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Netscape 6.2
lylonius writes: "Netscape today released version 6.2 of its browser based on Mozilla. Downloads for a variety of platforms and languages are available. You can also check out the release notes. This release comes off the Mozilla 0.9.4 branch, and is the third major release from Netscape using Mozilla." Kmeleon also has a release today, if you'd like your web with a little more browsing and little less AOL-promotion.
The perceived slowness is inversly proportional to your level of zealotry. You'd be suprised what the die hards will tolerate. ;)
I lost faith in Netscape after they stoped developing 4x. 6x has always seemed bloated and to slow and since it's based on Mozilla I might as well use mozilla. It seemes to be more up to date then netscape and runs just fine for me.
Snoozer.
I hope it can pull up MSN.
:P
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I use it on win32, it's really fast especially when loaded into memory in advance, regardless it's really fast. Almost comparable to IE, and unlike NS4 it's fairly stable in Win 9X.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
This is good for the user who doesn't know enough about Mozilla to go and download it often. This is for the person who likes to be able to go to Netscape's page, download their latest browser and just go with it. More people will get a newer Mozilla branch which is more stable and faster, which is good.
For the Slashdot community you're still better off downloading the Mozilla milestones instead of waiting for a Netscape branch every so often.
...however, Mozilla 0.9.5 and the nightlies afterward are already far ahead. Among other things, you get tabbed browsing, the Links toolbar, and (if you download the proper add-on) mouse gesture support.
Very, very cool.
I've been using KMeleon for a while, and become a fan... It pretty quick (not THE fastest) and the footprint is small. It's worth checking out.
There are a few quirks, sure, but for the most part It's replaced IE as my primary browser. I still have to use IE for the occasional page, but we'll see what 0.6 fixes...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the Release notes:
Known Problems
General
Mac OS: There is a known incompatibility between Netscape and WebFree, a Control Panel commonly used to block HTML-based ads. When using Netscape , disable WebFree.
Keyboard and Mouse Double right-clicking on a page can disable the keyboard.
Trying to visit a Microsoft owned web page may result in your computer's HCF (Halt and catch fire) instruction being called.
Ok, so I added the last one.
It depends, of course, on what you are comparing them to. Compare Netscape 4.x or greater against Opera or Lynx, and it will seem like a dog. (Been so long since I've used a version prior to Communicator, I can't really comment.) Compare it to Internet Explorer, and it'll hold its own nicely.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The problem is that every widget is hand drawn instead of using the native OS widgets. So scrollbars, drop down boxes, etc. are all taking up rendering time.
Until they drop the self-rendering of objects, Netscape and Mozilla will always be slower renderers than IE.
Everyone keeps pointing out that you're better off downloading the latest Mozilla instead. And while I tend to agree (I'm using the latest nightly build right now), my understanding is that the Netscape release adds in commercial features that aren't in Mozilla.
Does anyone care to comment on what features Netscape 6.2 offers that aren't in Mozilla?
You shouldn't.
mozilla@madoka:~$ crontab -l
5 0 * * *
mozilla@madoka:~$ cat
#!/bin/sh
umask 002
cd
rm -rf *
wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest
tar -zxf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
chown -R mozilla:mozilla mozilla
chmod -R g+w mozilla
Doesn't everyone do this?
Too bad Netscape didn't wait a few more weeks. Mozilla 0.9.5 introduced support for <link>, which rocks. I'd hoped that people would start getting introduced to this sooner rather than later. OTOH, Mozilla's support of <link> still has a few quirks (that's why it's not enabled by default right now) so maybe it's OK to wait until 6.3/0.9.6 or whatever.
If you're using 0.9.5 and haven't enabled <link> yet, do it. It's under your View menu, called "Site Navigation Bar" or something. It's pretty slick when you get to a site that uses <link> tags consistently.
Constitutionally Correct
Because you want the branded version with all the proprietary gewgaws. Mozilla is pre-1.0, Netscape 6.2 is released to the public. That's about it.
Chances are, if you know about the existence of Mozilla, you don't want the Netscape branded releases, although here and there there could be sites that will recognize Netscape and not Mozilla -- but chances are, you don't frequent such sites anyhow, if you know of the existence of Mozilla.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Ghosts of dead software companies haunt us again for a few hours on All Hallow's Eve, before returning to their graves.
already in Mozilla for a while.
