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Eight Tenths Of A Lizard
Palin was the first of many like-minded souls to write with this news: "On my weekly check of Mozilla's status, I ran into version .8 of Mozilla, which seems to have been released yesterday. What a nice Valentine's day gift that was. :-)" And Alphix points to the thing itself, and suggests some things
to read."
Mozilla is my daily-use,pH-balanced Web browser of late, so I'm glad to see that it can finally allow users to avoid the degrading spectacle of endlessly cycling animated .gifs.
I am using Sylpheed, it's quite a quite good 3 pane gtk mail client, rather stable, handles international character sets.
It does the job rather well for me. (small, fast, user friendly)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
> More like Netscape 6.0 was released a few months too early.
I don't think so. AOL have different needs than mozilla. They needed to get something out, even if it is crappy. Bad press is better than no press. They release bug fixes, and will release a future version based on the mozilla trunk. At the end, they will have a browser as stable as mozilla is, but will have something to show before. Net result will be positive for them *and* for mozilla (if NS6 didn't exist, you would seem hundred of comments explaining why mozilla is a failure because nothing official was released...)
Btw, mozilla is my main browser for the last 3 months. Crashes often, but is better and better.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
There's all kinds of cool keyboard shortcuts in IE. My favorite is pressing F11 to get full screen mode. Browsing the web in full screen absolutely rocks.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I think he meant the people who actually decided to release the mess that is 6.0. Having said that 6.01 isn't too bad, so I reckon 6.1 will be spot on (at long, long last).
Yawn, yet another innacurate statement. The Mozilla I'm using doesn't have a mail client. It's a separate plugin package as you will be able to see if you go here. I also wish people would keep up to date with releases before whinging. Yes 6.0 was a mess, but 6.01 isn't and neither is Mozilla 0.7 and 0.8, so use them instead.
What's really great about Mozilla is that on the download page it says DON'T PANIC in bold letters.
Under version 5.00.xx (and presumably any later versions)
:) Oh, btw, shame on whoever gave information about it being impossible to turn of animations in IE without clearly exploring the "internet options" section for five minutes.
Tools->Internet Options
Click on the advanced tab.
Under the "multimedia" section, there should be a "play animations" option. Remove the check in the checkbox in front of it.
Viola! No more animations. Although, in retrospect, some slashdot ads don't make a lot of sense now.
Reminds me of the old NCSA-turned proxy server "NoShit", and the Windows proxy "Proxomitron" I used to love before I left the MS world.
While features like disabling animated GIF's and disabling particular sites for popup windows, those nasty evil spamming advertisers are always brilliant at innovating new ways to bypass your filter controls.
Then, what are we to do? To respond to every one of their tricks right in the browser? Or should we separate the job and put it in a proxy server for that purpose?
The way I see it, using a proxy is the way to go. If you've tried Proximitron you'll know why. It's infinitely more configurable - user-configurable. Everyone will has the ability to scratch their own advertiser-induced itches.
Prozilla anyone?
We also know that version numbers are tuples, not fractions, right? Right?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
A lot of what you said sounds reasonable, but I don't think getting rid of popup and banner ads is a fringe element thing. I think that almost everyone would prefer to have the ability to turn them off, espeically the ones that flash on and off really quickly like a strobe light. No matter how you slice it, those ads suck.
I don't want to defend Netscape and its shopping buttons. The Mozilla I just dl'd doesn't have them. Most of your comments are about Netscape, so in a sense we're talking past one another. But I'll keep going anyway.j
Corporate IT guys are going to go with IE, at least in the foreseeable future. I wrote a web app for internal use at a real estate support company, and reluctantly had to agree with my boss that going IE only made sense. There are too many differences in DHTML and Javascript across platforms, almost everyone wanted to use IE anyway, and supporting other browsers would have made the project much harder to pull off. XML was a big bonus as well. And we didn't put any animated gifs in our app anyway.
But there's more to life than your cube. People wear bland clothes at work, they sit at ugly desks, and often have uncomfortable chairs. At home we have options, and hopefully we make sure things are better. I don't feel that my work environment ought to dictate how I furnish my apartment. Why should it dictate what kind of software I run?
I want to turn off ads, at least the flashing ones. Maybe that makes me sick and unamerican, but that's how I feel.
do NS6 and all Mozillas INSIST on importing my IE bookmarks every single goddam time I run the app???!
;)
They both nicely import my NS4.7x user profiles, giving me one full set of bookmarks, so why the fuck would I then want another complete copy of the same ones imported from IE? I already synchronize them for the very rare occasion I use IE, and you cannot get rid of the IE ones!
I want to submit this to Bugzilla with many flaming comments, but fear it will be rejected
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
> But even in the latter case, their sole purpose is to provide that sleazy sense of tactless
;-)
> production one comes to expect from all forms of adult entertainment.
