Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla 0.7 Released
mpt writes: "Mozilla 0.7 has been released. This is the first release with PSM (the Personal Security Manager) included on Win32, Mac OS, and Linux, so secure sites should work without extra fiddling. Other noticable changes since 0.6 include better mousewheel behavior, Microsoft Proxy Server support, treating maximized windows properly on Win32, and numerous performance improvements (especially for NNTP). So try it out, and report dem bugs." Since Mozilla.org and Mozillazine are now reporting this, we figure the mirrors have had time to update. :)
This is actually much faster, and certainly simpler. It is faster because the area is only drawn once (it is extremely hard to make the program's redraw be able to assumme the area is already erased, since the same code must be used for incremental update when there is no damage, and I doubt Mozilla does this).
More importantly this reduces blinking. For Mozilla which must change the background color for each page, except for a single background color (gray, probably) it will blink to gray and then to the correct color for every page. Even if the color is fixed, or even if background pixmaps are used, it will still blink when a large image or table in a different color is drawn in that area.
Blinking is very annoying and is the primary reason X displays often look like crap when you move windows.
I very much believe this is the correct behavior. I would like to see X fixed so that resizing and mapping windows, and in fact everything except drawing commands from the programs does not alter pixels on the screen. This would vastly reduce the annoying flashing behavior.
The fact that Mozilla is so slow that you would prefer to see the solid gray (actually a very slow version of this "blink") is of course Mozilla's fault, but erasing windows is not the solution.
You mean like what I can setup by editing my user specific $HOME/.mozilla/$moz_profile_name/plugin.list file? You know, the one that's user configurable and everything.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
it's slower to start a window, but page rendering tends to actually be faster than 4.7, with the notable exception of soros.ath.cx which is still faster on 4.7. Slashdot, on the other hand, renders faster in mozilla than ns47, when I hit one of those 500 comment articles, that I read in nested mode.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
HP/UX is not a fringe operating system, Mozilla supporter.
::grin::)
:)
It is from a Desktop user perspective.
I'd venture to say that Linux has a bigger space in the desktop/workstation market then HP-UX (although I'd bet most of those are develpment machines in people's homes vs. in the workplace).
Oh.. and I started using the nightly build from 7/5 as my main browser recently. A little wonkieness certainly, (sometimes downloading files bombs out with an odd message followed by the browser crashing soon after), but it seems to do much better than NS4.08 (which is now my secondary browser), and almost on par with IE5.0 (my tertiary browser... or was that part of my OS?
YMMV but I think they should be ready for a release candidate real soon. The installer even let me pick to just install the browser which made me a very happy camper indeed
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
This isn't really valid -- look at some of the other good browsers available (Konqueror and Opera for Linux, and IE for 'doze) and you'll notice that all of them smoke the living daylights out of Mozilla, while providing quite capable DOM and reflow (better than Mozilla's, in most cases!).
Sure, they can be a bit pokey at times doing one thing or another, but in general, they just haul compared to the 'zilla.
Really, Mozilla being incredibly slow is probably not really because of the rendering engine being sluggish (though it could probably use some usability tuning). It's more due to the horribly designed theming engine and widget set, as you surmised. A quick look at Galeon should convince anyone of this, and also hint at the even greater speedup that could appear if it was dumped completely.
I recall doing some cheezy benchmarks a couple months ago, and found that on the same machine, rendering a page with a bunch of text boxes (thus hitting the XUL junk hard), IE and Netscape 4.75 were both between 20 and 40 times faster than Mozilla (and had better layout usability as well -- Mozilla just had a blank screen, while IE laid out the table incrementally. NS4 didn't, but didn't freeze up either, or at least, was so fast it didn't appear to freeze up).
Eg., NS and IE laid out the page in under 2 seconds, while Mozilla took more than 20. Taking into account the ~1s server generation lag to create the page, that's rather bad. And, of course, since Mozilla is a massive threaded app, instead of forking off children as it should, it froze up completely during rendering in all windows.