Add user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true); to your prefs.js (while Netscape is not running) file and presto... no more popups.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
It used to be that Netscape offered official builds of Netscape for anything from AIX to Solaris. Now it looks like they are switching gears and only offering official builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
I would say that this speaks volumes about what sort of client platform most of their customers are using, and how the UNIX client landscape has changed recently. A few years ago, anti-Microsoft or pro-UNIX people (some one, some the other, some both) were seen running anything from HP-UX to OS/2. Netscape, accordingly, released versions of Netscape for nearly every OS. Now, these groups have condensed into the people running MacOS X and Linux. The people running something else as a client have slowly faded away, until these clients were considered a niche market. This is shown even by Slashdot, which has switched from "news for nerds" to an almost exclusively Linux-advocacy site.
This bodes well for Linux and MacOS, both of which have their markets. I am seeing more people use both of them not because they have an axe to grind with Microsoft, but purely for curiosity and learning's sake.
But what of the other client platforms? Obviously, Mozilla is still being released for them, but if official, "supported" browser/office software is no longer available, will anything but Linux/MacOS/Windows as a client go away? Or has it already?
Just an interesting trend, IMHO.
4.76 crashes several times a day on my NetBSD 1.5 machine.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
What the hell does ASP have to do with anything? ASP just spits out what the developer tells it - someone would still purposefully have to put in bad HTML to make a bad browser choke/slowdown.
creation science book
Is the cache in Mozilla not optimal? If you compare Moz against Opera in regard to flipping pages back and then forward, there is a huge speed advantage for Opera. Is it because Mozilla caches entire pages, and re-renders them when you hit back? I think Mozilla is as fast as any other browser in regards to rendering complex pages, but the case of flippnig back and forward is rather slow. Anynone know why?
Mikael
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I personally stopped using Netscape after a series of bad expierences with the 4.x versions. However, it seem as if Netscape 6.2 on Win32 really isn't so bad. Its very slick looking, renders all webpages I frequent flawlessly and very fast. So far, though I've only been using it for a few minutes, it has proven to be very stable. I will not yet uninstall IE6 from my system, but I'm going to give Netscape another chance.
I miss my Netscape 3.0 Gold Edition Days =)
cd /home/mozilla
/home/mozilla && rm -rf *
rm -rf *
Whoa. You realize your cron starts up in $HOME, and if that `cd` for some reason returns an error...
Try cd
rm will only run if cd returned successfully. In fact, you might want to link all those commands with ampersands; since each one is only relevant if the previous ran without errors.
Liberty in your lifetime
For OSX I've had a great experience with Omniweb. Its fast (load time and render time), super-configurable (its config looks just like the System Prefs panel), and has a sleek UI. The slide-out bookmarks is great! The carbonized IE is TERRIBLE, and netscape x.x seams equally crash-prone. I'm gonna stick with one of the "other" guys.
# make clean sig
Back when I was running Win98, IE 5.x rarely crashed. It had issues with /. when I had mod points to burn (all the drop-down boxes to mark posts as funny/insightful/troll/etc. next to each post confused the layout engine), but closing the window with the problem would clear it up.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Because of Netscape 4.x's only partial HTTP 1.1 support, it does become very slow with some HTTP servers, one of them being IIS (but also WebLogic and others).
I haven't noticed any particular problem with Moz, although it can be kind of clunky with pages with lots of form elements.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If you tried K-Meleon 0.1 or 0.2 and thought "gee this would be great if it actually supported cookies and had some configurable options and felt like more than a toy" then check out 0.6. Actually, it's been quite usable for a couple of releases now, and 0.6 seems as good as ever. Yes, I still use IE sometimes, but unlike my repeated attempts to wean myself to Mozilla that inevitably end in me getting sick of the poor UI response times and rendering freezes in Mozilla, I can actually get used to the snappy K-Meleon look and feel.
No, it's not perfect or bugless, and it still isn't quite as pretty or slick looking as IE, but it is nice to see how fast and responsive a Gecko based browser can be when the entire UI isn't getting rendered from XUL, and it's nice to have a real native browser alternative on Windows.
My only access to a windows system is over Citrix at 256 colors, and at that color depth kmeleon/gecko looks terrible compared to IE. all the colors look washed out, and images are blurry.
Anyone know why this is? I haven't tried mozilla under windows, does it suffer from the same problem?
(mostly unrelated, gtk+ for windows doesn't work in 256 colors either, so no gtk/citrix/windows apps without paying Citrix for a 16bit color license.)
This reminds me of a troll that used to hanf around the mozilla newsgroups that in the end just made a joke of himself. I even wound up parodying him just for more laughs. The whole argument against XUL is stupid these days.
