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Mozilla 0.9.2 Storms Out The Gates
Well, a lot of you were up late or up early finding out that 0.9.2 of Mozilla has been released unto the world. The Mozilla folks have also, in fine fashion, put out release notes as well.
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- The same icons are used for Mail/News and
Navigator, so when minimised, sometimes "which
one's my mail window?!" becomes a problem. It
only requires the Mozilla developers to add 2
words somewhere, but it's still not fixed.
- In the "Tasks" menu, the "Mail" entry is
used to access the mail and news client.
With such a poor description you could be
thinking Mozilla doesn't have a news client.
- The release notes say "The preferences dialog now allows you to turn off animated gif images or set them to only animate once". And where is this animated GIF preference? In the Privacy and Security category... right...
- Not interface-related, but it is very annoying that Mozilla only imports 4.x profiles during profile migration, in the mail client.
Seems like there's a bit of the "it's 'only' the interface" mentality at Mozilla. But apart from these annoying little bugs, Mozilla is great. I can't wait for the 1.0 release.If you're interested in support for Opera-like gestures, please vote for bug 76537 (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).
In case you're not familiar with the feature, Opera has gesture support. For instance, to reload a document, just hold down the right mouse button, and move the mouse up then down. Or, to go back a page, hold down the right mouse button and click the left mouse button ("forward" is just the reverse: hold down the left mouse button and click the right mouse button).
Alex Bischoff
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
Thanks to Ben Bucksch you will be able to find how to do that here:
bug 74574. It could use some more votes. (hint)
- 0.9.2 - 9.2 M
- 0.9.1 - 9.4 M
- 0.9 - 9.4 M
- 0.8.1 - 11.0 M
- 0.8 - 11.0 M
- 0.7 - 10.5 M
- 0.6 - 10.5 M
ThePosted from the wireless couch.
However, somewhat to my amazement, the keyboard input is unable to keep up with typing speed on a 233 MHz machine. It takes some talent to design such a topheavy keyboard input stack.
Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.
The bottom line for me is, the Lizard is here, and here to stay.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
A new Galeon release, targeted for Mozilla 0.9.2, will be released Monday.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.
Well, Alphanumerica (creators of the Aphrodite skin) were working on a package called 'Total Recall', which promised just that. It's now been subverted to a generic browser plug-in called Recall, available at http://recall.mosdev.org. Worth checking out!
There's a lot of cool projects being worked on at Mozdev. XUL is starting to look like a viable platform, now the spec's more or less cast in stone!
If you can't code- complain. I don't mean to mozilla.org they are working their butts off. I mean, complain to companies who's products exclude mozilla from operating on their web sites.
I could reel them off- they don't recognize mozilla and/or use javascript to restrict using it with their products. Products like livelink.
To preserve the web we MUST complain and force those companies we can to SUPPORT THE STANDARDS. If they support mozilla their code should work with IE. There's little reason anymore for products to not support mozilla, konqueror and IE. It's not tough and we deserve it.
Quick launch (AKA "turbo") merely preloads mozilla at startup so when you start mozilla for the first time it seems faster. In reality this is just an illusion, don't let it placate you, demand a better solution!
It's not an illusion that with quicklaunch turned on, I can close Mozilla windows without first checking to make sure that I'm not closing the last window.
The shareholder is always right.
Personally, I like Mozilla, and even more than that I like using Galeon, all the greatness of Mozilla with a nice GTK interface.
/usr/include dir while building mozilla (don't ask me how!) and was left with no browser to use, but I downloaded Opera in just a few minutes so I could keep entertaining myself while fixing my machine ; ) There's no other browser you could do that with while being stuck on a 56k line.
Then there is Konqueror, which, while I think it has a disgustingly ugly interface, the latest version which I just tried out yesterday is absolutely great. It renders things (IMO) almost as well as Mozilla, some things even better. It's very good, without Mozilla I might use it.