Actually, usability speed, as opposed to "real" speed, is one of the big problems with Mozilla right now. It's often fairly comparable with other browsers at producing a finished product of a page, but is very, very slow in terms of the UI feel. Status bars don't update often, gizmos don't pulse and flash, the page doesn't flash on quickly and then get reflowed, etc. The end result is that it's slow to begin with, and once the nasty UI is through with it, it seems like the days of the 386 have escaped to haunt us.
For some reason, my M16 install decided one day to stop running any plug-ins. Ergo, no Flash (no Thugs on Film! Henious!), no Real Audio (no Car Talk!), and Plugger never worked. Do plug-ins work on M17? Has anyone else seen this on M16?
.mozilla directory several times to try to clean this up, to no avail...
I've removed the both the Mozilla install and the
www.eFax.com are spammers
Works better then NS4.x and yes i'm talking about the x86 Linux version. It uses the jkd1.3 jvm from sun. Just get the browser and go to a java site like java.sun.com, a popup will ask you if you wish to install the jdk plugin say yes, and your done. I use the nighly builds, and i'll never go back to Netscape 4x
In my experience, any URL will do, given enough chances.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I have yet to find an IE-only website that is worth going to. Even among the plug-ins, the only ones that seem useful (and only rarely at that) are Java and Flash4.
I really like Konqueror. I think it is much faster than Mozilla, and when it works it works really well. Unfortunately Konqueror is not yet as stable as Mozilla---Konqueror seems to blow up about 3 times more frequently than Mozilla, and it doesn't work with Datek.
BTW, I use Gnome as my desktop and Konqueror as my browser.
From the Installation Notes:
Before installing on Linux, you must have write permission for the target installation directory. (Bug 46588)
So it's saying that I need +w in the install directory when I install Mozilla? No way!
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Wow, I know people complain about the releases being behind schedule, but now their going backwards.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
A light Mozilla session vastly overshadows the memory utilization of NS4.x. Infact, it beats Lotus Notes, and other major bloatware. If you leave the process inactive for a while, and the memory utilizaiton hits 50MB or so... it is a real drag to click on an icon as everything very slowly returns from swap. I hope these are memory leaks... and if so, that they're correctable.
Does anybody who has the source code know what it taking up all that RAM?
OTOH, NS4.x and IE5 run on minimal hardware such as Windows 3.1 machines with 8M of ram (don't run Java unless you have 16 or so)
Quick question for the mozilla insiders: Does this release support S/MIME? If not, will that be available anytime soon? (Missing S/MIME support is what forces me to use 4.76...)
OK, so it's not free software, but neither is Netscape.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
That version would be 1.0, dammit!
Dancin Santa
I believe that is a bug that has been fixed in the latest nightly builds. It probably just didn't make it into 0.7 which branched about 2 weeks ago.
There is a mirror at http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.mozil la.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla0.7/
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
In any case, I make more than enough money. I enrich myself every day at work, producing rather non-Free and non-free software which we sell to companies, big and small, for a few hundred thousand dollars a pop, or run as an ASP for several 10s of grands a month.
In short, I spend a lot of time enriching myself. If my business work involves mostly enriching myself, the other people at my company and our VCs, then so be it. When I come home I like to work on projects that enrich all of us in a different community (we humans are very tribalistic by nature, you know). This other community is the community of *nix hackers and users, people who appreciate software as an art and a craft, people who appreciate technical accomplishments on their own merit.
So I don't really see the huge difference here. It's all just a matter of what enriches you and your life, and how you perceive yourself in the tribalistic/social framework.
--
Every program has bugs and crashes. I run the daily builds of Mozilla and the CVS version of Konqueror. You know what? Konqueror crashes just as much as Mozilla, and don't even try to pretend it doesn't. Not to mention Konqueror has nowhere near the capabilities of Mozilla.
Just a few things Mozilla has that Konqueror doesn't:
1. Embedded Java *in* the page( apparently this is a limitation of KDE itself or so I'm told by Konqueror developers ). Not to mention that Konqueror crawls when you use it.