And lastly, just because it DOES use internal widgets, that does NOT mean that it can't outperform IE. Mozilla as a whole is slower than Gecko-based browsers because Mozilla DOES more than they do. The backends on Mozilla and K-Meleon and it's brethren are vastly different. It's like comparing a Yugo to an Aircraft carrier.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Ahhh - gotcha. Netscape only had partial support of a protocal which IIS implemented more fully, causing their browsers to behave better. And somehow Netscape poor implementation in a product years out of date is MS' fault. So, MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't. I'm not a huge fan of ASP/IIS/MS, but people saying "ASP" pages are "optimized" for IE is just ridiculous...
creation science book
Even IE uses it's own widget set (of course, in more recent versions of Windows, IE's widgets may now be the core widgets OS widgets). The widgets provided by the OS in 95/NT simply are not capable of being styled in the way CSS demands.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I don't know about Netscape 6.2, but Mozilla 0.9.4 in Windows with the -turbo option enabled loads faster than IE5/6.
Why?
Because it loads the browser into memory when the computer boots, JUST LIKE IE.
Now that the playing field is level, Mozilla still wins.
Refute that.
Actually, I would say that your management was right on. As mozilla.org says: We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!. We provide no end user support.
This is something that's missed by the "Mozilla advocates" that hang on Slashdot and Mozillazine and other places. Mozilla is not an end-user browser. It's for voluntary developers and voluntary QA people only. No non-nerds even know what Mozilla is, so if you try to encourage people to use it, the funny looks they are giving you are well grounded.
So, if you are worried about a MS-dominated WWW, encourage people to try Netscape 6.2. Don't even mention Mozilla -- it detracts from the message. Unfortunately, lots of (normal) people took a look at the horrific 6.0PR releases and the terrible 6.0 final and need some encouragement to take another look at the releases that actually work.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
K-Meleon has come a long way. It seems pretty usable. Anybody else out there trying it?
It seems to use a lot less memory than mozilla.
proprietary development.....they can't wait until a 1.0 so they take it when its good enough and call it x.y no wonder windows sucked for so long...and now that it doesn't suck as much, MS makes a bad activation/icinsing /Want to own the internet move....oye. I hope Netscape can make ther kind look good again, but since it is owned by AOL...well that speaks for it self on software development
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If you try K-Meleon and compare it to IE I think you'll find that the Gecko engine is not vastly different in performance from IE. Yes, some types of pages are faster in IE and some are faster in Gecko, depending on bandwidth and latency factors, your processor speed, amount of RAM on your computer, and # and type of widgets on page. On anything that's a PIII 700 or faster (like my Athlon 1200 at home) I can't really notice the difference subjectively, and it's clearly no more than a factor of 1.5x-2x in either direction in most normal scenarios.
The _feel_ of Mozilla the browser is a big problem, XUL just does not feel natural or responsive - a lot of Mozilla hardcore fans won't agree that there is a problem with XUL, and I can't quantify it meaningfully or say "it's slow", but it's more that the interface tends to freeze up or stop rendering when the engine is busy. I think it could be worked around and XUL could be made to work well in practice, but it just isn't 100% usable right now.
Quick question/comment. On my win2k server any install of the 6 series of netscape causes the following things to happen (every single time)
1. part way through the install I will get some random error, usually "disk problem" or "virtual memory problem" (this with 512 mb of memory and 1 gig of pageing available and running almost nothing else during install!!) Disk check reveals no problems
2. Just before I reboot Zonealarm will beep about some winders program wanting to contact a microsoft site (which I allow, haven't hauled out the packet sniffer to see exactly what is being sent when server phones home)
3. Reboot and running netscape does NOTHING. I get a pretty icon and then it goes away. Not log file/event entry.
So anyone else have this expereince? Just curious before I goto check again and haul out the packet sniffer.....Is it me or does my Win2k server just not like netscape? Is Billy boy up to his old tricks again? Jesus, I just wanted to look at the new netscape for gosh sakes.
Oh well
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Grab the spellchecker from Netscape ftp here : win , macos (not X) or linux i686.
Then drag it onto a Mozilla window, you'll get a dialog for installing it.
Some people on #mozillazine tell me that it may not work with Mozilla 0.9.5 though, previous verison shoudl be ok
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
Well it comes automatically in 6.2 if you want to add it to mozilla you goto the 6.2 download directory goto xpi directory then get spellcheck.xpi it should install automatically. Note: it is only garenteed to work netscape 6.2 infact I just tested it an it seems as though the UI for the spellchecker did not get added. So guess your out of luck.
Mouse Gestures work in Netscape 6.2 also.
Last I checked, the Links Toolbar was default off because it added 10% to the page load time!