But there is also Opera. I dislike it because it is not Free, as in closed source. You can get a free (as in beer) version, but it has a banner ad that always displays in the top. Aside from that, it is absolutely excellent. It's very fast, and (other than the damn banner ad) it has a pretty slick interface. It's definately different than any other browser interface out there, better or worse it's definately interesting. It renders html extremely well, not as good as Mozilla, and not quite as good as Konq, it seems to have a few nasty rendering bugs here and there, but it's still really great. One really great thing about it is it is EXTREMELY light weight. The version, with QT statically linked, is under 3 megs!
Funny story, last night I accidentally rm -rf'ed my
Enough friggin rambling from me...
So anyway, my point is that now we actually have multiple alternatives on Linux. Imagine that! I was worried it would never happen, but check it out, the state of browsing the web in Linux is almost on par with windows! Only thing lacking now is plugins(if you even care about that sort of thing). For those that do, there is a wine based plugin being developed by codeweavers that will allow windows plugings to be used in Linux! Quicktime, Active _BLAH_, etc. is all going to work.
Things are really looking up. Soon Distributions will be shipping with perfectly stable IE rivaling browsers, one of the most important thing Linux has always lacked which turned away many newbies.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
What we really need is -turbo mode for linux
Don't forget that Linux has exceedingly powerful disk caching. I've got 384MB of RAM and after I start and application once (including mozilla), it never has to access the disk to load again.
Gotta love those unix-clone boxen.
Browsing seems even faster than with 0.9.1, and the release notes claim that 25 segfault bugs have been crushed since the previous version - not that I ever hit these bugs. The drop-down history bar which was dismally slow to update in 0.9.1 also seems a little more responsive, though I think that feature is going a little towards the bloat side of things.
2 or 3 years ago, Linux users had every right to be concerned with the general direction of Web browsers in Linux versus The Competition. But if Mozilla development continues at this rate, we have nothing to worry about, and there is a fine alternative, Konqueror, if for some reason Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner is prevented from continuing development of Mozilla due to the new anti-GPL/viral clauses in their EULAs.
Mozilla may never have swept away the competition, but I strongly believe that it has saved us from a much more terrible state of affairs just by existing. There are two types of Open Source success: Apache, Perl: The instant hits. Linux, Mozilla: those that steadily improve over several years, rise to prominence, and eventually vanquish the competition. Although the entrepreneurs with capital obviously want to fund the former, companies like IBM, HP and Compaq know that the latter is what will lead to eventual World Domination.
quick launch does the same thing as giving the mozilla binary the "-turbo" switch at the command line. it instructs mozilla to keep its libraries in memory even after the program exits. this allows mozilla to start up just as fast as IE, which keeps its libraries perpetually in memory anyway.
-inq
Or GNOME an OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc. Those too take longer to compile.
Notice how those are some pretty impressive apps, that have quite a bit of functionality behind them...
In fact, most major applications should take much longer to compile than X. Would you really want your apps to be smaller than your GUI framework? (Mind you the GUI framework just ties things together, it essentially isn't even an app).
Have you ever tried to compile mozilla yourself? There are a billion options you can append to ./configure Which is what makes Mozilla amazing in the sense that you can customize it so well to what you want it to be like on multiple operating systems
Think before you speak
Sunny Dubey
It's probably more to the point that Mozilla is now more stable than Konqueror. It would be petty for me to compare the development time spent on the two projects. And the rendering engine for Konqueror still needs a lot of work, whereas the Mozilla's is complete and compliant. And the XML support is as sexy as hell....
This version just might replace Konqueror (my current Linux browser) and IE. I would miss the whiz-bang features of the latter. But I did a total reinstall only a few weeks ago, and already the damn thing has managed to start misplacing memory...
__
It seems to me now that all that Microsoft has won was a single battle in the browser war. Internet Explorer was, undoubtedly, one of the best programs MS ever wrote. It was quite fast (initially), supported many of the web standards and had excellent internationalization. However, while Mozilla had to retreat and regroup, it was well worth it.
