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Mozilla 0.9.4 Released

Posted by michael on from the fast-as-a-speeding-snail dept.

asa writes: "Lots of bug fixes (1,467 at last count) since 0.9.3 including the ability to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. You can find more information on what's new at the release notes and mozillaZine."

15 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror by pete-classic · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've got the new release mirrored at ftp://nerf-herder.net/pub/mozilla

    -Peter

    1. Re:Mirror by pete-classic · · Score: 4, Informative

      Why? If they can tamper with the releases, they can tamper with the MD5s.

      For mirrors. You get the MD5 (AFAIR, 128bits, conceiveably double that when including the filename ;-) from the "official" site and use it to verify that the bins on the mirror haven't been altered.

      -Peter

  2. Wow! by zachlipton · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wow, what a great release! I think that 0.9.3 really is a key step in the right direction for 1.0. See http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html for more details on the roadmap and plans for 1.0.

    Also, as a mozilla developer, I would like to thank all those who have joined the project recently and done something to help. Even if you cannot code, there is still lots that you can do. I urge you to download 0.9.4 or even better, a nightly build, and to look at http://www.mozilla.org/start, http://www.mozilla.org/qa/help, and http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html. There are many things that you can do to help which will help get 1.0 out the door sooner and better.

  3. How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by davidu · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ok folks, here is a really cool feature: The Ability to manage, on a site by site basis, which sites can give you popups and which can't. A very effective way to manage pop up ads. Here's how:

    No POPUPS whatsoever:
    user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

    But...if some sites need popups, make a zone for them like this:
    user_pref("capability.policy.strict.sites", "http://www.evil.org http://www.annoying.com");
    user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.alert", "noAccess");
    user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.confirm ", "noAccess");
    user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.prompt" , "noAccess");
    ... you get the idea....

    It is very cool, and there is a lot of scripting and other trickery you can do with these prefrences.
    Btw, this is all from: Configurable Security Policies

    -David
    --

    # Hack the planet, it's important.
    1. Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by abischof · · Score: 3, Informative

      UI for controlling popups is bug 75371. Feel free to vote for the bug, if that issue is important to you.

      --

      Alex Bischoff
      HTML/CSS coder for hire

    2. Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Informative
      Actually, what is in Mozilla now is much cooler yet, which is the ability to disable 99.9% of advertising popups while letting 99% of wanted popups through, with no user intervention necessary ! No need to maintain a list of sites that need popups to function. It disables popups during page load and unload, but lets through popups that happen due to an actual mouse click.

      Of course, if this feature ever gets widespread use we'll just see javascript links that open up advertisements in addition to their targets, but that won't happen unless IE gets this feature, which is unlikely. So download Mozilla and free yourself from evil automatic popups!

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  4. Re:Actually... by zachlipton · · Score: 2, Informative

    This used to be a huge issue and something that prevented lots of people from using Mozilla before. Thank you to those who have fixed this!

  5. What's new in 0.9.4 by mbrubeck · · Score: 4, Informative
    The difference in 0.9.4 is that you can disable popups on page-load/page-close only. This gets rid of most popup ads, while preserving less-annoying uses of popup windows (unlike 0.9.3).

    See this newsgroup post for details.

  6. Stop complaining about speed! by HanzoSan · · Score: 2, Informative



    Everyone who complains about speed doesnt know anything about how computers work.

    New software is bigger, more powerful, and NEEDS a more powerful computer, RAM IS CHEAP, dont tell me Mozilla uses too much ram when you can buy a gig of ram for under $200.

    Get a faster harddrive, if mozilla is slow you are most likely using cheap IDE crap.

    Now, if you have a modern computer THEN you may use modern browsers and modern software, if you have a computer which was made before Netscape 4.7 was released, then you should be using netscape 4.7, your computer will never be powerful enough to run mozilla.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
  7. "Patches and/or help is welcome!" by zachlipton · · Score: 2, Informative
    Rather than sitting around and discussing how Mozilla should load pages 1.5ms faster than it does today, why can't we all get off the ground and help. mozilla.org has made it very easy to find the resources that you need to help out, espically with non-coding work. Yes, you did hear me say it: "You can help with Mozilla without coding!"

    If you travel over to one of the following pages on mozilla.org, you can learn all that you can do to get involved. Confirming the unconfirmed (from page number 3 below) is a great way to get involved, doesn't take much time, and is of a big help when all the many bugs come in after a big release like this.
    1. http://www.mozilla.org/start
    2. http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html
    3. http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/
  8. Re:Proxomitron by damiam · · Score: 2, Informative
    Oops! I nearly forgot, scripting languages don't have DTDs

    They don't?

