Mozilla 0.9.6 Released

bluephone writes: "Yessireebob. mozilla.org has released the 0.9.6 milestone. Here are Release Notes and a link of files on the FTP server. For milestones 0.9.7 and 0.9.8, the focus is on performace enhancingment, and stability of the Mail/News end of the suite. And boy, is it getting good..."

Comments

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[jacoplane]

If the only part of mozilla you like is Gecko, then use only gecko with a simplified interface.

For linux, try Galeon

For windows, try K-Meleon

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[Milican]

Well lets look at the system requirements, which as we all know are very conservative

Windows
* Intel Pentium-class 233 MHz (or faster)
* 64 MB RAM
* 26 MB of free hard disk space

Linux
* Intel Pentium-class 233 MHz (or faster)
* 64 MB of RAM
* 26 MB of free hard disk space

Since you probably can't upgrade your processor on your board maybe you should try and bump your RAM to 128MB or so? That would definitely help out. Otherwise I recommend you give Opera a shot. It's right up your alley and it works on Linux and Windows :)

JOhn

These are the days

[Sludge]

I'm going to miss these days. My favourite browser gets massive improvements every couple of months.

Idea wishlist:

• Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea
• Plugin missing popup isn't so annoying (I refuse to install flash)
• A clean looking theme that isn't netscape 4-ish
• More usability based around the tab feature. That thing is wonderful!
• A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

I'm a very busy person who does some good for the community already in his free time, so don't ask me to implement these features. I just don't have the time.

Perhaps this would be a good time to ask... does anyone know of a proxy that allows you to rewrite packets on the fly? I think the web's got to the point where I want to start overriding some HTML arbitrarily. I know regular expressions, so some sort of regex interpreter would be quite handy.

Re:These are the days

[ink]

A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, nice try.

The main reason is that Mozilla makes pretty heavy use of pthreads, and pthreads don't exactly fly on Linux. Windows threading performance is definitely superior to Linux's pthread performance, at least on single processor systems. Why?

Windows is absolutely useless at process creation. Windows threads are about as heavyweight as Linux processes, and Windows processes are hopelessly heavyweight. So, the traditional Unix model of using many processes to complete complicated tasks completely fails on Win32. Microsoft's answer to this failing was to make threading as fast as possible, and to push multithreaded programming as a hack around a fundemental OS problem.

Back in Linux land, the relatively low demand for mutlithreaded apps (because the Unix model really works quite well if you have fast process build up/tear down) finally pushes Linus and friends to implement clone(). The clone() system call was based on Plan9's thread model, and is actually much faster and more advanced than Win32 threads, totally beating out of almost all standard OS kernels at thread performance.

So, now Linux has both faster processes and threads, but thread performance still sucks. Note that I said pthread performance on Linux isn't very fast. Pthreads are POSIX threads, and have very different semantics from clone(), mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick). So, the standard is a hack to say the least. Unfortunately, it's still a standard, and Linux must map pthread behaviour to clone() in userspace, which is painfully slow. It requires multiple context switches just to created a pthread on Linux. So, pthread-heavy programs like Mozilla just crawl.

So, the moral of the story is that Linux has a much better core, but seeing that the Linux community actually cares about standards, performance isn't quite up to snuff.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[anthony_baxter]

I find that building with mondo optimisation makes quite a difference to how fast mozilla "feels". I also turn off mail/news - I don't care, I don't need it :)

From my .mozconfig:

ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro"

I don't know what build options are used for the milestone builds...

Re:Themes?

[philipsblows]

According to the nightly build comments for Nov 20, there is a new theme page. If you check out the MozillaZine build comments here, you'll see the mention and the bugzilla bug number...

Note that I have not actually tried this myself... I'm just happy that other stuff is working as well as it is at this point with the nightly build from last thursday or so.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[rmathew]

"JayPee" has made available Navigator-only optimised builds for Linux that you might find useful.

Re:Slashdot crashes mozilla ?

[stefanlasiewski]

Yes, and it worked fine in a clean profile, and if I view the pages anonymously in the new clean profile, it works fine.

But when I log into slashdot, and view the page, it craps out (this is still on a clean profile).

I'm a moderator, so i have one of those 'score' dropdown boxes by every single post. Hundreds of posts = hundreds of dropdown boxes.

I used up that one last moderator point, the dropdown boxes no longer appear; and guess what, the page no longer crashes my browser. Works just dandy.

Off to file a bug...

Re:An MSers take on Mozilla

[Dr. Sp0ng]

I don't know who fucked up the shortcuts, but I must use alt-d over 100 times a day in IE, the shortcut that brings you to the address bar. I had a (not too investigative) look at the Mozilla help, and couldn't find any info on shortcuts

Ctrl-L (for Location) is the keystroke you're looking for.

Re:Better and Better

[pthisis]

- You can disable Mozilla's JS window.open()
A nice feature, true, but what happens when you go to click on a "help" icon and it can't open a new window?

The mozilla anti-popup feature disables popups on window open, page load, and window close (and timers). So obnoxious auto-pops don't happen, but e.g. The Onion's horoscopes still work.