Mozilla has now grown to accomodate many of IE's "cool" features. And here we can see IE's greatest shortcoming: it was built with corporate thinking in mind. Mozilla has an excellent development team which is concerned solely with Mozilla's good functioning as a browser. On the other hand, Microsoft has now become concerned with integrated IM, their online "services" and other features which make IE unstable and bloated.
A couple of weeks ago I saw one of my friends (who is not deeply involved with the open-source movement) using Mozilla. The reason for his choice was the fact that Mozilla (even the earlier 0.8!) ran faster than IE 6. It gave me hope - I saw that open-source software can prevail upon commercial software in the trial of public opinion.
The problem with horizontal artifacts in images, especially when scrolling, still hasn't been fixed. *sigh*
I really want to use Mozilla as my main browser now because it seems to work very well, but I'm a hopeless picky pedant and a bug like this that appears very prominently really keeps me away.
This time (between 0.9.1 and 0.9.2) I did submit it via Bugzilla, but it got marked (once again) as a duplicate of an already solved bug. I guess the people responsible for the graphics rendering are having trouble duplicating what I'm seeing...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Add user_pref("general.useragent.override", "yourbrowserhere"); to the prefs or user.js. Works nicely on the Mac. This and other useful tips courtesy of the Mozilla end user docs.
AFAIK Mozilla still doesn't support roaming via HTTP/LDAP like Netscape 4.X does. This feature is enormously useful for me since I switch workplaces a lot, and between different OS's. Anyone know when/if this feature is planned?
~
> First of all, I don't know if it's me, but the modern skin doesn't display well; I solved it by substituting chrome/modern.jar for an old version. Or just use the Classic theme. > What I'd like to know is how performance is going in Linux and platforms besides Windows. I use the Windows version and it is real fine, but I've heard that other versions are slower. We need more contributors on the Linux side. As always, Windows is the platforms with the most users and hence why development sometimes tend to improve more over there. However, I also believe the Linux (and of course mac) should be made as high priority as Windows is. We can only get there with more contributors! Furthermore, remember that Mozilla is mostly XP (Cross-platform code), which means that the only things that are Linux/Mac/Windows/whatever specific is the backend implementation. Improve that, and all the XP code gets snappier for the platform in question. Now, come over to mozilla.org and read the docs - help us make this browser even faster and less buggy!
-Håkan
I have found old pref files cna cause crashes on new versions - this is known since the syntax can change.
The BEST way to tell if its an old profile blowing up in your face, start Mozilla in profile manager mode (varys on platform I think but usuall something like -Profile or -ProfileManager) Windows should create an icon for it in Start.
If it starts, delete any existing profiles and create a new one - your life should be much simpler then.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
BUt it was REALY unstable - corrupted attachments - hey its beta.
Well, After I installed Moz 0.9.1 (I think I had .8 before) all I could say was WOW> 0.9.1 has been ultra stable (crashed twice since it came out and I installed it - once on Win 2K and once on Linux) Sites render properly most of the time, the only problem was some gif artifacts when scroling a page. The mail client rocks - I have multiple POP and IMAP accounts going without a glitch.
Needless to say I switched over to using Mozilla full time for browsing and email with 0.9.1 and have never looked back - something I could not do before due to instability and other bugs.
Kudos to the Mozilla team - I just installed 0.9.2 and look forward to the improvements! Mozill ahas easily become my browser/email combo of choice!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Several things are worth mentioning as major improvements recently:
Some things still need some work:
If you haven't tried mozilla recently (since 0.9) you owe it to yourself to download this one and try it out.
In the Macintosh whenever you launch Mozilla or open a new window the sidebar is open. No matter how I change the settings that sidebar is always open when make a new windows.
To fix this problem delete the component registary it will make a new one and this problem goes away.
Mozilla 9.1 one had this problem to I reported it and in about a week the nightly didn't have this problem.
But it seems this problem has returned.
BTW, the Mac Mozilla now reads the System "internet plug-ins" folder
Yeah I glad a professional operation like Microsoft would not do anything like that...
no wait...