I'm not going to defend animated GIFs here--they're annoying as hell, and on a dialup 56k like most people still are using, they're absolutely evil time-wasters. I recall once being SO annoyed that a page was taking so long to load, because the animated GIF banner at the top must have had thirty friggin frames...
But I just had to ask: what do you expect *other* than sleazy, tactless production in adult entertainment? Proper, tactful production? I can see it now, on PBS's Masterporn Theatre: "Oh, Madam Deepthroat, bring forth thy heaving bosoms of delight, that I might feel them up whilst thou tastest of my knightly schlong, bedewed with premature trickles of nectar as sweet as morning dew. Oh, how I have yearned to taste thy tuna steak of love, whilst you get it on with my handmaiden in some hot girl-girl action..."
Personally, I prefer the straightforward smut of a Dark Bros. or Max Hardcore production to the polished coldness of some silly Skinemax-wannabe soft stuff. But, I digress...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Ah, but the great thing about Mozilla is that you can have different distributions. In fact, people are already working on Beonex, a distribution targeted more at corporate settings. Microsoft is doing a similiar thing by packaging the IE engine in different ways (IE 6.0, MSN Explorer, etc).
Netscape/AOL pays the devlopers who are mostly responsible for BUILDING that great browser. Cut them some slack.
I haven't encountered such a version, and I saw most versions since 4.0. Maybe you've got some weird configuration error, happens all the time. Best strategy is to update or at least reinstall.
Jilles
Mozilla's Unix versions depend on Gtk+. But Mozilla also runs on Win32, MacOS, OS/2, and BeOS. Have you got Konqueror running on all these?
BTW, I think Konqueror is an excellent browser.
You could apply that argument anywhere though. Why buy Windows when Linux is free, why buy Office when StarOffice is free. I'd buy Opera if it was better than what's currently available, which on Linux it isn't really, although it's getting there.
Turning off animated gifs, true, there hasn't been a menu option for it. But, you can patch your netscape (any version) to play animations only once and then stop. I'll attach a little bit of C code I wrote that does the job for you.p
Still, it is nice to see the Mozilla guys including a preference to disable animation. Saddly, it seems that many users will never "find" it, judging from the post above.
* and "ANIMEXTS1.0" with different strings, so that
* netscape will be tricked into thinking all animated
* gifs are not to be looped. This is nice, since those
* annoying ads will play once and then stop.
*
* For more info, see this page:
* http://simmons.starkville.ms.us/tips/081097/
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#define NETSCAPE "/usr/lib/netscape/netscape-communicator"
#define STR1 "NETSCAPE2.0"
#define STR2 "ANIMEXTS1.0"
const unsigned char *memstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle, int size);
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd, r, pos;
struct stat nsstat;
unsigned char *buf, *p;
r = stat(NETSCAPE, &nsstat);
if (r != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "File %s doesn't exist\n", NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
buf = (unsigned char *)malloc(nsstat.st_size);
if (buf == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to allocate %ld bytes of memory\n",
(long)nsstat.st_size);
exit(1);
}
fd = open(NETSCAPE, O_RDWR);
if (fd < 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to open %s for read/write access\n",
NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
r = read(fd, buf, nsstat.st_size);
if (r != nsstat.st_size) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to read %ld bytes from %s\n",
(long)nsstat.st_size, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
p = (unsigned char *)memstr(buf, STR1, nsstat.st_size);
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Didn't find string \"%s\" within %s\n",
STR1, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
pos = (int)(p - buf);
r = lseek(fd, pos, SEEK_SET);
if (r != pos) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to seek to offset=%d within %s\n",
pos, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
r = write(fd, "NO_ANIM_GIF", strlen(STR1));
if (r != strlen(STR1)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error writing to %s at offset %d\n",
NETSCAPE, pos);
exit(1);
}
p = (unsigned char *)memstr(buf, STR2, nsstat.st_size);
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Didn't find string \"%s\" within %s\n",
STR2, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
pos = (int)(p - buf);
r = lseek(fd, pos, SEEK_SET);
if (r != pos) {
fprintf(stderr, "Unable to seek to offset=%d within %s\n",
pos, NETSCAPE);
exit(1);
}
r = write(fd, "NO_ANIM_GIF", strlen(STR1));
if (r != strlen(STR1)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error writing to %s at offset %d\n",
NETSCAPE, pos);
exit(1);
}
close(fd);
return 0;
}
const unsigned char *memstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle, int size)
{
const char *p;
int len;
len = strlen(needle);
while (size > 0) {
p = memchr(haystack, *needle, size);
if (p == NULL) return NULL;
size -= (int)(p - haystack);
if (size >= len && memcmp(p, needle, len) == 0) {
return p;
}
p++;
haystack = p;
}
return NULL;
}
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
You can turn off animated gifs in IE. In options, advanced (or somewhere similar), turn off 'play animations'. No more dancing baloney. Javascript can also be controlled from somewhere similar. The functionality is there, but as with most MS products, it's not easy to find.