2. VERY limited DOM support( face it, Konqueror DOM support really sucks.. for now )
3. Slows to a crawl when lots of animated gifs are on the page and/or when a plugin is heavily in use.
4. Limited to 5 threads( there needs to be an option to change that )
5. Must have that *Stupid* DCOP server! While not a complete memory hog, it's annoying for those who *don't* use KDE. As a result Mozilla actually starts up *faster* than Konqueror on a fresh start.
.. and if you want me to keep going I can prolly find more.
But you know what? Mozilla is *still* a second to Konqueror when I'm browsing the web. This is because of memory usage, and speed once the app is started( and the pages I go to, Konqueror usually does okay ).
But I have Mozilla waiting in the wings when Konqueror dies( and it does.. *alot* ). And Mozilla works when I use it on URLs that Konqueror dies misably on( and I've had Konqueror take X with it ).
So before you start saying stuff is horse shit you should probably look at the product your defending. While Konqueror is great, in my book there is a lot of trouble when trying to compare it to Mozilla.
Posted from Konqueror 1.9.8( CVS 20010106 )
Apart from Konquorer - who the gnome zealots won't use - Mozilla is the only mainstream browser out there for Gnu/Linux users. How many times have you gone to a page only to be turned away because your browser "isn't supported by this website"? Mozilla - being a semi-offical netscape project, will actually have people and companies making scripted sites that will work properly with mozilla. One way that redmond has been trying to keep people away from linux is by not releasing IE for linux - it ensures that some web sites simply won't display on linux.
The point is this: Mozilla stands to be a real mainstream browser. Don't knock it before it gets a decent chance.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne
mozilla is looking for contributions of bulds on platforms other than linux, mac and win32. See http://mozilla.org/build/distribution.html
for info on how to contribute builds to mozilla.org.
--Asa
HP/UX is not a fringe operating system, Mozilla supporter.
You don't need year 2000 compliance any more. It's 2001 now.
This is a continuation of the milestones. Version numbers make it obvious what version 1 is, and also allows you to release 1.0.6 after 1.2 or whatever as a "stability" release. You can't do that with just one number. 0.6/N6 was branched based on code that was pre-M18, so 0.6 was missing stuff that was in M18. 0.7 is the first numbered release based on the main line from M18 onwards, and we'll see numbered releases from hereon in. I expect we'll see 0.8/N6.5b1, 0.9/N6.5b2, etc from hereon in.
In a network transparent window system, you simply cannot guarantee timely redraws. And even local applications cannot do so. Not allowing the server to clear damaged areas often results in visually very confusing displays. Even if clearing did cause some unnecessary flashing (which it doesn't), disabling it would still be a bad tradeoff from a usability point of view. Mozilla is just broken in that regard, as is Qt. Microsoft Windows also gets this wrong, although it is less critical on Windows. Gtk and Tcl/Tk seem to do it right.
If you really want to avoid flashing, turn on backing store. That's what it is there for. But you have to decide whether the cost is worth it for your application. For Mozilla, it's unnecessary.
I see people posting negative comments. However, I was very impressed myself with the last release. It is January 10th 2001, and I have had it running as my only browser process since 2000 (ps aux doesn't give the exact dates for last years processes). I don't understand some of the comments. If a page doesn't follow standards and is designed for IE5 only, its not worth my while if it doesn't render correctly on my platform. It's their loss. With that said, I have never noticed any problems yet. I also use the mail and news for reading news.groupstudy.com. It works fine, never has crashed, however periodically it gets damn slow and I hear my hard drive thrashing like crazy. But then it stops. Anyway, I'd like to reiterate my thanks and appreciation for this project.
(Im running on a P166, 64megs Ram, Redhat 6.2)
I got this strange problem with XFree 4.0.2 though, my mouse pointer doesn't redraw correctly when the image below it changes.
0.6 was on it's way to becoming my primary browser until some bugs in the history code reared their ugly head. First, clicking on a link sometimes did *weird* things. (It would try to load the right page on the wrong server.