The tabbed browsing on the other hand is way cool, especially for those of you that still "surf".
EOF
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Lynx has had it almost forever. Mosaic had it. Even though I'd been using <link rel="author"> since I started making web pages, I first realized the possibilities when I saw it in iCab. There are a few others. Here are a few good articles about it.
Constitutionally Correct
Here's how I do spellchecking in *ALL* my X11 apps:
http://freefall.homeip.net/stuff/spellcheck/
Enjoy.
Actually the sensable thing is rm /home/mozilla/* -rf
easy simple no question about what it will do.
echo "stuff to check" | ispell -a | grep "^&" | xmessage -nearmouse -file -
There are plenty of great browsers out there, Mozilla, Konquerer, IE, Opera, and sever others. Why would anyone stop using their browser of choice and use Netscape? I mean, it's not really that good anyway.
after they stoped
You missed that one (and you didn't catch the missing commas, lowercase 'm' in "Mozilla", etc.) so I have no faith in you, either.
Personally, I need binaries for:
* Solaris 8/x86 (!)
* Solaris 8/sparc
* NetBSD/i386
Please!
- Hubert
You can install the Netscape spellchecker in Mozilla.
It might only work in 0.94, but I imagine it's a fairly easy fix and someone will have a 0.95 compatible version soon.
Search this thread for '.xpi' as in spellchecker.xpi, the posts mentioning it go into more details about where and how.
Amazing that it took this long for such an obvious interface to old HTML standards, isn't it? Sheesh! It is, however, a great selling point for mozilla!
Mozilla milestones have a much, much lower quality threshold than NS releases. It means if you use 0.9.5, or 0.9.6 etc you'll get cutting edge features but more bugs guaranteed.
NS 6.2 has been in continuous testing for months after the 0.9.4 branch it's based which means it's much more stable.
That's funny, because my pages look beautiful (well, as beautiful as an artistically-challenged person such as myself could make them) on Mozilla, and like absolute shit on MSIE. Huh.
I browse with the latest milestone of Moz. Have been for about six months now. Not quite as stable as IE on the same system, but it gives me a little more control over my browsing environment.
I download the new build of K-Meleon whenever it comes out, get really excited, and then go back to using Moz after a few days of crashes and inconsistent behavior. Frankly, I'm getting a little burnt on the cycle. Still, I bet K-Meleon will reach 1.0 before Mozilla does.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I thought netscape said they weren't releasing anymore browsers after they released 6.0 and it sucked?
Did anyone else read this at the time? I hate developing for Netscape. Give me Opera, Konquerer or IE, but please kill netscape!!!
Hit Bridge.com in Netscape 4.7x and then hit it in any 6.x netscape... What happened?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
No mod points unfortunately, so I'll go for the suppporting comment :)
A customer was bitten by this a couple of months ago. cd failed because a drive had failed to mount. The script wiped out just about everything.
The sad thing was that this happened while we were trying to fix some vague un-related hardware problem that kept corrupting databases, so ofcourse we where blamed for a dead production server. You can imagine how relieved we were when we found out it was one of the customers own scripts.
Morale: check those return values, make sure your command worked as intended, especially in cron!
karma capped
Did they update 0.9.4 from the standard mozilla version? Something similar to the extra bug fixes in 0.9.2.1?
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
The widgets provided by the OS in 95/NT simply are not capable of being styled in the way CSS demands.
Can you name a single specific example of a CSS requirement that can't be met by native widgets on Windows and Mac?
If you can, you'll be the first since these discussions started, over two years ago IIRC.
Meanwhile, it is clearly a fact that Mozilla can't draw its widgets in the way that the platform standards on Mac OS (9 or X) and Windows XP demand.
Tim
Large corporates are conservative and slow in moving from one platform to another. They'll be running Netware and Notes for a very long time (and good on them) and they might have even stuck with their old standard Netscape browser apart from one minor detail:
Netscape isn't useable in most Terminal Services environments - essentially because large TS environments often use low (256) color displays and its dithering is piss poor. On a Windows box, view netscape.com in IE and Netscape. Its nearly unreadable in Netscape, as is most of the NS UI (even in classic mode). IE, on the other hand dithers extremely well, to the point where its possible to believe you were looking at a high color display.
There's enough people tired of running Windows based desktop but keen on the Win32 platform to make TS compatibility a big concern when selecting an SOE. Goodbye Netscape.
/me types this in IE on his Linux box using Rdesktop. Well recommended for non MS TS clients.
Galeon is a plain Gnome wrapper around Gecko and it's worked a treat for me. Stable, much lighter-weight than full-blown Mozilla, but full of crunchy Gecko goodness.