> Does not crash, no memory leaks, fast, simple
> interface, etc
Nonstandard/buggy rendering, runs only on Windows*, all kinds of security problems, etc.
* MacIE is a completely separate code base.
The closed-source Netscape 4 was complete garbage internally and they had to throw it away. It's taken a few years to recover from that.
About 0.7 or thereabouts, all my plugins died. No more Flash (no great loss save for losing Thugs On Film), no more Real Audio (NGL except for Car Talk). No plug-ins listed in the about:plugins page. Has this been fixed?
Also, while talking about external programs: how about being able to link to external DOWNLOADERS! I prefer to use NT (the program, not the OS) to do my downloads, and I'd like to plug that into Mozilla. I'd like to see
Plugger style functionality built-in to Mozilla to allow me to point the lizard at my video and audio format players.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I've become spoiled in netscape 4.x by using fullscreen. It's available here if you still surf oldschool. Probably my favourite NS plugin/app ever.
I started using it because I had a 14" monitor and wanted to see more page, continued using it even on a 21 incher because it was so sweet. Much better in my opinion than IE's fullscreen.
Would love to see a Mozilla version. Mail them at info@inquare.com, pressure will make them comply.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Perhaps you misunderstood the intent of that comment.
I don't want to know how I can turn off whichever preferences in a particular version of netscape; I want to know when browsers like netscape will let a user create my own buttons and customize their actions.
OF COURSE I can go to my preferences, but I can't just have one button that does a frequent task. Similarly, I liked the "Font Size" button they had in IE; in Netscape, that might make up for the lack of a "Zoom" feature (Opera and Galeon did this well).
Also, that code you posted is pretty long and ugly; not only would a link have sufficed, but couldn't someone have neatened up their error handling code? I wrote a function in C just for that, and it has greatly reduced the amount of pointless 'if' statements I have had to write, and improved debugging.
...and while I'm being pedantic, why the hell did you put my user name in quotes, "pjrc"?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Works fine for me. What problems are you having?
Just checked, and if I right click on an animated gif in my trusty iCab browser, there is a "Stop Animation" option there. Only on an actually animating gif, of course.
No, JWZ didn't write the bad parts of Mail & News (i.e., 4.0), and he wrote a lot of the core browser; check his page. He also RAN the Mozilla project, as well as having written xscreensaver, xdaliclock, dadadodo, and lots of other cool stuff.
:)
Lots of UNIX systems have Netscape installed; they might also have lynx, and around here possibly a few file browsers that double as web browsers, IE for Solaris or HP/UX, Amaya, and a host of other forgotten browsers.
And, AFAIK, Stallman wouldn't be terribly happy with Mozilla, because it isn't GPL'ed. The MPL ain't bad, but I'm sure he'd find something to object to in there. Now *that* would be somewhat amusing.
In short, reply to someone who knows less about the subject next time, Matt.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
> Changing the skin kills the menus (File and Edit works, everything after View doesn't)
It only kills the current window. Workaround: open another window, switch the skin from it, then close it.
> It'll get better soon, honest
It did get a *hell* better in the last months. Not really usable for general consumpsion, but it is already my default browser.
> Is the emperor wearing clothes?
About the huge amount of bugs you have, you have to admit that they are not in fundamental parts of the browser. You can browse the web with mozilla with a non proprietary software.
This is huge goodness. Let's say that the emperor have bathclothes..
And thanks for supporting this project. *Everybody* will benefit of it.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Keep in mind, most of the mozilla source is C++, not C (ike most of FreeBSD. C++ takes longer to compile; it is a more complex language.
Also, there is an additional stage where interface specifications are compiled into header files. The interface specs allow cross language access to components at runtime.
"Just a browser" today means an entire interpreted, garbage collected language (javascript), HTML, XML and XSL rendering and a ton of other stuff. If you want a lightweight browser, get lynx.
Finally, while mozilla is a browser, it is also a platform for developing OS independant applications with web and web-like technologies (see mozdev.org). It has a scope as broad as a OS.
