 6? :)
Anyway, download JVM plug-in here:

• windows
• Linux

Initial experiences - posted from .6

[voop]

Wow! I managed to get Mozilla .6 just before it was announced on /. and before the servers are /.'ed.

Anyways, contrary to previous milestones and nightly builds, this version installed smoothly on my laptop (running Debian) - and seems to run moderately fine. I have tried on some otherwise troublesome URL's, which look surprisingly good.

There are small rendering glitches, such as when writing this text in the "Comment" textfield on slashdot. If I fill out a line, ending a word exactly on the last character in the field, then the "space" before the next word will be in the beginning of the next line. It looks funny, but is hardly annoying.

The browser looks slick, as does the mail&news component. However mail&news seems to be something I will leave with pine for a while. I tried to connect Nozilla .6 to my local leafnode (no, don't bother...it's behind a filtering router). Nozilla read fine the grouplist, I subscribed and even read 3-4 postings. Then everything got stuck, mozilla eating up all the cpu-time it possibly could and I had to -9 it. I tried a few times with roughly the same result. I didn't bother to check the mail functionalities.

So while it may not be ready for prime-time on all fronts, then it cirtanly seems to have replaced Netscape as my browser. Ohh, wait - Mozilla IS netscape. Nevermind, it is a fine product thus far.