It's things like this that I'm sure are a major pain in the ass for the Mozilla developers, but once their ironed out, it should turn out to be a really nice browser.
In short...get the nightlies and use the heck out of them...that's the only way that we're going to get all the bugs found and fixed.
I also have to say congrats to mozilla on picking up the release schedule. I remember people whining about how long it took for new milestones to come out, but now things really are progressing nicely. Good job!
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
Its kinda obvious you need write permission to, umm, write stuff also install documentation (/notes) often try to cover all the bases, just in case you forgot something.. Lets not post a slashdot comment everytime a manual reads that the plug needs to be plugged in for an appliance. Specialy since microwave manuals in the US still state its not a good thing to try to dry pets in the appliance
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
oh, and one other thing. our build machines never sit idle. we produce builds every day. check them out at ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly
Imagine even the simplest display, some black text on a white background. In your case the server automatically clears exposed areas to white.
Take a sample pixel that lies inside a black letter. It will initially have the old window's contents. When exposed the server changes it to white. When drawn the server changes it to black. That is 2 transitions.
Now imagine the program is super-efficient at drawing (or that it copies the data from a backing store, as you suggest), so that it only draws each pixel once. Then initially that pixel will have the old window's contents. When drawn it will turn black. This is 1 transition, the minimum possible.
Now you can argue that nobody draws their data like that, and any reasonable program will result in 2 blinks anyway, but the fact remains that if the server clears it, it is impossible to avoid the 2 blinks.
I also argue that simple application will erase the background even if the server did. This will result in 3 writes to the pixel, even if two of them are the same white color. This is not cheap, 1000 pixels does take some machine time and it is worth it to save one pass.
Also, even if the program blinks I think it is less objectionable since it will draw the two images right next to each other in time. If the server erases it there could be a quite long time where the display is showing the cleared area, making the blink much more visible.
Backing store like the NeXT had is nice (and it can be faked on X by mapping a single large pixmap as the background for the window). In fact I believe it is the only solution that allows the server to decide what to do with exposed area. But unfortunately most modern hardware does not allow hardware accelerated graphics to be used there, defeating most of the advantages.
> How come it has so few users,
...)
...).
It has a lot of users - you would be surprised.
> and nearly no presence in the marketplace?
Because you define the term "marketplace"
(nice in combination with "free") for
yourself?
> Because the lisp community (with exceptions) has never understood free (libre) software.
How does it come then that there are so many
free Lisp systems (alone for Common Lisp
there are GCL, CMUCL, CLisp, SBCL, ECL,
and Lisp software? Tons of Scheme systems
(the complex MIT Scheme, the Scheme Shell scsh,
the cross platform DrScheme, the tiny
SIOD,
> Where is GNU ? Everywhere!
Actually not on my computers - GNU software
is not really "free" - one is bound by
the GPL.
Anyway, what do we see?
Guile (a Scheme implementation,
which is, hmm, a Lisp dialect) is the "official"
scripting language (remember GIMP?) for GNU.
Emacs and XEmacs are **widely** used. Weren't
they mostly Lisp programs?
> Most people who work on free software do so because they benefit from it directly. It gives them features they need.
Dream on.
> So what is better (1) enrich yourself at other people's expense or (2) enrich yourself and others? Wake up lispers!
I guess you should just forget your romantic
ideas.
There is Lisp software out there.
I applaud more the guys who are maintaining
the CMUCL and CLisp (drives for example Yahoo Store) implementations - both excellent and free,
instead a random guy who has no idea what he
is talking about.
right here.
Chris Blizzard rocks. He builds (almost) daily Mozilla rpms for Redhat 6 and 7. At the above link you will find:
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Actually, that's just some of what's new. That list highlights some of the features that users are likely to notice right off. For a more comprehensive list you might try a bugzilla query something like the 1500 or so bugs fixed since around Mozilla 0.6 It's not a perfect query since a few of those were in M18 and not in 0.6 and vise versa but you get the picture. --Asa
Well, I'm using 0.7 right now to post this, and after tooling around with it for a bit, I can finally say that it's finally an acceptable browser. Speed seems greatly improved since the last milestone, it "feels" a lot more stable, and a lot of the annoying bugs that hampered previous use of it are finally ironed out. Congratulations to the Mozilla team.