Eventually, it will compile into both the entire mozilla system *AND* a compact embeddable component, but its not quite there yet (but really close!).
it's great to see Mozilla shaping up. i've been trying out Mozilla on a regular basis since M4 (yeah, i'm a glutton for punishment), but it's only recently that i've been able to use it on my Windows machine at work as my primary browser.
at home however, i run the MacOS, and while IE 5.0 on MacOS 9 is still the best browser i've ever tried, i now run a later build of MacOS X for development purposes. IE 5.1 on MacOS X is severely lacking (a very poor carbon port), and i'd really like to make the switch to Mozilla on this platform. does anybody know what's going on with Fizzilla, the MacOS X port of Mozilla? specifically, i'd love to be able to run FizzillaMach that uses the UNIX code as a back end and a carbon port of the Mac code as the interface.
right now the latest build of Fizzilla is based on an early January nightly build, and while that's good, it still has some pretty nasty bugs that keep me from using it on OS X. it's a shame because the recent builds of Mozilla have been so good. does anybody know if there is there active development of Fizzilla? are they planning on releasing a new build, perhaps based off of 0.8? on March 24th a lot of people are going to be looking for a Mac OS X-native web browser, and IE is already going to be included in the dock by default. it's going to be important to have the Mozilla alternative available at that time. :I ..
- j
Opera 5 also has this form of cookie control.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
How about:
setenv MAIL "xterm -e mutt"
for example
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Hey, guys, you know about the Internet Junkbuster, right? It's a proxy server that will filter cookies, ads, referer information, and lots of other stuff. It's incredibly useful if you desire privacy on the net, not to mention saving your eyes from those aforementioned strobe-light ads.
The IJB is available for UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. Configuration is just a little bit complicated, but no more so than any other standard UNIX daemon.
Alos, there's a truly wonderful program by the name of WebWasher that will do that same thing under Microsoft Windows. It's got a very slick interface, awesome features, and some very friendly guys working on it. If you have any Microsoft Windows clients, I would highly recommend installing WebWasher on them.
Definitely check out Squid as well. It's a caching proxy server that runs under UNIX and Linux. I've used it for years.
There are a couple easy things you might try to work around this problem. First and easiest is to create a new Mozilla profile. To do this simply run mozilla.exe" -profilemanager and it should launch a profike manager window. Create a new profile in that window and you should be good to go. If that doesn't do the trick (if the profile manager won't launch) then the next thing you might try is to remove your Mozilla/ directory in winnt/profiles/user/applicatin data/ This folder contains a component registry file and your old mozilla profiles (note, this will destroy previous profiles and the data they contain including bookmarks, mail, etc). Then reinstall mozilla and try to run it again. If these steps don't work then please visit Bugzilla and file a bug with clear steps to reproduce your problem and all relevant mozilla install and system information.
--Asa
OK, I'm running the 0.8 build now. Now, where is this GUI for turning off animated GIFS?
/usr/local/mozilla, installed the new Mozilla, and I don't have this GUI.
I blew away
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think that chris blizzard is the person to thank.
--Asa
alternatively, you can just click on the stop button in IE. This immediately stops animated gifs.
Jilles
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs...
...JavaScript?
On NS 4.x and IE 5.5 there is such a button, and it's right there on the toolbar! It's the "Stop" button. Once a page has finished loading, press the stop button. This kills all the flashies dead in their tracks. I do this all the time to get away from the distractions of a xmas tree of gifs most sites have turned into.
The nice part about this is that the sites I frequent get the ad hit, which isn't an option with something like junkbuster. I rather like the notion that those sites are getting the revenue from my visit. Might mean they stay around a little longer and all that.
"...cookies..."
Konqueror is the best I've seen in this regard. Each site that asks for a cookie Konq prompts you for. I know other browsers have this option, but in Konq you can specify to allow or deny all future cookies from a specific domain. It is perhaps Konq's best feature yet.
Actually, I personally don't think we need a button to turn it off. Instead, how about simply removing that damn "window.close()" event entirely from the language? Is there any real use for this event besides throwing gobs of advertising at you as you attempt to leave a site? It's not even effective advertising, as the audience in question isn't going to be looking at the message, but instead how to deal with a browser suddenly out of control.
The other annoying aspect to JavaScript are them pop-up windows. Unfortunately, there are a number of legitimate uses for these making it difficult to say we should just get rid of them entirely. If there were some tool on a bar to deal with these that might be worthwhile. Again, I still don't think that totally disabling JS, even as a switch, is a reasonable solution when there are alternatives that haven't yet been explored.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
some history:
On or about september 22 a development branch called MN6 was cut from the Mozilla trunk. This branch was a slower moving branch that resulted a couple months later in the Mozilla code which was at the heart of the Netscape 6 product.
a couple weeks after the MN6 branch was cut there was a Mozilla Milestone made from the trunk. This was M18. The next trunk Milestone was 0.7 in early January and the latest tunk release is 0.8
--Asa
How so? Could you please point me to something (recent) comparing the two? I mean, those are pretty bold words. I've been using Mozilla on my Mac and Linux machines at home and my Windows box at work. It's been very stable and usable for me.
