Mozilla 0.9.4 Released

Actually... by bconway · 2001-09-14 11:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Disabling window.open has been around for a couple of releases now, it's just not the most straightforward thing to enable. I was most pleased to find that hitting enter after filling in a form will actually submit a request everyplace I tried it, assuming that's the intent of the form (i.e. a search engine). This seemed to be a hit-or-miss thing in previous releases.

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Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?

Looking good by boaworm · 2001-09-14 11:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

Mozilla is turning out to be a really good browser nowdays. I missed a few features in 0.9.3 though, mostly that it tends to crash while at java-intense pages, as well as encryption.

Hopefully these things have gotten better, it is quite annoying when the browser crashes :-(

If Mozilla is going to be able to compete with the major browsers, it (IMHO) has to be a lot more stable. I can cope with a page being rendered badly, but not with a browser crash. IE is still a lot more stable. Or.. perhaps it is just bad Java Runtime integration ?

Thanks anyway Mozilla team, i'm off to the download zone :-)

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Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele

Re:Looking good by maggard · 2001-09-14 12:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

If Mozilla is going to be able to compete with the major browsers...
What other major browsers? Opera? Lynx? The legions of other 1%'ers?
As far as most webfolks are concerned there's IE for Wintel, IE for Mac (they've different code bases and behave very differently), Netscape et al v.4x, Netscape/Mozilla et al v.6x then generic text-browsers for ADA compatibility. That leaves Netscape/Mozilla as one of the two major names and the rest lost in the "other" catagory*.
*Yes lots of browser-partesians will howl at this but for most web sites the vast majority of browsers hitting them regularly are IE or NS. No comment on quality or anything else, just reading the logs.

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I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Re:Looking good by chabotc · 2001-09-14 13:33 · Score: 3, Interesting

From my experiances experimenting with java, it is mostly due to the fact that mozilla uses a java2 envirioment. (the jre1.3.xpi and sun java and blackdown java plugins for mozilla are all 1.3+ based).

Most of the applets you will find on the web will still be java 1 based. (This is what IE ships, duh)

There are some 'known' problems, leaking resources, threads and not relaunching applets when a java 1 applet is loaded in a java2 VM

big miss feature if you ask me, but in both sun's bug DB, and mozilla's bugzilla, its gotten marked as 'solved/wontfix', so don't hold your breath to see it resolved ;-)

Wow! by zachlipton · 2001-09-14 11:57 · 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.

Re:Wow! by Gerv · 2001-09-14 12:02 · Score: 5, Funny

Wow, what a great release! I think that 0.9.3 really is a key step in the right direction for 1.0.

Has someone been cutting and pasting out of their "Slashdot comments" file? ;-)

Gerv

How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by davidu · 2001-09-14 11:57 · 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

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# Hack the planet, it's important.

Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by abischof · 2001-09-14 12:34 · Score: 3, Informative

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

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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by Spy+Hunter · 2001-09-14 13:21 · 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!

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main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by iso · 2001-09-14 20:07 · Score: 3

I've put in my vote. Still, it's remarkable that people would even consider this a "feature" when you have to edit obscure configuration files to make it work. I've been a Linux user since 1995, but I think this is a good example of the major reason I've now switched to Mac OS X: Apple wouldn't dream of making a feature that didn't have a UI interface whereas with Linux it's the norm.

Apart from Linux, I've been using UNIX for over 15 years and quite frankly I'm done with text files. I've put all 10 of my votes for Mozilla bugs into UI bugs because in 2001 I shouldn't have to be editing text files if I don't want to. It's amazing that these features have been in Mozilla for months but still don't have even a rudimentary graphical interface.

- j

I love it! by Brazilian+Geek · 2001-09-14 12:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've been using Mozilla's daily builds as my standard browser since M18 and as my email client since 0.8 and I've got to say that I love it - yes, it is a memory hog but I have more than enough memory to give a fsck.

I've been trying to evangelize the users from my work place into using Mozilla since 0.9.2 and so far I've managed to get 10 out of 90 to switch (from Netscape 4.75 of course, IE is a no-no acording to company security policy).