Sumner

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Simm0]

Unfortunately this high optimization (>= -O3) will not work while compiling with GCC 3.0 which currently has a strange bug which will cause mozilla to crash on startup. A patch was checked in early today that fixes this problem on the mozilla trunk.

Re:Better and Better

[nathanh]

[Re: Open Source nature of Mozilla] Zealots aside, why is this better? Have you modified any of the source code? Have you contributed? Have you searched through it to make sure there are no back doors that mail out your keystrokes? Or are you karma whoring?

• No single entity (person or company) can control the distribution or ownership of the browser. This neatly avoids the problem of a single vendor trying to control standards.
• No product lock-in: "must have" features can always be lifted and used in another piece of software, if the mozilla monster turns out to be an unwanted burden.
• The software is not rushed to completion (2 years of delays proves this!) so I have faith that the quality is better than most other browsers.
• Development is driven by demand not money. This means the engine implements features that people wanted, not just feature "checklists".
• The GECKO engine is portable and has been ported widely. This means I'm not locked into a single operating system or hardware platform.
• There is no limits on how the engine is used. This means I see the same engine rendering my help files, my email, my webpages, etc.
• Though I might never read the code, I know somebody else can, will, and has.

Build Options

[Simm0]

Here are a couple of build options that I frequently use in my .mozconfig when building mozilla to keep it running extreemely well also cutting alot of the cruft out.

These build options are for all the people that are complaining about shoddy mozilla performance under linux and people that would like to have a look at some really new features.

ac_add_options --with-extensions=all
Enables such things as the Chatzilla IRC client and the dom inspector(which I think is extreemely neat for debugging and viewing dynamicly changing html object model) also contains some very experimental things such as xmlterm.

ac_add_options --enable-mathml
Very neat standard for displaying math of all types and sizes in xml.

ac_add_options --enable-crypto
Great option, about a year ago this option wasnt even possible due to netscape not realeasing it's code due to US laws afaik. Now everyone that want to compile the lizard can get ssl support built right into the browser.

ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686"
The main optimization part. This option has the biggest leaverage affect on the actual quickness of the browsre itself.

ac_add_options --disable-tests
Get rid of the unneccesary tests.

ac_add_options --disable-debug
We don't need any debuging symbols in th build if where not a developer do we.

ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --enable-static
A nice new enhancement of the moz build system which links all of the modules in statically, im experiencing a big speed increase and a decrease of startup times with this option probably because it doesnt need to read each individual shared object from the hard disk.

Re:Threads and Processes

[bgarcia]

This statement puzzles me greatly. How can Linux threads be faster yet their performance still sucks?

I think he meant to say that the linux kernel threads (clone()) are faster, but the *pthread* calls are slower.

This statement implies that Linux has POSIX compliant threads which the last time I checked is not true especially since the primary kernel hackers (Alan Cox, Linus, etc) are against it.

Linux does have POSIX-compliant threads. The kernel does not, but there is a pthread library that implements the pthread functions to work with linux kernel threads.

Better cookie viewing before accept/refuse

[weave]

IE 6 now tops Moz in the cookie/privacy area because you can set IE to prompt before each cookie and remember the accept or refuse action for later (as you can with Moz), but it also allows you to see the cookie contents to help you decide what to do with it as well.

Opera and Konq also have this nice feature.

I'm hoping Moz steps up to that plate soon....

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[bpowell423]

right-click on the tab, select "close tab". This will close the tab without switching to it, albeit with two clicks, not one.

dhtml is worthless in mozilla

[sh0rtie]

Sorry but after installing mozilla and doing some performance tests with dhtml, mozilla is about 70% slower than IE6 (p4 1g ram winXP) even in simple animations making practical dhtml worthless in it and flash seems more attractive by the day as this isnt dependant on a slow javascript and rendering engine, which would be a shame.

Load time isnt even an issue as its so slow even when its loaded.

Javascript to plugin communication still doesnt work out of the box (contrary to what the moz site says) at least ns4 supported it.

standards support is meaningless as no-one supports them , making it more of an "ideal" than a standard.

quote : "standards are great because there are so many to choose from"

i don't think m$ has anything to fear from mozilla in its current state, at least not in this decade :p

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[BZ]

Unfortunately, a lot of the work Mozilla does _is_ tight number-crunching loops of various sorts. What do you think layout is? It's a lot of recursive number-crunching. So yes, the compiler is making a large difference here. Going from -O to -O2 with gcc (the milestones use -O) leads to a 15% speed increase pretty much across the board for all operations (page loading, new window, etc)

Re:What is this tabbed browsing thing?

[Fnkmaster]

Try right-clicking on any link. The context menu that pops up has an option for opening a new tab. Likewise, right click on the newly appeared tabs and you can close them.

Wow -- a place where Lynx wins out!

[devphil]

* Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea

Go figure. Who would have thought that Mozilla users would be asking for a feature that Lynx has had for years. :-)

This is one of many reasons why I keep Lynx around: when I'm using a web interface to a bug-tracking system, and I want to, say, paste some code in to the "explanation" textarea before I close the report, I can just pop into my $EDITOR.

I don't know of any other *nix browser which lets me do this (but I haven't looked very hard).