My only real problem has been that you get "Connect refused" errors a lot more than in Communicator 4.X and that it will mess with your back/forward list of sites visited when you do. So, I don't really see it as a "buggy piece of shit," but could you show me something about feature comparisons between the two?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You could do a lot worse than looking at www.exim.org. Not only does it work as a drop-in sendmail replacement, but the config files are in plain english (more or less), it's very flexible, very fast, and very robust too. Of course, what will help you is that it knows all about LDAP. (and mysql, postgresql, oracle, nis, etc)
--
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Yet another reason why I prefer Netscape 3.0 (Option--uncheck-image-autoload, Option--uncheck-enable-Java/shit) over Netscape 4.x (Edit-prefs-advanced-click/click/click-ok)
The more inconvenient you can make it for the user to toggle shit like Java, proxying, etc., the more likely they are to see the ads.
Now watch my UNIX port of Netscape 4 take 20 seconds to render a pile of tables where Netscape 3 would have done it in less than one.
When Mozilla shows they want to write a great browser, not a "look at how deep we can bury the features" (NS4) or a "k00l, itz gawt sk1nz!" memory hog (XUL)... oh hell, why bother finishing the sentence. We know they won't.
You don't need to know c++ do contribute to mozilla. Visit irc.mozilla.org #mozilla and #mozillazine for pointers to non c++ coding (javascript, XUL, CSS, etc).
--Asa
I'm reading this thread using Mozilla 0.8 (2001021502) Wallstreet MacOS 8.6 vga out to a Dell monitor, and the widget works fine. Perhaps it's interacting badly with your video card &/or driver?
if they would just fix Mac IE's stabilityI want to know where the heck IE 5.5 went. It was demoed at MacHack last summer. I can only guess they postponed it until the OS X release party.
Getting rid of window.close().... I don't think so. My company writes Web apps that behave like real GUI apps. Getting rid of window.close() would destroy such capabilities. (Note: our sites run in intranet/extranent environments only)
---
We all know that fractions should be cancelled down - thus the topic should have been four fifths of a lizard, not eight tenths! :)
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
I think before anyone posts to slashdot, they should read this bug report:
7 4
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689
Relating to slashdot's troubles earlier to-day.
Actually Mozilla is now released under a dual MPL/GPL license. So RMS should be quite happy with it.
Check it out!
Well, if the debugging info bothers you that much, then you can download the 20MB source and compile it without debugging info...
:)
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
* Seems faster than the old 0.6 or 0.7 builds. (ie the menus seem zippier).
* Seems to load faster than previous versions.
* Still can't minimize the download window w/o minimizing the entire Mozilla app.... (what gives?)
* Still having trouble installing JRE 1.3
Overall, 0.8 seems to be faster, and generally better than any of the previous builds.
Gururise
Garden Grove Real Estate
Is it going to come back? I have some stuff for the Mac that used LiveConnect to talk between Java applets and JavaScript. It is broken in NS6 (huh, less functionality than the previous release).
well, netscape 6.0 split off from the mozilla branch way back before M18 (http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html), so comparing Netscape 6 with a product released 3 versions later is a little unfair.
I sitll agree, netscape 6 sucks though.
P.S. This release was 2 days late! It was forcast for the 12th feb! (Well, arround).
Good job guys, keeping to a schedule. Should look forward to 0.9 about the 3rd week of march then, and hopefully 1.0 at the end of April.
There is a patch for mozilla that provides hooks for a PGP plugin in development right now. I believe Network Associates is working on it. Expect to see it fully operational in 0.9. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687 for more info.
I had a great time using Mozilla 0.7; it has gotten a lot better, and so much better than the original Netscape code they were using. However, I don't think that's the issue anymore.
The real issue is, what will happen to Netscape? They aren't losing the browser war now because of Mozilla. Now it's because of AOL, who makes every stable Mozilla release into a horribly patched, rushed Netscape release with extra annoying commercial features and bundling that none of us want or need.
Also, despite the benefits Mozilla has seen due to Open Source development, I doubt it will do as well without Netscape, as gutted as it is. JWZ said that the benefits gained from opening a project like that is about 30%, which means that 70% of the work has to be done by AOL/Netscape/Time Warner, and if AOL loses this war to Microsoft, we might lose a lot of developers.
Also, it sucks seeing a great team of people turn into a large impersonal entity that no one really likes. As the Open Source community is already developing other browsers, it isn't clear how much work will be put into Mozilla, and how much will be spent reinventing the wheel.
