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

Cross-platform performance.

[reaper20]

Very nice release so far, mail/news seems to be "catching up" to the browser function.

The tabbed browsing is almost up to galeon-level, though the speed is still slow, and its missing an (X) to close individual tabs. Use ctrl-w to close tabs in the meantime. This feature is quickly becoming my favorite.

One thing that continually bugs me is the total lack of performance of the linux builds compared to the windows builds. On windows, moz is FAST, and getting faster, and I don't mean just the turbo-load stuff ... does anyone have a reasonable explanation on why the performance is so radically different between linux/win.

From my daily usage, mozilla on windows is "done" as far as for what I need to do, on linux, it still has a long way to go.

What is making mozilla slow on linux?

go Mozilla!

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[rdean400]

One thing I've always been curious about is the effect of the compiler on performance. VC++ produces fairly quick code. How does GCC code compare?

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[IvyMike]

I agree. In fact, on Windows, it sure feels like Mozilla is faster than the Netscape 4.x releases. (I have no hard data, but the feel is arguably the important part anyway.) On Solaris, Mozilla is A LOT slower than Netscape; in fact, the only reason I use it is because of the tabbed interface. On Mac OSX, Mozilla is also slower than Netscape, but it doesn't seem to be such a huge differential. Usually, I consider it a blessing that I spend the majority of my time on Solaris and OSX, but that's the one downside. :)

But the good news is, we have nowhere to go but up.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[reaper20]

oh I see it .... i was expecting an X in every tab .. guess I'll have to play with it to see if it works better.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

While linux's implementation of pthreads can be considered lacking against other POSIX implementations, it provides for that which makes sense. Additionally, as threads and processes are the same from linux's internal perspective (both created via clone()), you can't really blame it on pthreads. From tests that I've run, pthread_create is actually faster then fork on UP systems, so unless you have a more detailed analysis of why pthreads are the problem, I'm going to call you on this one.

Standards smandards, pthreads under linux is in no way fully compliant w/ the POSIX standard (but then again, who really wants that sorta insanity on their disks).

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[OblongPlatypus]

I was expecting an X in every tab as well, and I really think that would be better. Not just because it'd be nice to be able to close a tab I'm not currently in, but also because it's nice to have all the tab stuff in one area for easy mouse access.

I'll still use the keyboard shortcuts most of the time though, so it's no big deal.

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:Cross-platform performance.

[cabbey]

Right click on the tab, there are a couple of interesting menu options there, |Close Tab| and |Close Other Tabs|. Combined with the default middle click action on links I've found tab browsing to be a rather nice addition to Mozilla.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[rmathew]

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

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[cobar]

At least part of Mozilla's linux problems are due to gcc. Currently, release builds are built with egcs which is apparently a somewhat crappy C++ compiler. There were a lot of improvements to gcc 2.95.x that help out Mozilla a bit (5%), and I'm sure gcc 3 might have a few more.

Interested people should try the gcc30 build in the http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest directory.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[IvyMike]

My Solaris box (which is away at work right now) is a 440 Mhz Ultra 10 (that's the UltrasparcIII processor, I'm pretty sure); I've got the Creator 3D video card. It's running Solaris 8, 512M RAM. (Quick poking around shows that I seem to have enough memory in this case.)

I am running the available nightly builds, which now that I think of it, might not be as optimized as they could be. Doh! (Although on all three OSes, I was comparing the performance of the nightly builds to the released Netscape 4.7x.)

Are you running: Nightly builds, your own builds, or Mozilla 0.9.x releases? I'll probably have to try all of those tomorrow to see how performance is.

Maybe I should just ask my boss for a Blade 1000 with the new 1.05 Ghz processors. As long as I'm dreaming, it might as well be a dual processor machine, in fact. :)

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:Cross-platform performance.

[Anders]

One thing I've always been curious about is the effect of the compiler on performance. VC++ produces fairly quick code. How does GCC code compare?

