Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
- 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
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah I glad a professional operation like Microsoft would not do anything like that...
no wait...