;)
WARNING: This opinion is subject to quick and radical change the first time it crashes.
NO CARRIER
The linux kernel "jumping" from 1.x to 2.0 is the same as Windows 2.x jumping to 3.0. You don't need all the x:es between 1 and 9 in 2.x to go to 3.0. Going to 3.0 means (should mean) you made a major leap. Skipping version (MS Word 2 -> 5, NS 4 -> 6) is a completely different thing. It's is marketshare hunting.
But that's the point--it's a perpetual beta! With every cycle, it gets bigger, more feature-laden, and slower; without ever getting closer to release. If feature development was stopped right now, and they did nothing but fix all of the bugs in it, then it would be a big and slow release product.
In other words, it's not getting any faster, any smaller, or any closer to completion. It's just getting bigger and slower.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
both are still in the source. Previous mathml and svg enabled builds were contributed to mozilla.org by interested folks in the community. If they don't show up sometime in the next couple of weeks ping me and I'll ask around. The win32 mathml & svg enabled build was contributed by a regular build contributor so I imagine that will show up soon.
--Asa
If you check it out, you will find that the www site and the ftp site are different boxes. So linking to the www mirror page will not effect the ftp server
Official name: komodo.mozilla.org
(Aliases: ftp.mozilla.org)
Addresses: 207.200.81.212
Official name: gila.mozilla.org
(Aliases: www.mozilla.org)
Addresses: 207.200.81.215
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Now what on earth is a Microsoft Proxy Server? I've heard of HTTP proxies, SOCKS proxies, but Microsoft? What is this new protocol I never heard about??
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free the mallocs!
And I noticed one sort of odd thing: it hasn't crashed yet on me. When I started trying Mozilla the thing blew up all the time; now I feel completely comfortable with the idea of Mozilla as my primary browser, particularly with the integrated (and free!) crypto.
The only edge Konqueror has over Mozilla now, in my opinion, is being based on QT - which is the only toolkit so far that's been patched to use the excellent Xft library for antialiased fonts under XFree86 4.0.2 and later. I can't wait for Mozilla to pick up support for this thing.
Whats wrong with that?
Excellent! Modded down before I was modded up! I'm so proud!
Anyways...
IE won. Won, as in, controls well over 90% of the desktop market. If ALL of the non-Windows operating systems out there ever amount to more than 10% of the _desktop_ environment, then MS will release IE for (whatever). Mark my words--IE6 or IE7 will be released for Linux if it keeps growing on the desktop like it has for the past few months.
As far as embedded devices running Mozilla, I still disagree. No company will embed it, if it's big, slow, buggy, and unreliable.
Mozilla has lost its momentum, and its focus. It can't be compared to Linux, because Linux is a centralised, focused effort, and is not allowed to drift off course.
I still say that Mozilla never was and never will be a contender as a browser for anyone other than the hardcore diletantes, and a very few very specialised applications. Hell, look at OS/2--at least it was a good product, and it still didn't get any farther than that.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Man, it's hard to believe that they have had this locked up for a year.. They must have done a lot of testing!
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Most importantly, though, why does Mozilla still insist on changing X11 screen redraw semantics? By default, damaged areas of X11 windows get cleared. Mozilla insists on leaving the damage, leading to very confusing screen displays with parts of one window ghosted in another. Can't this be fixed? Why deviate from the X11 convention in the first place? Windows gets this wrong, and X11 just gets it right.
If you're into beta testing software at all - get it. If not, wait a month, then get the current release.
Regardless of what anyone says, I'm going to make a prediction that Mozilla will come to solve many of the picky little things in HTML and will be the first to render HTML 4.0 bug-free. The fact that Netscape has a hand in it will also be good - it will be supported by major sites because the Netscape coding for all those weird website quirks will also be in there.