Generally speaking, compiler optimizations do not matter. For tight, number crunching loops, they might - but most desktop software spends its time in system libraries (when they do not wait for user input).

To optimize, it does not help to call ten library functions slightly faster, the functions will still require the same time; what helps is a redesign where you bring down the need to call functions (for example by caching values). Turning on compiler optimizations will not help you with that, though.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Idaho]

Hello? I don't know what reality you're living in, but at least in my reality there IS such an 'X' to close a tabbed window, in the upper-right corner just below the "M"-logo.

Has been there in 0.9.5 and stayed there in 0.9.6

And I've tried this using both Modern and Classic layout. So I don't see what you're talking about...

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[captaineo]

That's pretty moot with the latest X releases (4.x is pretty freaking fast, expecially when optimized.) Graphics performance on my box is actually a little better under Linux/X (and FreeBSD/X) than Win2k Pro.

X will always be slower than GDI, because of the client->server copy and context switch (whereas with GDI it's just fill command buffer, then execute). Not that this is a bad thing - network transparency is great, and the speed difference can theoretically be made arbitrarily small, given enough optimization of the X code =). At this point though the basic problem is that the X protocol is too stateless, and so you waste time sending massive amounts of state between the client and the server. (believe me, I've used LTT to make kernel traces of Mozilla redrawing - it's nasty. It's not just a simple expose event->redraw round-trip; it's several round trips...).

It's icky, but often irrelevant (since most Linux programs just fork additional processes, and this is pretty clean. Under Linux, process creation is much less expensive than in Windows).

That's completely true, and all of my own software uses multiple processes for concurrency rather than threads =). But, we are talking about Mozilla here. Mozilla makes extensive use of pthreads :[. (ideally a web browser should just be one thread using async socket I/O; although I might go along with having a second thread for async disk I/O, and/or doing Java garbage collection asynchronously)

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[brunes69]

He means an X ON the tab, a-la Galeon. This would allow you to close an open tab without swiching to it.

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.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[The Pim]

The main reason is that Mozilla makes pretty heavy use of pthreads, and pthreads don't exactly fly on Linux.

In your own words, nice try. pthreads on Linux have their problems, but entirely implausible that mozilla bottlenecks on thread creation. From what I can see (strace seems to fall down :-/ ), mozilla (0.9.5 linux) may create a thread or two for some "big" operations like opening a window or loading a page, but not for typical UI operations. And there's no way that the creation of a few threads accounts for the painful slowness of the "big" operations.

I don't know the specific answer (one friend who dabbled in mozilla debugging told me the performance problems "defy explanation"), but it doesn't take much staring at top to see that the main thread sucks CPU hard when you perform any UI operations. So I suspect that the the unix front end is just not as well tuned as the Windows front end (which jives with what I've heard about the priorities of Netscape employees). It's also worth noting that the Netscape 4 unix front end was designed by legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski :-)

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[the_2nd_coming]

but if they are using GCC 2.9.5 the prelinking sucked ass so it creates slow C++ code. however, if they use GCC3.x, the Prelinking is much better, however, it still sucks ass when you compair it to VC++

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[sfe_software]

I like the X where it's at, but what would be nice is some feedback. It's not really a button, and sometimes it takes >1 second to actually close; using a laptop (touch pad) it's not always clear if you actually clicked it or not...

However, I'm glad Mozilla is at the point that I'm complaining about such simple things as this; it's been my primary browser since 0.9.2.

I did notice (as others have mentioned) how much faster it is on Windows. It may be my imagination but I could swear 0.9.6 is a lot faster than .5 was at startup and loading pages... but still has much room for improvement on the Linux side of things.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[greenrd]

Both ways are buggy at the the moment. The former sometimes closes the wrong tab. The latter I just tried and it worked, but it also pasted the clipboard contents into the URL bar and went there - which I did not want!

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Misch]

Try adding in some other Mouse Gestures. Then you can start having some more fun with the mouse buttons :-)

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:Cross-platform performance.