I only hope that a truly impressive, usable browser comes out of all this: one that doesn't annoy me and show me ads, but rather lets me tell it what I want it to do. Being able to set a level of HTML compliance would be nice, as well.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
IE is a great browser, but it lacks some important features. It's hard to control javascript, for example, and you can't turn off animated gifs. I don't think that's accidental. If you let people turn off the ads, the advertisers won't be happy, and as a good multi-national corporate citizen, MS probably won't want to do anything to jeopardize the platform's value to advertisers.
Of course if they did, they would be instantly crucified for their anti-competitive action of not letting other companies derive advertising revenue, noting that microsoft derives no revenue from banner ads, yadda yadda yadda.
Go run Proximitron (no link, I'm lazy, use Google. If I could use everything2 links, that'd be nice, but e2 seems to be doing worse than slashdot these days). Don't mind the hideous interface (there's an option to turn it off, then it becomes merely idiosyncratic), it's otherwise a great tool. I use it to look at the various headers when I do server work. It can do all kinds of filtering and transforms on headers and content, which includes blocking sites, cookies, etc. Has built-in filters to animate gifs only once, as well as popup-stoppers that don't turn off all javascript, etc.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
How do you disable the floating tips that appear when your mouse strays over the back button too long? Under Netscape 6 for Solaris, I've seen these floating windows remain on the desktop even when Netscape is iconified.
I found a setting for "browser.chrome.toolbar_tips - false" on developer.netscape.com, but this doesn't seem to work.
I'd use Mozilla, but I like to use Solaris x86 at work, and I don't see binaries for this platform. Yes, I know I could build it...
I've watched naive users (e.g. my parents) use a browser. When faced with an agonizing animated GIF, giant blink text, or horrible background, they move the mouse to the offending item, and try to turn it off. This is, of course, in keeping with the GUI concept: select the item, then manipulate it, perhaps with a right mouse click. This corresponds deeply with reality: if a mosquito is biting me, I focus on it and take action.
Browser interfaces are often counter-intuitive because the cure is hidden in deep menu items, e.g. edit->prefs->advanced->.... Users rarely find these things, and if they do, don't know what they do. My dad doesn't want to disable all Java apps, he just wants to stop the pain he is experiencing on the page he is currently visiting. To make a browser great, watch your new users very closely.
No it isn't. The current image library is called imglib, but it's sequel is currently called libpr0n, yes. :)
-Håkan
Jesus Fucking Christ, the source tree is 150M large. I left it building overnight, running under time(1), and when I woke up, I found out that it took 58 minutes to build. 58 minutes! That's just a hair shorter than it takes to build my base FreeBSD system from scratch! I thought Mozilla was supposted to be a browser, for Christ's sake!
So after balking at the exceptionally long build time, I ran du to find out just how large this pile of shit is... with object files, binaries, and source (remember, 150M), the tree was 1.4G. That's very close to the the size of my /usr...
Not to mention the fact that it still doesn't render pages right, it takes a while to render widgets, and it crashes.
The team ought to focus on making a lean, fast, quality browser... every time I try to build this thing, it gets bigger... and for what?
A new year calls for a new signature.
I have a script that gets the nightly build of Mozilla for me every day, so I've seen it get better and better. It's starting improve and be very usable performance wise. But...lately I've been using Opera v5.0b6 and the more I use it the more I like it. Very fast with few rendering problems. Well worth checking out!
Only Linux truly loves you. Human beings just can't grep all the processes you're going through.
the library Mozilla uses for animated gifs is in fact called 'libpr0n'
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*pr0n*' -print[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*pron*' -print
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*porn*' -print
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$ find . -name '*p0rn*' -print
[gjw@snoopy mozilla]$
Nice thought, but please verify rumors before spreading them.
Web apps that behave like real GUI apps. Getting rid of window.close() would destroy such capabilities. (Note: our sites run in intranet/extranent environments only)
Just curious here, but I'm left wondering what kinds of things you do at the triggering of a window.close() event? It seems to me to be pretty rare for even GUI apps to need this unless they're doing some kind of memory clean up. Browser based apps generally don't need this kind of thing, so I'm just left here curious as to the need still yet.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I'm totally psyched about the prospect of killing the animated gifs. They're a serious hassle whenever I'm SSHed(Or whatever the hell I'm supposed to call it now... I use OpenSSH) into some box running mozilla remotely. They're a pointless waste of bandwidth for remote X login and not pretty enough to be useful in any cases I can think of other than, just possibly, porn. But even in the latter case, their sole purpose is to provide that sleazy sense of tactless production one comes to expect from all forms of adult entertainment.
Good riddance and good night.
Since Galeon is entirely dependent on Mozilla for its browsing engine, and Mozilla was largely created by Netscape, I'm afraid you're not Netscape-free at all.
Am I the only person who things SSL is the most screwed up thing about this program?
