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.

Comments

Opera-like gestures

[abischof]

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

Mozilla shrinking

[cluening]

Although it is rather unscientific and probably unrealistic, I have noticed one good sign about mozilla as I have downloaded each release: as of late, mozilla download have been shrinking. When new features/code are continually added and the size of a program gets smaller, I take that as a good sign. For example, here are the sizes of the Linux x86 full .tar.gz file over the releases since 0.6:

• 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

The .8's jumped a little, but notice how the .9's picked up the slack. I think this looks quite good to me...

Re:Mozilla shrinking

[wolruf]

The 2MB footprint improvement is mainly due to XPCDOM code integration:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bugidtype= include&order=bugs.bug_id&bug_id=,76534,76535,7654 0,76543,76568,76871,76942,77404,77410,77412,77418, 77469,77471,77557,77559,77560,77561,77562,77574,77 575,77802,78386,78782,78783,79010

See Mozillazine update from May, 9:
http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/May2001_ buildbar_comments.html

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Stable now

[SurfsUp]

My wife has switched to Mozilla, that says a lot. One week now and zero crashes.

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.
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Using 0.9.2 right now

[AirLace]

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.

Re:Quick Launch??

[inquis]

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

They'll be back!

[uriyan]

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.

Same graphics rendering problem as in 0.9.1.

[aussersterne]

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...

What's better this time out (linux p.o.v.)

[vondo]

I've been using mozilla as my main browser since M16 maybe and my main e-mail app a bit after that. Only with the release of 0.9.1 have I really been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, a stable 1.0 product that is better than Netscape 4.7 in all ways. (I don't have much experience with IE.)

Several things are worth mentioning as major improvements recently:

• MIME type/helper app support: In the past, mozilla was difficult to configure for helper apps, didn't read my .mailcap (still doesn't, but RSN), and was generally a pain in the butt. A lot of work has been going on here recently which means that 0.9.2 is much easier to deal with and 0.9.3 looks to be even better. See bug 78106 for an overview of this work.
• Stability: I don't ever remember 0.9.1 crashing on me (but it might have) and 0.9.2 promises to be even better. If you are having problems in this area, try renaming your ~/.mozilla directory, restarting, and then moving back in just the files you need (bookmarks, cookies, etc). It sucks, but this can sometimes help.
• Speed: mozilla just keeps getting more and more responsive. It's not as fast as 4.77, never will be since it does so much more, but it is certainly getting better.
• Autocomplete: Overall better since it seems to match anywhere in the URL, but it does tend to get cluttered up with non-top level URLS.

Some things still need some work:

• Printing on linux might be getting better but there are still lots of problems leading to ugly printouts
• The newsreader doesn't seem to thread entirely properly
• Perhaps the biggest obstacle to mozilla acceptance is the number of sites that are written with non-standard HTML/JavaScript and fail to render properly with mozilla. If you see this at sites you frequent, file an evangelism bug and send the webmaster e-mail.

If you haven't tried mozilla recently (since 0.9) you owe it to yourself to download this one and try it out.