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Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
MatriXOracle writes: "mozilla.org released milestone 0.9.1 today. New features include Bi-directional text support, LDAP Autocomplete in mail, new combined taskbar, an overhaul of the Modern skin with all new colors and buttons, and lots of performance and stability fixes, with over 30 of the topcrash bugs fixed." I'm using today's build right now, and it's very pretty, especially with the (brilliant!) modern theme. However, it's also segfaulted repeatedly for me already, so I hope you have better luck.
I happened to have the mozilla 0.9 and linux kernel 2.4.5 sources on my hard drive. I decided to find out how big they are in comparison of each other. The command I used to test was: xargs cat | find -iname *.[ch] I used a slight modification of that for Mozilla which has .cpp sources. This doesn't even count any of that XUL stuff.
Here are the results:
Mozilla is currently some 22,000 lines of code bigger than the most recent kernel release.
Holy hell that's a large project.
\\\ SLUDGE
If you want PGP support in Mozilla, please vote for bug 22687.
To quote Eran Tromer from that bug page:
"I'd like to express my personal opinion on the matter. Context: I'm not a Mozilla developer, but I'm well-versed in relevant security issues and I've been following this bug with interest.
"In terms of security, e-mail is currently one of the weakest facilities on the Internet. HTTP/SSL, SSH and SCP provide encrypted and authenticated protocols for the respective needs, but e-mail by and large still relies on plaintext messages passed in the clear by POP3 and SMTP. The implications are obvious and frequently experienced. This is paradoxical, considering the vast popularity of e-mail and its frequent use for sensitive information.
"This grave situation persists mainly because of lack of functionality in common e-mail software. Encrypted e-mail ought to become the *default* format, and it must become trivial to import public keys, to send standard-compliant signed and encrypted messages, and verify their validity upon receipt. None of this is possible without e-mail software support. And Mozilla is in the position to change this situation.
"It is my opinion that in this case, clean architecture should be sacrified for functionality. Yes, providing this functionality in Mozilla 1.0 (i.e., anytime soon) may necessitate unmodular, specialized and hard-to-maintain changes in the codebase. It is not possible to do the Right Thing with the given resources and timeframe. Then go ahead and just do a Working Thing and fix it later, because this one is too important.
"Mozilla.org is spending an inordinate amount of time on building a fantastic infrastructure, to-the-letter compliance with numerous standards and owe-inspriring customizability. But as a practical web user, site administrator, programmer and consultant, I'd rather give up all of these than have my e-mails show up in the wrong hands.
"Hence, I urge you to reconsider your decision."
(end quote)
- Tal Cohen- Tal Cohen
I suspect that your problem was attempting to load sites with TLS (SSL 3.1) enabled where the site didn't support TLS. Mozilla nightly builds now gracefully downgrade to SSL3 when they encounter these misconfigured or out of date servers. The fix didn't make it into the Milestone but we did set the pref for TLS to off (you can reenable it Edit|Preferences Privacy and Security -> SSL -> Enable TLS) as the Milestone default so you should have better luck visiting SSL sites.
--Asa
--Asa
Actually, you should blame MatriXOracle. He submitted the plagarized blurb without attributing it, and the slashdot editors merely posted it. They had no way of knowing it was from mozillazine.
First of all, a confession. I've been using IE5.x for quite some time now. It's always been faster than Netscape by far and more standards-compliant. (Even if tainted by embrace-and-extend.) Mozilla's never been fast or stable enough to compete.
.9.1 changes all of that.
This baby is *fast*, and I mean extremely fast. Pages pop right up on broadband, even those damned table layouts from the dark days of the 4.0 browsers, broken CSS, and terrible DOMs. Not only that, but it appears as stable as .9 was, which was far more stable than any previous Netscape release since it was called Mosaic.
First of all, a big thanks to the developers who finally proved that Open Source can deliver. It's been a massive undertaking, several years in the making, but Mozilla's OSS development model have kept it at the cutting edge.
Second of all, download this sucker right now. Make sure all your friends do as well. The faster we get standards-compliant browsers the quicker web developers can leverage CSS to make cool sites faster. Believe me, I'm sick of coding for Netscape 4.x and the steaming pile of feces that is it's CSS support. Perhaps this won't be enough to keep Netscape's market share, but the 7% or so of us that use Netscape should upgrade ASAP.
Why are new features going in when it's not stable? When will there be a feature freeze? There really needs to be a "stable" release of this thing.
I have been using Microsoft's IE6 Beta on my parent's PC (my Mac doesn't have a modem) for the past while for my browsing. I just downloaded Mozilla 0.9.1 and I'll do a quick comparison:
Disclaimer: IE6 is in Beta. But so is Mozilla.