[Fnkmaster]

The X on the tab itself (close current tab) WAS there. They removed it in the nightly builds in between 0.9.5 and 0.9.6. I assume it hasn't made a reappearance yet. This was removed because somebody decided it wasn't good UI design and currently they refuse to replace it. Assholes.

The correct means to close tabs is right-click close on the tab. Ctrl-w and middle click on the tab are shortcut mechanisms for this.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

["Zow"]

Um, that's what I thought at first too, but I think the origonal poster is on a Mac.

-"Zow"

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Hornsby]

I'm not sure if this just changed with the latest release or not, but --enable-optimize no longer accepts an argument of the compiler optimizations as described in the parent to this comment. The ./configure will croak if you put the ac_add_options --enable-optimize in your .mozconfig. The proper way to set this option is to export the MOZ_OPTIMIZE_FLAGS variable before you run configure, setting it to whatever flags you want passed to the compiler during the build. You also need to include the ac_add_options --enable-optimize line in your .mozconfig with NO arguments, or it will ignore any flags that have been specified in the MOZ_OPTIMIZE_FLAGS variable. Also, seeing as how many of us are using the most modern x86 processors, it would be advisable to set -march and -mcpu to i686 rather than pentiumpro. I'm in the process of rebuilding the lizard now, and I'm quite curious as to what kind of empirical performance increases I'm going to see.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[IvyMike]

I tried running the 0.9.5 Mozilla today (it looks like the 0.9.6 isn't available for Sparc Solaris yet) and it is, in fact, quite a bit faster than the daily builds. Even though it doesn't have the latest cool feature (favicons) I think it's enough faster that I'll stick with it. Thanks.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Fnkmaster]

Sorry, my post was confusing. It was "off to the side" in 0.9.5 and was impossible to accidentally close. In the nightly builds there was no X at all for a while. I still haven't gotten to use 0.9.6 release yet, so I have yet to determine if they've come up with a compromise between the UI purists and the people who just want to close tabs easily.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[Eccles]

Right click on the tab, there are a couple of interesting menu options there

I wish close tab was the first, though; I've accidentally gotten rid of other panes I didn't want to get rid of because I've chosen the wrong menu thingie. The first item is generally the easiest to pick and should the most common thing.

I wonder if there could be a clean way to make tabs convertable to separate windows and vice-versa.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[BZ]

15% is about as much as typical _good_ algorithmic speedups have been giving. A typical algorithmic speedup will make some class of cases much faster, make some class of cases a bit slower, and not affect most cases. It usually averages out to a few percent improvement overall.

Re:Cross-platform performance.

[ink]

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.

You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Linux pthreads use clone() syscalls! In addition, userland threads have an order of magnitude faster spawning time than kernel threads at the expense of clueless scheduling with regards to I/O operations, so your assertion (ick) that they are undesirable is very strange. You should check out IBM's ngpt project for Linux, which will give the programmer a choice between the two.

How did you get modded up to +5 informative?

much improved!

[wtmcgee]

its looking really good - every release gets a lot more reliable, and has slowly taken over #2 from opera, and is now getting close to giving IE a run for its money. one thing i wish i knew how to do is make a nice solid, simple theme for moz though - i'm not too high on any of the themes i've seen so far.

regardless - this is not the mozilla devolpers jobs - they're doing a great job with the browser! the performance fixes they are referring to are also much anticipated - speeding this bad boy up would shut up a ton of critics.

Re:much improved!

[motherhead]

ha ha, that's funny. get a life.

heh, if i could run konqueror or galeon on my OSX or 2K/XP boxes i would never run/miss IE.

Instead of him getting a life, how about you get a clue and stop chokeing on whatever they ram down your throat.

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...

[ihatelisp]

From the release note,

System requirement
* Intel Pentium-class 233 MHz (or faster) processor

So your hardware isn't even covered by the requirement. However, Mozilla runs fine if you have a lightly loaded system, e.g. a clean install of Windows 95. I was able to run Netscape 6.2 on a Pentium 100 with 32MB RAM in Win95, and it outperforms Netscape 4.79 (try fancier pages like www.msn.com; simple pages doesn't justify what Gecko is capable of).