Score one for my idiot meter today.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Not on my PC. P5-200, 32MB RAM, Win95 OSR2, Communicator would load pages much faster than IE4. IE4 would load several pages, getting slower each time until it would finally hang.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I can't comment from firsthand experience, since I have never loaded NS6x. The last few builds of Mozilla, on the other hand, have been quite speedy. As a personal preference, I still prefer Opera, though.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Well, as an app developer (at least if you develop gui apps on Windows) you may be in a better position to tell me :) Can everything here be done with native widgets for example? On the whole Mozilla seems to render the widgets on that page better than IE. Opera, which does use native widgets, misses most of the CSS stuff, though you can see they've mapped colours etc to the native widgets where the native widgets allow.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Eye used spell checking on this massage butt, in genital, it don't find any thing wrong. Every word were spelled good accordian to the program. Do you no some thing that I donut?
(The above illustrates why spellcheckers are frequently of limited value without grammar checking software.)
"the Netscape spell checker"
Note that the spell checker was licensed from Lernout & Hauspie, which went bankrupt a couple of days ago...
The CSS and extensions that IE support are artificially important because of its huge market-share. Mozilla is a better browser for standards, and that is my only claim.
Have you tried developing standard CSS? Once you do, you will realize that Mozilla supports a lot more CSS than IE, and Mozilla is much more stable in its rendering. IE will often forget where it has drawn and can't keep a list in a straight line. Explain to me IE's bugs on this page (With the CSS bloated for IE) and this other page (roll over the links in the "recent posts" list) and notice how slow it is on the navbar. Mozilla doesn't have any of these problems.
Even looking at an outdated chart of CSS bugs, Mozilla is at least as good at CSS. Considering that development on IE is crawling compared to everything else, Mozilla has much better support. I actually think that Mozilla has the only sane CSS implementation of all the browsers.
# make clean sig
No doubt, coding for IE is cheaper. As I posted in another thread, one of our clients made that decision, and now we have to rebuild the site to be Netscape friendly? Why? 10% of his "unique visitors" are Netscape, and they can't even use the site with the latest version.
If a 10% increase in profits > cost of implementing a Netscape version... well, Netscape version is coming...
Its a business decision. The IE5 version of the page is the low hanging fruit. Netscape is more of a challenge... Now if I could figure out the random Mozilla rendering problem...
Not a business problem, I'd just like to see it work under Mozilla/Netscape 6.x.
Alex
Or just run
rm -rf /home/mozilla/*
The best way to handle errors is to eliminate their possibility.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
No, we didn't. At least not all of us. The Belgian part of the company, L&H NV, is in liquidation. L&H holdings, however, is a US company and is still under chapter 11 protection. We will be acquired by the end of November. See this link.
Bruce Davis
UNIX Systems Administrator
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
IE doesn't really dither it's interface -- it uses different icons for low-color installs.
The first part's false, the second part's true. It does dither its interface - the HTML rendering part. View Slashdot, Netscape.com, etc side by side in IE and NS 6 on a 256 color Windows box to see what I mean.
Was this release assembed from the mozilla 0.9.4 source before or after the patch to fix linux plugins was installed?
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Though this is a kind of a FAQ, it's not the same program.
Mozilla is the open source code. In the last year or so (Milestone 18 was the big turning point for me, it's been getting better since), it's really been getting good. You can debate some of the bloat (XUL and stuff like that) but it's a damn good browser. Some (a lot?) of that bloat is related to it's in-development status - has some debug code in there that will be removed for final release, not quite optimized.
Every once in a while, Netscape takes a source cut of this and releases it as a Netscape product. It's not exactly the same source, they add things to it (whether it's stuff you would want is subject to some debate). The rendering is the same (Gecko layout engine) but the Netscape product has more bells and whistles, and seems to have a bit more UI polish (some say, I haven't tried it).
If you think about it, Mozilla kind of drives Netscape releases. The Netscape boys take what they think is a decent source cut (the most recent being Mozilla 0.9.5) and ploish it somehwat and release it as Netscape Navigator.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This argument would be more cogent if it were not for the fact that IE6 also draws all its widgets in web pages "by hand". The simple reason for this is that the native widget set simply does not support the functionality required of web page form widgets by CSS.
You can install the Netscape spellchecker, but only into really old builds. It doesn't work in current builds. But, work is being done on creating a spellchecker specifically for Mozilla.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
These are not correct interpretations of CSS. Background image and color are not the same as fill image and color, which is how these specifications are being interpreted in Mozilla. The background image of a button, for instance, is the image on which the button sits, not a fill image contained within a button. Widgets are not required to be transparent and to show their background image through them. A correct interpretation would show, for instance, a normal platform button sitting within its box surrounded by, not filled by, the background image or color. See the CSS2 spec on this point.
