Mozilla 0.9.5

agotneja writes: "Check out mozilla.org for details :) Another fine (hopefully!) release." For whatever reason, 1.0 still seems really far off.

Comments

they should start going backwards with the numbers

[timothy]

... until people start feeling grateful for 0.9.5 ;)

Or call it "one point oh beta minus initial release testing phase DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON use at own risk edition, AKA 'only 4 more points'"

At any rate, I'll grab .9.5 now, but .9.4 is sweet.

Tim

Link tag

[hereticmessiah]

What I like best about Moz 0.9.5 is its better support for the tag. It's really about time the more browsers started to actively support this tag considering its great utility and vintage.

Re:Link tag

[sharkey]

...better support for the tag

I think you left off the "B". Mozilla introduced the tag, IIRC, and has supported it for years.
From The Book of Mozilla, 12:10:

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.

Re:Mozilla is the BEST browser!

[Mr Spot]

Its Debateable that IE is more stable, but Mozilla is faster.

But what use is a fast program if it isn't as stable as the program it is meant to replace? Don't get me worng, I use Mozilla too, but saying it's better because it is faster, even though it is less stable, is flawed logic to say the least.

Intergrate ICQ + AOL into mozilla ...

Mozilla's codebase is big enough already, adding features like these would simply be increasing the code's complexity while not being as well suited to the task as a dedicated program. This is also the basis of the Unix philosophy: make several programs to do one thing, and do it well, instead of one program to do everything and suck at them all. Add to that that you do not want your instant messaging programs to die when your browser does, and vice versa.

... pre caching of entire websites ...

This is a horrible thing to do! In essence, you would end up downloading countless megabytes of data that would never get read and cause needless congestion on the internet. Say you follow a link from an article: you may only end up going to one page in that site. But your browser has downloaded the whole thing, only to end up throwing it away. That would be extremely pointless and possibly perceived as rude by the operators of the server whose bandwidth you have just wasted. Also, broadband users wouldn't need to have pages pre-cached -- their connection is fast enough without the help of a web accelerator.

Not meaning to attack you personally, but I had to voice my opinion on some of your ideas, so don't get offended by what I say.

Rebuild for faster operation.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing you should do is pull down the source and reconfigure and build with --disable-debug "--enable-optimizations=-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro" in addition to what ever components you want.

You would n't believe how much more snappier it makes mozilla run, for example the java sdk framed docs index pages goes down from 2.5sec to 1.5sec's on my athlon 850.

Also add this line to your prefs.js file:

user_pref("nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache", false);

This speeds up loading time by using the pre-compiled versions of the javascript controls.

Q: Why should an IE user switch?

[Sara Chan]

Consider the typical Windows user, who uses IE 6. What are the reasons that I should give to such users for switching to Mozilla, or perhaps Netscape 6.1?

Please note that political arguments about open-source software are not what I'm looking for. The typical Windows user isn't going to listen to this.

What about features, speed, reliability, etc.? The things that I could tell users.

Re:Q: Why should an IE user switch?

[Kilobug]

You can speak about:
* security holes of IE
* password-protected list of username/passwords
* integration with search engines
* tab browsing
* faster and more accurate rendering for complex web pages (with many tables)
* full alpha-channel in PNG
* javascript pop-up control
* intelligent cookies/pictures manager
* pretty interface (new modern theme is so sweet)
* ...

Worse is Better?

[marm]

Why is it that people always forget the Konqueror?

I don't think they do. Konqueror is my preferred browser by far. It's not perfect, there are areas where it needs a little work (Javascript and Netscape plugin handling for instance) but the overall feel of the browser UI and rendering engine is unmatched. It's quick, full of useful features, relatively light on resources and renders well. In short, everything I want out of a web browser.