No, you're not. Take a look at bug #60912 and bug #31174, for starters.
setenv MAIL "xterm -e mutt"
Nice thought, but $MAIL is already used to point to your mailbox -- /var/spool/mail/username or /home/username/Maildir/ or what have you.
How about using $MUA for text MUAs like mutt, or... hmm... maybe $X11_MUA for X11-based MUAs like "xterm -e mutt"?
I'm about ready to post a message akin to JWZ's high profile departure from Mozilla, but from a users perspective. I snatched Mozilla before it was posted on slashdot, put it on Linux (Mandrake 7.2 and a Celeron 466) and Windows (98SE with a PIII/500).
It's still got so many bugs. The text entry widget is broken. It kills Windows dead (real hard, I know). Changing the skin kills the menus (File and Edit works, everything after View doesn't). It crashed getting my POP email. On and on and on.
Did I get a bad build (build ID 2001021503)? Is my machine misconfigured? What the hell is going on?
I don't want to make this sound like a troll or flamebait. Its really not, in my mind. Its the plaintive wail of someone who has spent the past year or so trying to tell his co-workers, friends, and random people on the street to support this project, "It'll get better soon, honest". It is better now, to be sure. It hasn't crashed in the last 8 minutes or so its been running on this machine. Joy. It hasn't finished rendering the submit page, and for that matter it never seems to finish (looking at the stdout in the xterm above for the past few pages I've loaded).
Will 1.0 actually work? Is the emperor wearing clothes?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
"In the meantime, if you want to test drive the brand new Mozilla 0.8 builds now, we recommend that you install Mozilla 0.8 in its own directory, that you do not get rid of your current browser(s), and that you do not set Mozilla 0.8 as your default browser -- yet."
">Mozilla is my daily-use,pH-balanced web browser of late
Of course, the people at Mozilla were just saying don't set the version 0.8 as the default browser - perhaps they're simply recommending waiting a few builds for more bug fixes.
On another note, I was encouraged by this:
"Mozilla development work now is focused on bug squashing, improved stability, and better performance."
Nice to see that performance is being worked on - that is my main critism of most browsers for Linux (Konqueror is fast, but it wouldn't properly display a few pages for me in KDE 2.0.1, so I'll wait a few versions). For me, I'm still stuck with Netscrape 4.7 on both my Win comp and my Linux comp, because I want the same browser for both, yet reasonably full featured and psuedo-reliable (Netscape crashes maybe once every two weeks of hard use, not too bad for me).
Anyway, it's promising to see Mozilla and Konqueror coming along nicely. Good work.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
5000 lines is pretty good...
:P
Probably it could be done in less. Depends on how minimal you want to be. Most people would want it to have all the fancy do-dads like being able to download stuff.
Also the other poster is right when he says that gtk-mozembed doesn't have cookie support.
> I want to know when browsers like netscape will
... "View | Text Size".
> let a user create my own buttons and customize
> their actions.
If you don't mind hacking XML/Javascript it's dead easy to do this in Mozilla right now, without having to recompile anything. Take a peek inside the JAR files you downloaded. (They're just ZIP files by another name.)
> Similarly, I liked the "Font Size" button they
> had in IE
There's a menu item
Then why is practically every Slashdot page equipped with one?
Sorta funny to slam one of Slashdot's only revenue streams...
... and needless to say, so does Mozilla.
Well, formally it's a control-click, but if you have a 2 button mouse, the right button is customarily mapped to control-click. In practice it works just like a PC mouse.
The Microsoft optical 2 button + wheel mose is the only good M$ product I've ever encounterd. If they only made it in mac colors...
Of course, the people at Mozilla were just saying don't set the version 0.8 as the default browser - perhaps they're simply recommending waiting a few builds for more bug fixes.
um. no the people at Mozilla did not say that. a guy from the webpages mozillaquest.com said that.
--Asa
I have to ask what people who use Netscape for mail have been doing now that Mozilla is shaping up. I've used Netscape for my mail client for many years now (only for the facts that it is firstly a decent GUI client, as far as Unix clients go, and that it can display HTML mail), but Mozilla just doesn't cut it for me.
The widgets for lists and trees are terrible in Mozilla (at least on Unix), and it really makes me wish that the Moz folks had decided to stay with Gtk+ for the toolkit, rather than rolling their own for the sake of portability.. I'm not sure they knew what they were getting into with a new toolkit, especially since they'll probably have to deal with the same things that the Pango folks are..
Anyway, back to my initial query -- what are people using instead? There have been a number of clients based on toolkits like Tk (blech) and even straight Athena widgets (triple blech). The nicer-looking clients (IMHO) seem to be all glam and no substance.. What's up with that?
If someone can find me a 3-pane Gtk+ or Gnome GUI client that is stable and that can handle PGP/GPG, I'd be forever grateful.