If you were to interpret the background properties consistently as meaning fill color or image, then the text areas shown would be inconsistent. The characters would need to be drawn in their background image or color (as the widgets are), rather than on top of their background image or color.
The things on the page that appear to be correct w.r.t. the spec are doable natively. Widget colors are controllable on both major platforms. Frames and backgrounds for text editing areas are also controllable with native widgets on both major platforms. (Couldn't speak to Linux.)
In addition, no user agent is required to render every possible combination of CSS properties. See the CSS2 spec: A computed value is in principle ready to be used, but a user agent may not be able to make use of the value in a given environment. For example, a user agent may only be able to render borders with integer pixel widths and may therefore have to approximate the computed width. The actual value is the computed value after any approximations have been applied. Sure, the more coverage the better, but does Mozilla render fractional border widths? Approximation of computed values in rendering still leaves a user agent conformant.
Tim
I'm no IE zealot, but I have been doing web development with DHTML and JavaScript for the last year, and I can say that Netscape 4 vs. IE is the problem most people are referring to when they say "Netscape isn't (as) standards-compliant (as IE)." Netscape 4 is a bloody dog for anything above DOM-level-zero -- <LAYER>, <ILAYER>, etc... Brrr... I'll pass.
Netscape 6, on the other hand, has greatly impressed me. I'm so glad the Netscape crew has acknowledged the problems of Netscape 4.x and is making a concerted effort to be standards-compliant in version 6.
If my pages look good and operate well in IE but badly in Netscape 4, it's Netscape's fault. But if they look good and operate well in IE and badly in Netscape 6, it's my fault or IE's fault.
I just wish Netscape 6 could load faster and didn't use so much much memory (both in Windows; don't know about other platforms). Someone mentioned that Mozilla 0.94 had a "turbo" option which loaded it into memory when Windows starts to give it the same speed advantage as IE. I hope that's in Netscape 6.2 and can be easily turned on by the user. That would certainly help. Can you believe that for all my complaints about it, I'm using Netscape 4.x to post this? Why? Because it's fast, and for me, it's faster than IE. I'll have to try Netscape 6.2 so I can get this clunker off the web and reduce (if only slightly) the headaches it causes developers everywhere.
I also wish Netscape hadn't changed the plug-in architecture, too, but that's not as relevant to the problems of Netscape 4.x, which largely concern its "DHTML".
...the faithful?
I actually shelled out the 20 USD for a CD of Netscape 6.1. I even registered it.
Now 6.2 is released and (a) I get no notification (b) there is no "Netscape Update" menu pick to _find_ the update (c) it appears that instead of a differential upgrade, I have to download the whole 20 MB again.
I have been using Netscape since 1994. I _want_ to keep using Netscape. Am I missing something, or are they _trying_ to drive me to IE?
sPh
Some people on #mozillazine tell me that it may not work with Mozilla 0.9.5
It assuredly doesn't work in 0.9.5. That "trick" hasn't even worked since 0.9.2. I'm not saying this to disparage you, but just to clarify things. Not to worry, though, work is being done on a spellchecker for Mozilla.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
=====
<button>hello</button>
=====
or
=====
<div>hello</div>
=====
except that user agents are more than likely to have default style rules that make a button look like a button (ie have borders that make it look raised normally or depressed when active and have a predefined background colour rather than being transparent as a div would be by default.)
Similarly an: <input type=text value=hello> is just a container that has a default style rule similar to:
======
input[type=text]{
content(content: attr(value);
background-color: etc;
border-top : etc etc
etc
}
======
The elements are just containers like any other, they are not inherantly special because they are "buttons". It may look like a button but to CSS it's just a box. Having said all that, current CSS recomendations may not be able to adequatly describe the visual rendering of all form elements but that is where we are heading. Ultimatly while form elements may normally look like they've been rendered with this style sheet there's nothing to stop the web author or end user modifying those attributes as they can any other attributes on any other element.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Whoa. You realize your cron starts up in $HOME, and if that `cd` for some reason returns an error...
Try cd /home/mozilla && rm -rf *
I now that geeks use ampersands, but can you tell me what the hell is wrong with rm -rf /home/mozilla/*? Simpler is better. And writing rm -rf * is almost always a bad idea. You will edit this cron job again someday, and probably get it wrong.
