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Eight Tenths Of A Lizard

Posted by timothy on from the use-it-love-it-live-it dept.

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.

11 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. What, you want *tactful* adult entertainment? by Sir_Winston · · Score: 4

    > 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*
  2. The last blocker bug... by redpants · · Score: 5

    I think before anyone posts to slashdot, they should read this bug report:

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6897 4

    Relating to slashdot's troubles earlier to-day.

    1. Re:The last blocker bug... by WasterDave · · Score: 5

      We can't possibly consider releasing Mozilla 0.8 until they are back up and running, so that lots of Linux zealots and armchair coders can log on and slag off our hard work in a specially-prepared forum.

      Fuck, that's funny. So, go on: 95 posts saying that its bloatware and why can't we have a lighter browser; 47 pointing out the obvious and saying that Netscrape 4.7.2 leaks memory; 22 posts on the subject of IE being better; At least some figting pointlessly over whether the UI stinks, or it's just that we don't understand how important XML is...

      Good work, Mozilla dudes.

      Dave

      --
      I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
  3. New question... by pb · · Score: 5

    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.
  4. Animated GIFs and Interface Design by Gorobei · · Score: 5
    Animated GIFs illustrate one of the big problems of complex GUI apps: the cure for the pain is no where near the source of the pain.

    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.

  5. Choices! by NetJunkie · · Score: 4

    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!

  6. If Timothy is so opposed to animated GIFs... by SClitheroe · · Score: 4

    Then why is practically every Slashdot page equipped with one?

    Sorta funny to slam one of Slashdot's only revenue streams...

  7. Browser good, mailer bad... by Mike+Hicks · · Score: 4

    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.
    --

    1. Re:Browser good, mailer bad... by benmg · · Score: 4

      Dave Hyatt is working on a new tree widget for use in large trees (mail, bookmarks, etc) which is a leaf frame with no content model backing. A client creates a component that implements an interface that the widget talks to in order to paint its contents. The component is free to source its data from any medium it chooses. The tree only has to deal with matter onscreen, there is no lengthy content construction phase or RDF graph generation (unless your data store is RDF), so it is much faster. Demonstrations have shown it capable of scaling to over 5,000,000 items and appearing and scrolling quickly. Hopefully this will provide a means to solve the speed problems suffered by the mail client, and to an extent the bookmarks window. To see it in action, pull MailNews_Performance_20010208_BRANCH on Linux or Windows.

      -Ben Goodger
      -Netscape Navigator

  8. Re:8/10ths, and I am sad by BZ · · Score: 4
    You did not get a particularly bad build. However, Mozilla is a work in progress. Some of the problems you describe were created by the rearchitecting of parts of the browser over the last few weeks.

    I would suggest watching http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/ and getting or not getting builds based on the excellent comments Asa puts up there.

    I'm not sure why your text entry widget wasn't working; if you could file a bug report on it (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org) that would be great. The menu bug is a very recent regression and is being worked on.

  9. Pop-up disabling now possible by jpatokal · · Score: 5
    If they could put an option to disable those !"/$£@23$ javascript popup windows without disabling javascript.

    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:

    // Use configurable security policies to override popups, see
    // http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/component s/configPolicy.html
    // Turn window.open off for particular sites:

    user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");
    user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowinte rnal.open","noAccess");

    // Or turn it off everywhere:
    user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinterna l.open","noAccess");

    // Override popping up new windows on target=anything
    user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true);

    Cheers,
    -j.