There are a few reasons people have stopped making much noise over Konqueror recently:

• There hasn't been a major release of it recently, and there won't be for a little while either (not until KDE3 sometime early next year). This is due to Konqui's coupling to the KDE release schedules. Fair enough I think, given that Konqueror is a key component of KDE.
• The inevitability of Konqui becoming popular, maybe even the most common Linux browser - AKA the IE effect. KDE is the default desktop for most distros these days, and Konqueror is the default web browser for all those KDE desktops. It's a good browser and tightly integrated into KDE. Why bother switching to anything else?
• The fact that many users of Konqui are very happy indeed with its performance, and, perceiving the rapid success which Konqueror has had, feel no need to crow too much about it?

I think that the 'battle' between Konqueror and Mozilla to be the most successful *nix browser is a little like the 1970's 'battle' between UNIX and Lisp machines. Lisp machines (perhaps like Mozilla) were designed by people whose emphasis was on the 'right way' and completeness above all else. If that meant a very large and complex system, then so be it. UNIX (perhaps a bit like Konqueror) was designed by people whose emphasis was on the 'right way' and completeness but ABSOLUTELY NOT at the expense of simplicity.

We all know now who won that 'battle'.

There's more about this subtle difference in design philosophy here. Yes, notice where this is hosted - Jamie Zawinski's site. Ironic? Perhaps not, given jwz's resignation from Netscape and Mozilla. You be the judge.

Installing Java plugin

[abischof]

If you can't seem to get the Java plugin to work, please read the instructions in the release notes:
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.5/#java

Re:Are we the ugly stepchild?

[Gerv]

Seems like OS X is constantly a late release, if it gets released at all.

That's because there are about five people on the planet capable of building Mozilla for OS X, and they are all very busy :-) Part of the reason is that it requires an experimental, pre-release version of Apple's gcc-based compiler.

Gerv

Re:i don't really understand you

[Gerv]

Can't we geeks have at least ONE fucking browser for ourselves?

What you mean is: "Waah! Why won't someone write the browser _I_ want?"

You're a geek. Go do a Mozilla distribution for geeks. Add in all the patches like gestures and PGP. Do a new, cool skin. People will love it. That's what the code is for. mozilla.org wants to see that happen.

Or quit whining.

Gerv

Mail/News/Chat clients, better Java support

[jonabbey]

Mozilla is being built as a successor to Netscape Communicator, and so includes a bunch of tools to take advantage of a variety of open Internet standards, including POP,IMAP,NNTP,LDAP, and IRC. Mozilla also includes a web page editor (Composer) which can be used to create mail and news posts as well as web pages, if you're into that kinky HTML stuff. This makes Mozilla vulnerable to the (misleading) bloat charge, for those who don't like flexible tools, but it also gives you a one-stop tool that can take you all over USENET as well as the web.

One of the most important benefits that I can see on Windows is that Mozilla comes with support for using Sun's recent, vastly improved, Java VM's integrated into the browser. Yes, people can write HTML for Java applets that will work on IE and Netscape 4.x using the Java plug-in, but Mozilla automatically uses the Java plug-in for all Java code, with significant benefits in performance and stability. If you have any use for Java in your browser, Mozilla will support things better.

There's also things like themeing, the sidebar, the improved cookie management, and the lack of operating system exploits that IE and Outlook seem to continually fall prey to.

Re:Not biased, just practical

[BZ]

> Please, be more specific on what is missing from
> Konqueror.

Decent support for the W3C DOM. Decent XML support. Good CSS2 support.

It renders brain-dead sites fine. It does not render sites using current technology fine.

Re:grr spell check grrr

[Gerv]

Is it possible that they could make it all the way to 1.0 without a simple spell check feature?

Perfectly possible, and extremely likely.

surely there must be open source dictionaries they could implement?

Probably. The trick is finding someone to do the implementing.

Can't they use netscape 4.x's dictionary?

No. It's proprietary.

I'm too ashamed to recommend Mozilla to my friends

...because you know they can't spell?

Gerv