This is something that's missed by the "Mozilla advocates" that hang on Slashdot and Mozillazine and other places. Mozilla is not an end-user browser. It's for voluntary developers and voluntary QA people only . No non-nerds even know what Mozilla is, so if you try to encourage people to use it, the funny looks they are giving you are well grounded.
:-) You're also wrong about non-nerds. My wife uses Mozilla and is perfectly happy. People use what you give them, so long as it does the job.
I think you're lagged by 3 months or so. Mozilla is in fact now perfectly capable of being your primary browser, it delivers in all departments and seldom crashes. (The only time I don't use Mozilla now is on small memory/slow machines, and there I use Opera, except when Opera can't render the page, then I go to Mozilla, damm the speed
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Because Opera makes my teeth itch and I haven't gotten Mozilla to compile yet.
When I'm at home, I use OmniWeb.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
There is no difference to CSS whether I have: <button>hello</button> or <div>hello</div>
No offense, but that's just not true. An interactive element is not an empty DIV. It has a content area. That content area contains a button.
Also please note that the CSS2 spec explicitly says that backgrounds should not be set for HTML items: The background of the box generated by the root element covers the entire canvas. For HTML documents, however, we recommend that authors specify the background for the BODY element rather than the HTML element. User agents should observe the following precedence rules to fill in the background: if the value of the 'background' property for the HTML element is different from 'transparent' then use it, else use the value of the 'background' property for the BODY element.
For those of you with trouble reading spec-ese, this means a couple of things. First, the allegedly required functionality (widget background setting) is actually recommended against in the specification.
Second, the Mozilla implementation misinterprets the spec. Having a button on a BODY that has a background image or background color would create the same visual effect within the button's bounding box as setting the button's own background image or background color -- which is to say, a surround effect, not a fill effect.
The supposedly required functionality is not required, and Mozilla is interpreting the functionality in a clearly incorrect way.
Having said all that, current CSS recomendations may not be able to adequatly describe the visual rendering of all form elements but that is where we are heading [w3.org]. Ultimatly while form elements may normally look like they've been rendered with this style sheet [w3.org] there's nothing to stop the web author or end user modifying those attributes as they can any other attributes on any other element.
Nope, sorry, you're reading that wrong too. The goal there is to be able to use system default appearances, not to get away from system default appearances. Search for the string "system standard rendering" -- it appears many times -- and note statements like:
Section 2.1 of CSS1 and Chapter 18 of CSS2 introduced several user interface related pseudo-classes, properties and values. This proposal extends them to provide the ability, through CSS, to style elements based upon their various user interface related states, and to make an arbitrary structural element take on the dynamic presentation, or system default look and feel, of various standard user interface widgets.
The exact rendering of check and diamond depends on the user agent, but it is suggested that the same glyph which is used on the platform to render a "checked" menu item be used for "check", and similarly for those platforms which support rendering of a "diamond" next to a menu item. Conformant user agents may render 'diamond' the same as 'check'. The radio- and checkbox- values are rendered as they are by default on the platform.
Again, for those who have trouble reading spec language, that says that CSS3 is meant to use default system widget appearances, and that Mozilla is not going to be able to support CSS3 because it uses its own non-standard widget appearances.
Tim
Netscape 6.x is much more CSS2 compliant than IE. Stuff renders as intended. You have to re-code the stuff with stupid tricks to get it right in MSIE.
Personally, I use mozilla on linux.
I've always found Internet Exploder to be dreadfully slow. Every so often I would get angry with Netscape, and try IE, only to go back to Netscape. Various browser versions, various Win OSes. IE is just a big slug.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
HTML (in it's modern form) defines structural functionality.
CSS defines presentational possibilities.
The User Agents default stylesheet provides default CSS presentational definitions for HTML.
These defaults are overridable by the author and user (in that order) in accordance with the possibilities that CSS allows. Er, that div wasn't empty, it had exactly the same content as the button. That content was the text "hello". To suggest that the content of a <button> element is the visual rendering of a button demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding. The content of a <button> element is what lies between the two tags, as the html 4.01 specification shows quite plainly by placing some text and an image in there.
You seem to be fundamentally unaware of the evolution that this media has and is going through. Everything is being generalised. The presentational details (ie what it looks like) are being seperated from the structural functionality. That a button performs an action when clicked on is to do with it's structural functionality. That it looks like you'd expect a button to look is a presentational detail.
With CSS, in a CSS compliant browser, an author (or user) can modify that look from the default look provided by the user agents default stylesheet in any way they like.