Your hardware is pretty old. If you're thinking about running Mozilla on top of X in unix, well, you're pushing your computer too hard

Mozilla

[1155]

Mozilla seems to really be coming along. As soon as it is streamlined more or less, it should run smoothly on most setups. Perhaps the most evident note on this suite though, is that it is still in the 0.*.* mode in developement. People are making decisions on it before it is fully developed, or before it hits the 1.0 mark.

If you tried it a while back, wait until about 1.5.*, I am sure it will all work perfectly then. This build is a lot better than previous versions though. I would defitely recommend it for the end user who has a p2 300 or above.

Re:Mozilla

[frleong]

Yeah, by the time mozilla 1.5.* is out, IE should be in version 8 or .NET or whatever. Even Opera would be at least in version 7. At that time, I think no one will ever bother running Mozilla again.

I mean, it is extremely slow, even on my PII-400 with 256MB of RAM. IE is ways faster in load time and crashes less (trust me, the first time I loaded the latest Mozilla Mail/News, I got a crash within 3 minutes). You may say that IE is preloaded, but what about Opera? I'm using Opera 6 beta from time to time and its browser loads at about the same speed of IE.

Re:Mozilla

[Explo]

I mean, it is extremely slow, even on my PII-400 with 256MB of RAM. IE is ways faster in load time and crashes less (trust me, the first time I loaded the latest Mozilla Mail/News, I got a crash within 3 minutes). You may say that IE is preloaded, but what about Opera? I'm using Opera 6 beta from time to time and its browser loads at about the same speed of IE.

Pretty good crash performance; honestly, for me Mozilla crashes once in a few days. Even a year ago, it crashed just once or twice per day day for me. With the relative heaviness I agree though; It works pretty nicely with P3-550 & 256 MB of RAM or even better with my home machine (Thunderbird, more memory), but it's definitely a bit slow with my secondary machine, K6-2 400.

Re:Mozilla

[krmt]

Yeah, the turbo feature doesn't work so well since pretty much the update right after it first came out (9.3?, 4?) so it still loads slower than IE. It's nowhere near unacceptable though (I'm running a PII-400 with 128MB RAM, so I'm sure I'm getting speeds similar to yours).

The thing that matters to me is that I get much much better page rendering performance out of Mozilla than I do out of IE. The Gecko engine is really shining these days, and I get much faster rendering times on just about any page with Moz. This is much more important to me than load times, and definitely makes that extra load time worth the wait.

The Mail/News will get better, but last time I checked it was still under par. That seems to be the focus of the next few releases though, so don't count the module out. Remember, you won't have to configure it specially to be secure like you do for Outlook, which will be a real bonus (and time saver too, since we're on that subject).

And as for crashes, I get about equal crashes in both browsers, depending on which computer I'm at. At the office, Mozilla is less stable. At home, IE is less stable. Mileage varies.

In terms of future improvements, it'll be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to take the lead on improvements again, or if Mozilla will continue to blaze the trail, as it's been doing lately. I wouldn't be surprised if tabbed browsing appeared in IE, but who knows what'll come out of Mozilla. And the 3rd party stuff! Once the API settles (which is why v1.0 is such a big deal) there should be some cool mini apps built for Mozilla. I already use the PubMed one all the time, it's my favorite browser feature yet, and makes Mozilla my browser of choice at the office. Because of the nature of the whole free software community, and the relative triviality of these kinds of apps, you'll see a ton of great ones come out once the API is ready for it. Then we'll see the browser wars really kick up.

Re:Mozilla

[Snowfox]

Yeah, by the time mozilla 1.5.* is out, IE should be in version 8 or .NET or whatever. Even Opera would be at least in version 7. At that time, I think no one will ever bother running Mozilla again

So, if I read you right, you're an advocate of taking a hint from AMD, perhaps going with QuantiVersion technology(tm)?

