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Mozilla 0.9 Out
Malicose writes: "Mozilla 0.9 is out. Improvements include Automatic Proxy Configuration, Personal Security Manager 2.0 with improved performance and UI, and rewritten from scratch image rendering library." Someday this may very well be the best browser in the world. I write this in konqueror, and hope Moz 0.9 uses half the RAM and is twice as fast and convinces me to switch back.
Here's a sample crash analysis page. Watch out, this page is 2+ MB.
>After for first two or three crashes, I stop :-)
>sending them because I fear my duplicate
>Talkback bug reports are causing some Netscape
>employee to curse my name.. "damn! it's that
>same guy sending in a dozen bug reports for the
>same silly crash!"
Heh. Not quite. The crash reports go to a database, not to people. If Mozilla crashes for you during normal everyday use, then you should report each crash. The most common crashes are the ones that tend to get the most attention so if you neglect to report all your crashes, then you're just making them look less common. I'm not sure exactly how the data is tabulated but it can't hurt to report each crash.
On the other hand if you crash in the same place over and over to just spam talkback then yes, you'll be cursed at.
Well, the biggest one is to prevent stupid sites from refusing to serve you just because you're not using browser X. They're almost always wrong. I'll take my chances, thank you, I don't need you playing Mommy.
If you're paranoid, there are certain browser-specific bugs that a malicious website can take advantage of if they know your exact version. Better to keep them guessing. (You have cleaned out your /etc/issue file so it doesn't say exactly what version of what OS you're running... right?! If you do, you might as well as change it to "PORTSCAN ME NOW, WORLD!")
And, it's always a good thing to throw some entropy into to some marketroid's demographics.
Plus, I hope I give some admins a good laugh now and then. If you ever see this in your server logs, you'll know it's me:
Mozilla/6.666 (Atari 2600)
I like the images that this conjures.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
I may use and love Konqueror, but I still cheer for the Mozilla people because they're just a teeny bit more ambitious; as in, Mozilla runs on Unix, Windows, Mac, BeOS, and others. I still use Netscape 4.7x under Windows because I still prefer its "feel" over IE (Dear Microsoft: Fix the ****ing mouse wheel scolling!!), but it's getting outdated quickly, and I'm going to need something better for Windows. Mozilla and its derivatives (like K-meleon) are pretty much the only runners from the free software/open source community right now. I don't like the idea of Microsoft embracing and extending the web and convincing web designers that getting 90-95% of the potential market is good enough. We need a browser that runs on all platforms and is the most standards-compliant of all of them. That's why I can't help but cheer Mozilla on.
the new image rendering library was known as libpr0n to all of the developers.
Keeping
The 0.9 branch is known as the performance branch (though more performance stuff is still being checked in) and to that end a lot of stuff has been rewritten for speed: For example, Mail/News now uses Outliner which has at least doubled the speed which I use to have using Mozilla Mail/News. Then there's PSM 2.0 which was totally rewritten from the ground up so that SSL pages are now blazzingly fast. ImageLib (LibPr0n) also was completely rewritten so that it renders images 2x as fast as it did before. This is not to say that this is the end of the performance fixes. In addition to the ones mentioned above, the latest nightlies have a very big speed increase loading pages (which was checked in right after 0.9 branched). In addition were working on getting the startup time down, with among other things the ability on (Winblows computers) to load Mozilla at Startup just as you would IE. bug 76004, (I know some people won't like this idea but some will, and you will have a choice) If you want to help out you can join the channel #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. We need Linux coders to help optimize the speed on Linux so that its just as fast as on Windows, were getting there but were still a bit behind. A while ago I stopped b*tching about Mozilla and its slowness and decided to get involved and I have found you can make a lot of difference if you do. Even if you can't devote lots of time to it, even filing bugs, helping sort and duplicate bugs or creating testcases for those bugs is sorely needed. If you have any questions feel free to email me or check out Mozillazine.