In the same way it is possible to make a normally inline <span> element have a "display:block;" I can make a normally "inline-block" <button> element display with "inline", "block" , "table", "table-cell", "hidden" etc etc. Whether it makes sense for me to do so is another matter entirely, but it is possible and ultimatly required by the specs.
Everything is being generalised. Presentation is being seperated from structural functionality. We're moving from html whatever to xhtml 1.1 (and beyond). Odd things (such as form widget rendering) that just "worked" in older HTML versions are being redefined in terms of generic CSS language (this is the goal of the CSS3 page I linked to if you read it). This generalisation opens a whole world of possibilities. If you are building a browser today and you want it to be able to grow into these possibilities you need to embrace the genericism from the ground up.
The whole bit you quoted after "explicitly says that backgrounds should not be set for HTML items" simply means that if you want to set a background for an HTML page (as opposed to a non-HTML XML page) they recommend you do it on the <body> element rather than the <html>. If you were styling an arbitrary XML page you'd set the background for the whole page on the root element. They are simply saying that for html you should do it on the <body> tag instead, largely for historical reasons. It's got absolutely nothing to do with buttons or widgets.
"system standard rendering" is not defined anywhere that I could find.
Those keywords only give you access to system standard renderings. It would be a good idea for a user agent to make use of these definitions in it UA stylesheet. You are certainly not forced to use them as an author or as a user. As either a conforming browser would enable me to make a checkbox look like a radio button and vice versa, or stick something that looks like a radio button at the beginning of every paragraph.
Even if you accept that "system standard rendering" means using the default OS widgets and also accept that those widgets may not be capable of fulfilling other (potential) CSS aspects (z-index, opacity) then the specs are at odds with themselves and need to be fixed or priorities given. If I were allocating priorities I'd opt for consistancy within the browser window, rather than between the browser window and the OS.
I guess that depends on what you mean by platform. Mozilla could well be described as the platform. In any case people who don't have trouble reading W3 spec language are well aware that anything that is merely "suggested" has no impact on conformity to the standard.
.
Some thoughts on the whole widget thing from the Mozilla folk are here.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Sorry, you remain mistaken.
The HTML 4.01 spec does not define buttons as generic containers; in fact, it refers explictly to their extra rendering requirements.
You have ignored the clearly defined meaning of "background," which is, in fact, "background."
When I pointed out that CSS3 is explicitly heading in the direction of "system standard renderings", you feigned ignorance of what "system standard renderings" meant. That's just sad.
The Mozilla page you cited does not note anything that could not be done with native widgets. There are no unsupportable requirements for "transparency and z-ordering" that either you or anyone at Mozilla has been able to find. Native widgets on both Windows and Mac have transparent backgrounds and draw in a z-ordered way.
In short, there is not a word of support for your position in any W3C spec, and there are plenty of words that say the opposite. The fact that CSS3 advocates "system standard rendering" is the smoking gun, but the situation was clear enough even without that.
Tim
From here:
So there you are. If you are building a browser that hopes to be and continue to be "state of the art" you better treat your standard form elements as you would any other element, because while buttons etc may look like they did previously they can also be made to look completely different using standard CSS terminology as with any other element.
How nice. What a pity that the CSS3 proposal covering opacity doesn't just call for transparent backgrounds but for whole elements (including content) to be transparent. To my knowledge the windows widgets don't support that natively. I'm happy to be proved wrong though, show me some source code that I can compile and run on win98 or an msdn page that says otherwise.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's Aqua :P
We were talking specifically about Macs, not Windows. I can't say how stable they are on a platform I don't run.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I think you completely missed my argument -- I agree that Mozilla is technically a fine browser, just that it's not supposed to be an end-user browser, so don't push it as such.
That's nonsense. Mozilla is a perfectly fine end-user browser, and I feel perfectly comfortable recommending it to whoever. You're on some kind of drugs.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
> This is shown even by Slashdot, which has
/. story when I started reading was "someone mentioned Linux somewhere! We are getting maintstream recogniztion now!".
> switched from "news for nerds" to an almost
> exclusively Linux-advocacy site.
Actually, it is the other way around. It has switched from an almost exclusively Linux-advocacy site, to a general "news from nerds" site. The prototypical
At least that is the development in the time I have read it. I'm willing to be corrected about even earlier times by someone with a lower user-id.
Like I said, enjoy the funny looks people give you when you try to push Mozilla on them. Of course, that's assuming you ever leave your mom's basement -- I have a feeling that you're the sort who fights for the cause with little messageboard trolls and don't have any infuluence over web dev test plans, desktop rollouts, or any other effective way to improve non-IE browser support.
Read my user info, asshole.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.