...ours goes up to 11.

Spell Checker

[Malc]

I've found every release better than the last, except for 0.95, which seemed to have gained a few more crashes. I'm excited to see how this one goes. Can anybody give me instructions on how to integrate the Netscape spell checker and change the language settings to en_GB? I tried following instructions for the spell checker before (installed the .xpi), but I couldn't figure out how to actually use it (were the UI bits removed?)

Only comment so far on the latest build: it polls all of the news groups and servers in my Netscape profile when the news/mail client starts. This is bad as I have a load of crap in there, and a load that are only accessible from when I switch internet connections. I have to click cancel on a lot of dialogs before I can get going :(

Re:Spell Checker

[yota]

This is the Unofficial Mozilla Spell-checker FAQ: http://www.mozilla.org.uk/docs/spell-checker-faq.h tml it should address your concerns.

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Gecko is a wonderful rendering engine and all that, but the performance gain is totally lost on us Pentium-120mhz users.

Yep - it's pretty slow on my C64 as well.

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

9.6!

[JabberWokky]

9.6 already... wow. Soon to be followed by:

9.7 (two months)
9.8 (six months)
9.9 (one year)
9.99 (two years)
9.999 (five years)
9.9999 (nine years)
9.99999 (thirty-seven years)
9.999999 (nine hundred and twenty-eight years)

(No offense meant to the Mozilla team - the last time I poked at it, it looked like a nicely developing and nifty browser).

--
Evan

Re:9.6!

[ThatComputerGuy]

Now see, if they had just followed Knuth's example, they wouldn't have this "1.0 Stable Milestone" problem!

So, Moz team, when will we see version 0.9.9.3.1415...?

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[jacoplane]

There's also a similar project for Mac OS X, qbati, which seems to be just getting underway.

Export

[nexex]

Interesting line from export restrictions,
"This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas) ...". And we all know that those areas will be non-exsistant :)

Re:Export

[matthayes]

currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas)

Which, given the Taleban's advocacy of the Internet, is a crying shame.

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[LazyDawg]

My main complaint was, through a thin veil of sarcasm: "If Opera can run so snappy and fast, why not Mozilla?"

I use opera, and Netscape 4.78, and they do just fine on my "C64-like" hardware.

If you have the best hardware around, then Mozilla works snappy, which is all well and good, but deep down inside developers should be worried about how many cycles are being wasted.

But I guess stuff like that deserves Score 0: Troll :)

It's nearly on par with IE5.5

[gruntvald]

Though I haven't checked 6.0 yet. If the Mozilla team can straighten out some of the plug in problems (for example, it takes some voodoo before java actually works), or at least come up with a definitive install procedure, we'll be rockin'. The browser is solid, but I don't want to have to be asked what MIME type an m3u file (winamp playlist) is. Heck, I don't actually know! I'm so used to it being taken care of. This kind of "plays nice with others" is something we take for granted - even if it's fake in Bill Gates' case!

Re:It's nearly on par with IE5.5

[n-baxley]

I agree 100%. If we want this to become "everyman's browser", then you have to improve the install to make it "idiot proof". But, maybe that's what the NS 6.x releases are for. ;)

Re:It's nearly on par with IE5.5

[Luyseyal]

NS6 or Mozilla? They're similar, but different animals.

-l

Re:It's nearly on par with IE5.5

[yesthatguy]

for example, it takes some voodoo before java actually works

I had that exact problem - the netscape 6 plugin repeatedly b0rked my installation. The best solution I've seen, and it seems to work pretty well, is to just use the plugin file that's included with the jdk. On my linux box, it's in /usr/java/jdk1.3.1/jre/plugin/i386/ns600/libjavapl ugin_oji.so and I see somebody's already posted its location on Windows. I just symlinked this file into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, restarted mozilla, and java worked perfectly.

Try this

[Anonymous DWord]

http://www.seas.upenn.edu:8080/%7Ezakharin/Softwar e/Dawn.html

Works up to 0.9.3, so it should work...

