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 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.
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.
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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
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.
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
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"
Here's the rest of what's new:
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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