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  9. Re:First bug post... by zachlipton · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thank you very much for trying Mozilla and reporting bugs. However, this is not the right place to report a bug as there is no way to track it here with the hundreds of other comments.

    Please travel over to http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helpe r.html and follow the instructions there to report bugs. Espically, please please please search for duplicates before you file a bug. After a release, the number of bugs filed jumps by huge amounts and many of these are duplicates. Please let us who are working on Mozilla work on code and not weeding out duplicate bugs.

    Thanks

  10. Re:Speed issues. Moz 9.3/9.4 by Ungulate · · Score: 2, Informative

    The reason moz/nscp6 is slower than 4.x is that the entire user interface is built out of XML, CSS, and javascript (something collectively referred to as XPFE). This approach ensures that there's as little platform-specific code as possible, making mozilla available on a wide number of platforms that simply wouldn't have been plausible if everything was being done natively. It's been said many times that if not for XPFE, there wouldn't have been versions for anything but Windows and possibly Macintosh.

    The good news is that UI responsiveness improves with each release, and I fully expect it to equal 4.x in time. However, I've read that GTK is a bottleneck of some sort, so that's why Windows has a performance advantage over *nix.

  11. .94 & previous releases seem to have memory le by ILoveMandrake · · Score: 2, Informative

    This seems to have been a re-occuring problem among all of the releases, but even worse with .94 (.93 seemed to be getting better). Here are my specs : 1.2 ghz athlon w/ 266 fsb, 266MB PC133, gf2 ultra, sblive 5.1...)

    I started mozilla having 136 MB with the buffers & cached memory. After about an hour or so of watching realplayer videos in cnn & abc and going to various sites I had only 85 MB free with buffers & cached memory included. I noticed a very aparent slowdown in the way programs loaded. I closed the window with realplayer with no ram gain. I then clozed mozilla. and my free memory went back up to 135 or so.

    This may be caused by the fact that I have 4-5 windows open at once. I later tried using the "flush memory" option which only freed up about 5-10MB. The older versions seemed to have much less of this problem, but it was still noticeable. I use opera 5.05TP1 and it not only loads in a second or two, but is much faster at loading web pages and allows you to have up to 10 or more pages open at once in one opera window. This is quite nice for the way I browse. Unfortunately It does not have real player support, but id does have java & flash suport.

  12. Speed ... by konmaskisin · · Score: 2, Informative
    This release takes 17 seconds to start up on a pII-233 (about 1 second less if you use a reall small bookmark file). Sure, that's a bit slow (given the Netscape 4 takes ~ 12 seonds and Opera takes ~ 7 seconds. But 0.9.3 took 24 seconds (constistantly) so thats about a 30% start up time improvement and there's more to come. I'm not sure what the estimates are but 4 seonds faster on my machine is likey possible and that's without the BRUTAL_SHARING stuff in mozilla yet (which will make it faster) or improvements in gcc, glibc and ld which will likely get startup to ~10 seconds or less on a machine like mine.


    Rendering pages is extremely FAST but creating windows is SLOW. The main hitch I have right now is on new window creation (which takes a long time to do). For example on a test page that uses javascript to open and close 75 windows one at a time (see the super simple code at this URL and either copy and make you own test or click on the link on that page):

    http://206.191.52.79/MozTester/pagebanger.html

    On a P233 running Linux I get the following (you'll likely want to try this on a faster machine - it's the relative comparisons that are interesting).

    * Netscape 4.7.* takes about a minute
    * Opera takes about 15 seconds
    * Mozilla takes about 5 minutes !! (actually I stopped timing it's so slow)
    * KFM/Konqueror ?? (old version doesn't work try it with KDE 2.0)
    * Galeon ??? (not timed recently - the sort of more "native" GTK GUI might be faster??)
    * Embedded Moz etc.
    * Other browsers??

    On MS Windows the Mozilla GUI is likely faster (haven't tested) and IE of course is very fast ... However IE 5.0 seems SLOWER on rendering pages and only really flies better on creating new windows.

    Some of the slowness is due to the server so I engourage you to create your own javascript tests that just openm and close blank windows or something ... but the main slowness in Mozilla comes in drawing its own GUI ... Other than that the performance and speed of Moz is pleasantly peppy even on old machines (though lots RAM is recommended).