Way to go Mozilla Team - it gets better every single day, congratulations!

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All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...

Re:Mirror by Gerv · 2001-09-14 12:11 · Score: 4, Funny

The mozilla folks really ought to put up MD5s with the release.

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

Anyway, the standard disclaimer we put on all releases applies: "If it doesn't melt your hard drive and send your tax evasion plans to the IRS, consider yourself lucky."
Gerv

Re:Mirror by pete-classic · 2001-09-14 12:15 · 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

mailer works a little better, too by BillyGoatThree · 2001-09-14 12:17 · Score: 3

I've been using Moz daily for almost a year now for both web and mail. I downloaded a daily a couple days ago and it's getting better all the time. The most notable improvement: The mailer isn't a time-sink like it used to be. Even in 0.9.3 it would take me upwards of 1 or even 2 minutes to click "new msg", put in 3 recip addrs, type a subject line and then start writing the body. Luckily I only write about 3 emails a week...

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324006

Re:Speed issues. Moz 9.3/9.4 by zachlipton · 2001-09-14 12:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

In my mind, I don't think of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x to be an upgrade to Netscape 4.x, I think of it as a completely different product. Any time that you rewrite 100% of the product, you can expect the new version to be slower, more infested with bugs, and just "feel" worse than the older version which has been tended for many years.

However, if Netscape decided not to do the 5.0 rewrite, disaster would be the only end. The old code was not mantainible and doesn't allow for the powerful new features and embedding that seamonkey allows for.

Speed is something that is being worked on and is significantly better than before. I won't mention full names here on /. without permission from the people involved, but someone at Netscape (d. hy.) did a lot of work on page loading and a new contributor did a lot of proformence work as well recently (jes.). Mail/news also uses the widget in the folder-paine, which has great speed increases as well.

So we are trying the best we can. As always, patches are welcome.

Zach

What's new in 0.9.4 by mbrubeck · 2001-09-14 12:25 · 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.

good work by Ender+Ryan · 2001-09-14 13:42 · Score: 3, Funny

I have to say I'm am extremely impressed with the latest releases of mozilla, there has again been a very very nice speed jump.

As a submitter of bugs, it's good to see them getting cleaned up, at this point it's better than many browsers that call themselves 3, 4, 5, 6, 7... whatever.

Stability is getting really good, I haven't been able to crash the latest 0.9.3 nightlies or 0.9.4, even with java, javascript, and flash.

Really excellent work, my thanks goes out to everyone who has helped with Mozilla.

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Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden

Re:Proxomitron by Todd+Knarr · 2001-09-14 13:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

How about not optimizing your page code instead? Just write HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 or CSS1/CSS2 or Javascript 1.2 or whatever according to the standards ( see www.w3c.org for all of them ) and make life easy on all of us. I find it annoying to go to a site and see "Sorry, Netscape 6.x isn't supported.", flip the user-agent string to IE5.5 and discover that the site renders perfectly in Mozilla 0.9.recent. To me it says that the site doesn't care what customers it annoys and that the designer doesn't know how to create HTML pages.

Re:Oh Great!! by tester13 · 2001-09-14 17:22 · Score: 3, Insightful

not at all. I want to see what I want to see and don't want to see what i don't want to see.

I'm not averse to changing content per se. I just want to be the one changing it.

Re:Hangs on startup is probably sound "bug" by rasjani · 2001-09-14 21:14 · Score: 3, Interesting

This is typical error if you have flash plugin installed or possibly java (I havent really verified this).

Flash plugin opens /dev/dsp in initialization state and depending on your sounddrivers, it wont open if you have, for example xmms (or anything else using sound devices) running. Someone also mentioned that java does the same but i havent noticed this myself.

So, here's a list of what you can really do:

get rid of offending plugins.
Stop all sounds when starting mozilla
Use esddsp to lauch mozilla
Get Alsa. Oss that comes with stock kernel doesnt support soundmixing and thus, multiple instances cannot use /dev/dsp "simultaneously".

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yush

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