CAP THAT KARMA!
Moderators: -1, nested, oldest first!
SIG: HUP
We do not guarantee that any source code or executable code available from the mozilla.org domain is Year 2000 compliant.
Drat. I guess I should stop working on my mod_timetravel module for Apache, since it's not going to work with Mozilla.
NO CARRIER
seen some comments about it and i have to agree: this thing from netscape is not the browser we've dreamt of for Linux. ;-)).
Mozilla is an example of "too much code design kills the project".
Yeah, it's great, it has lotta objects calling lotta others and so on. as a drawback, it's very very slow, and they'll never manage to have a stable product.
In fact, the only thing that is quite good in Mozilla project is Gecko. It is a quite fast and powerful layout engine.
The worst idea is having a theme managment and object model OVER GTK+.It's useless (GTK+ IS skinnable), and damn slow.
And for Mail and NNTP, it's simply crap. crashes often, looses messages in mail and so on. BTW, there's no good X Mailer for Linux (PINE is console, remember
So i'm waiting for Nautilus, Evolution and new versions of Konqueror and KMail (not to talk about IE)... Maybe at the end Linux, the OS the most adapted to the Internet, will have powerful Internet end-user tools.
it would be 6.1
My blog
(Celeron 566, 128MB RAM, everything else vanilla)
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
I know, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls...
The only way Internet Explorer can "win", whatever that means, is if they release a Linux version.
And that isn't going to happen. I agree that IE has won on Windows. So what? What about the embedded market? What about Linux users? You think that Linux users are going to be happy using Netscape 3 forever?
And you are wrong that Mozilla will not be used. Even if the browser never becomes popular, the Gecko rendering engine will be. A lightweight, fast browser that uses that engine would be much faster and easier to write than a new browser from scratch.
Many embedded devices like the TiVo run Linux. Many of them will eventually have web browsers on them. Many of those will be based on Mozilla, for some of the same reasons they are based on Linux.
Failed utterly? Get real.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Java support being about the only thing keeping me using NS4.x. . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It's still the Mozialla M. Perhaps you installled NBetscape 6...I've noticed the two can interefere with eachother. I don't know if it's in the registry or what. For instance, after I installed Netscape 6 on one computer, Mozilla crashed non-stop. Anywho, I'm typing this message from Mozilla 0.7 and it's working fine, and with the "M" in the upper right.
but just in case, for those who do not go there often, dozens of mirrors are listed here:
http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html
I am really looking forward to this, because NS and moz0.6 have been just a little bit problematic for me. Little things, like go to page x then open a new window go to page y, and it thinks it is still on page x. Infuriating, but what can I say.
I have great hopes for this.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
For example, if I have some 3/4 pipe fittings and a pipe that won't fit into them (it is 3/4 and a bit or had a burr or is slightly out of shape), we would say "Oh, that's the microsoft pipe, use the other one"
Or someone has a sweater that is nice and warm and soft but when they put it on, it brings them out in a rash, that's a microsoft sweater.
Rich
Release notes are here. FWIW, though, I still prefer the daily builds :).
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Here's the rest of what's new:
--
I am a huge supporter of Mozilla. It is my regular browser. I do have one wish for the more recent releases, though: Continue releasing binaries for alternate architectures. For the releases before 0.6 (all the Mxx releases), they pu up binaries for PPC, alpha and SPARC. They also released binaries for OS/2, HPUX and other more fringe oses. These weren't released at the same time as the Linux x86 and Windows binaries, but they were released. I know that I can compile it on my own machine (LinuxPPC), but their build host sits idle now instead of building other binaries. Just my thoughts, though.
--neutrino
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion-i.e. none to speak of. - Lazarus Long
From the Compatibility Information:
If you are using an ATI Rage video card, images are correctly displayed initially, but may not be properly re-drawn when you minimize and maximize or resize the window.
--