--
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
If you would like to see the real roadmap go to http://mozilla.org/roadmap.html
The roadmap you pointed to was a table on a webpage called mozillaquest.com.
--Asa
I was happily chugging along on the daily builds until sometime around the first of the month. Apparently, they decided to stop asking what color preferences you want and instead use the colors associated with your gtk theme as the default colors for text/background for the displayed pages. Sites like appwatch are unreadable because they chose to use the secondary foreground color so I'm still using a build from about a month ago. The bug's been in bugzilla since Feb 2nd along with a patch and they still haven't bothered to check it in. I thought they were supposed to be in the process of fixing the bugs right now rather than adding "features". The other thing that sucks is I had to fire up Netscape 4.7 to post this because the text entry seems to break at every line so when you insert long URLs, it chops them up so they don't work. I'm still trying to find that one in bugzilla...
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I couldn't give a fuck less if you visit my site if you want to browse the web in some beatup piece of shit browser, you're not the guy I'm looking for.
The main problem I have with IE is that IE tries and often succeeds in rendering completely invalid HTML. It seems to me that it isn't too much to ask that a web developer run his HTML through a validator.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
That said, you are not the only one who wants this functionality. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11459.
The discussion on that bug includes a way to fix it using Protozoilla. This fix is currently being considered for inclusion in the main source tree.
It acts as a proxy on localhost can can modify headers (my useragent is MinitaureGiantSpaceHamsterBrowser, or I could tell it to say that my mozilla is IE5) and you can program your own filters to match/modify any html/javascript.
It's extremely useful with Mozilla (or any other browser) because I can eliminate specific ad-frames, web-branding, popups, halt animated GIFS and other nastiness on the page before it loads.
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
<rant>.
why on earth does mozilla not let me link my <a href="mailto:blah"> to another app? this just seems absolutely stupid!
cause honestly, who would want to use mozilla mail when you could use something like pronto.
</rant>
im refering to the linux version, havent tried any other os's in a few years
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
If they could put an option to disable those !"/$£@23$ javascript popup windows without disabling javascript. I mean come on just try this site then wait 5 seconds and count how many windows you have to close! Nuts! ;-)
--
We are In an internet world with no borders nor fences, who needs windows and gates...
By opening up the development process and setting up one of the best bug management database (which is also open to the public), it automatically means that Mozilla is the buggiest software? Then maybe everyone should just close up their source and their development status, and there would be no bugs at all.
The bug you refered to loads fine in my Mozilla 0.8
I think it's really important to keep other options alive.
IE is a great browser, but it lacks some important features. It's hard to control javascript, for example, and you can't turn off animated gifs. I don't think that's accidental. If you let people turn off the ads, the advertisers won't be happy, and as a good multi-national corporate citizen, MS probably won't want to do anything to jeopardize the platform's value to advertisers.
There's no way (at least no easy way) to convert a real video file into something you can edit or recompress. Why? It's a feature that content providers want. To me it's a bug. I can understand Real doing that, and having a proprietary data format comes in handy.
More and more I think we're going to see these large companies deliberately crippling our tools for the benefit of content providers. But that only works with proprietary data formats and protocols. The web is still open.
The big story in advertising is pop-up windows. If Mozilla bills itself as the browser that helps you defeat that annoying ads, a lot of people will respond to it. And a lot of people will put up with annoying little errors as they get worked out, because the pop-up windows are incredibly annoying. MS isn't going to do that. They'll never side with their users over the content providers. That leaves a niche.
As for me, the ability to turn off animated gifs will be enough to make me switch. Those things really bug me.
All of these ads are going to get worse and worse. Mozilla should bill itself as the answer. It is the answer. And we need it.
I think browsers should be more customizable with what they allow the users to do.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs, cookies, and JavaScript? Microsoft considered making a similar button in IE, but stopped when people started calling it "The Porn Button". But if that's what users want, they should be able to do it.
The web is becoming overrun with proprietary data formats and protocols, but at least the open ones do get more popular. Notice the popularity of mp3's, Shockwave Flash, DivX-encoded movies, and mpegs. That's because there are at least players out there for everyone, and the tools aren't too hard to find.
Pop-up windows and banners don't necessarily work; web advertising needs a different model that doesn't involve annoying the consumer. Maybe product placement would work somewhat better, or text ads like Google, or little "sponsored by" buttons.
Personally, I use junkbuster to get rid of ads; it's also cross-platform, and cross-browser compatible, and works rather well.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, then it's time to switch to Moz. Quoting the 0.8 release notes:
There are several new hidden prefs (UI will be added eventually) to turn off various annoying features on web pages:
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");e rnal.open","noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowint
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowintern
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true);
Cheers,
-j.