Startup Speed: IE6. But IE Programmers probably know a bit more about Windows than Moz Developers... And someone else said Moz now has an IE like always on mode now.
Winner: IE6
Interface: I used to hate the Old Modern theme. The new one is 10x better. I can say Moz wins by a long shot.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1
Rendering Speed: When I downloaded IE6 I thought nothing could get faster than it. There was next to no waiting for a page to render. Even my copy of Moz at the time (I think 0.8.1) wasn't as fast. This new copy of Moz is just a tiny bit faster, but it is faster.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1 but not by much
Image Rendering: With Moz's new libpr0n it beat's IE6 by a small->meduim amount.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1
Interface Speed: I no longer notice the "XUL Lag" I did with older Mozillas. But as IE6 is Win32 native it is a little faster.
Winner: IE6 but not by much
Download & Install: I have a 56k modem because I live in the middle of nowhere, so I can tell you that downloading big stuff sucks. IE6 brings up this smart installer like NS6 so you can select what more Microsoft software you want. I chose Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. Rougly what is included in the Mozilla .EXE installer. Moz is about 9MB while IE6+OE6 was something like 13MB. Plus IE rebooted my PC and updated a bunch of stuff which took like 10 minutes alltogether. Moz installed easily and with out a reboot.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1
Editable Text Boxes: About the only thing that I hate about Mozilla is the Slashdot comment box type thing. IE6 uses a native embedded notepad type thing while Moz uses the horrible XUL Text Box. The XUL Box sometimes doesn't catch my keystrokes and it is horrible for navigating with the mouse. It take me about three trys to get where I want it the XUL box.
Winner: IE6 by a long, long shot.
Stability: I haven't used Moz 0.9.1 long enough to get an opinion, but the IE6 beta has only crashed about 4 times in about 3 months of heavy use.
Winner: Probably IE6
Loading Cached Pages: Mozilla loads and renders cached pages instantly or near instanly. IE6 takes a second to load it from my disk.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1
Sidebar: IE6 ripped off Moz's sidebar. There are more stuff for the Moz sidebar but for the two things I look at the most (stocks & weather (no I don't own any stocks, I'm 13...)) Moz always want's me to log back into NS's Server. Yes I know this is NS's Fault but I have to count it. Plus when the Browser-With-90%-Market-Share(tm) debuts in non-beta for with sidebars everyone will make an IE6 sidebar, mark my words...
Winner: Tie For Now
Overall Winner: Moz 0.9.1! But IE6 has some yet unimplemented features such as privacy protection (gasp!) and a bunch of other stuff. I will try to give a Browser comparison every few browser releases to keep up.
I've Tried to give an unbiased opinion. I don't really hate MS that much as I use MS Office 6 on my Power Mac 6100 and I like it. And I can say that IE6 is very good. But Moz just tied/exceeded IE6 for now. But any new features will be assimilated, see My SideBar.
--Volrath50
My only complaint so far is that Mozilla has a tendency to barf and die on sites with a lot of Javascript or large PDFs; invariably I end up with an orphaned runaway mozilla-bin process that needs killing after that happens. It's a gripe, sure, but not any more of a problem really than IE when it hopelessly locks up. Both instances are rare, thankfully.
As soon as I can get the chance, I'll see if 0.91 fixes any of this. It's been a really good product lately, much better than any Netscape I've ever had to use on my UNIX workstations. Thanks, Moz-dev-guys. I appreciate it. Lots.
Don't be fooled by the fact this is only a point .1 release, the improvement is vast compared with 0.9.
:)
First up and the one most people will knowtice right away is Page Loading, the load time was cut in half at least by a checkin that occuried right after 0.9, branched.
2nd on the list of most knowticable(sp?) is the Modern theme, its great the improvement is substantial over the old one and personally I use it as my default skin now.
3rd a huge effort was put into fixing a lot of the crashers that effected 0.9 so it should crash much less (your milage may vary however)
4th: THe DDE bug was fixed (yeah!) meaning that if your on Winblows and Mozilla never did anything after you double clicked on it before with this release it should start.
5th: On Winblows you can turn on the preloader for mozilla by specifying the -turbo option. Which means that it will stay in memory like IE does thus giving you nearly instantious opening speed. (And no we havent given up on cutting down startup speed this just to get people off our back who complain that IE loads so fast and why cant Mozilla...well now you have it so stop bitching
Finally there is the other good stuff like LDAP support and Bidi support (multidirectional text support) (contributed by IBM btw) which makes Mozilla even more usuable and expandable.
We need help please please come to #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org and ask for some help on how to get involved. I (nick Ksosez) or the other people on there will be glad to help you. We especially need C++ coders and or Linux coders.
Enjoy the release
-Ksosez
http://members.home.net/factorialnine/moz91.png