Could someone please tell me...

[Pollux]

...if they got rid of the pathetic crash error that happens whenever one uses the tab key to jump from one data field to the next?

Man, that bug makes me so angry. I'm using .95 right now, and had to restart Mozilla as well as restart the .96 download due to that bug.

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:These are the days

[Dr. Sp0ng]

* 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.

That would be nice, but Moz (and NS4) let you simply middle-click on the HTML display area and it'll go to the URL in your clipboard. Nice timesaver, except when your mouse spazzes and you end up hitting a link instead of empty space and pop up a new window instead :P

I agree 100% with your other points... those are pretty much my main gripes too. About the $EDITOR thing, yes! Every place I *ever* have to enter text should understand vi keys if I want it that way. I already have tcsh and every decently configurable program I run using vi keys, there's no reason Mozilla and all GTK/Qt apps shouldn't be able to as well :P

Oh well, the situation is better than it is on Windows; my vi-trained fingers have a tendancy to hit escape after typing a bunch of text, and in IE this resets the text area to the default value. Quite irritating.

Re:These are the days

[drudd]

I have the exact opposite problem... I try to middle-click on a link to open it in a new window and end up pasting whatever crap was in my clipboard...

I also have the strange habit of constantly selecting and deselecting paragraphs as I browse, so usually an entire paragraph of random text gets pasted as a url.

Doug

Re:These are the days

[kilrogg]

* 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.

Place the cursor to the begining of the URL bar and hit ctrl+k, this will delete everything after the cursor without copying it to the clipboard.

Re:These are the days

[Sludge]

Ah, this is great news! I often hit the middle mouse button by accident on the page when I have crap in my buffer, and I used to get wierd errors about pages not being found. I never put 11 and 11 (binary) together.

Re:These are the days

[cabbey]

Plugin missing popup isn't so annoying (I refuse to install flash)

I've actually been thinking of making a fake plugin that could be trained to register for whatever you want, and all it ever does is render a grey rectangle. That would fix this problem for good.

A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard.

You mean like Konquerer's clear button? ;) /me too!

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.

ugh, isn't that just the most annoying thing? I've screamed at the computer more than once for that move, especially when I've already closed the window I had copied from.

Re:These are the days

[kilrogg]

Or yet one more way: you can also do ctrl+l (gives focus to link bar and highlights the contents, but it's not copied to clipboard). Follow it up with ctrl+v to paste the clipboard contents.

Re:These are the days

[dwlemon]

On the clipboard issue, the way it should really be implemented is how it is laid out on OpenDesktop. The Cut/Copy/Paste functions use one clipboard, while the select/middle-click functions use another.

The problem is that Mozilla and a lot of other programs (Opera comes to mind) don't do it this way.

And perhaps the "standard" should be changed so that an initial click on a text field which results in selecting the entire field should not be considered a "copy" because it is usually a change of keyboard focus, not intended as selection.

Re:These are the days

[Erik Hensema]

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 working on this one, see bug 24651

I've got a patch which works on a nightly build from about a month ago, but 0.9.6 segfaults on this. I'll look into it ASAP.

The patch essentially places a small button left of the location bar (much smaller than in the attached screenshot). This button needs some graphic designing, so if anybody can work the Gimp, please visit the bug and download the blank buttons.

Re:These are the days

[Tet]

Place the cursor to the begining of the URL bar and hit ctrl+k

Or place the cursor *anywhere* in the URL bar, and use ctrl-U. My only complaint about this is that some fool chose to overload ctrl-U and make it the keyboard accelerator for view source, so if you haven't quite clicked in the URL bar, you don't get the result you expect... which leads me nicely onto my #1 wishlist for Mozilla: easily configurable key mappings. Yes, I know it can be done via the prefs file, but I've yet to see suitable documentation for it, and it would be much better served by having an option in Edit->Preferences.

Re:These are the days

[GypC]

my vi-trained fingers have a tendancy to hit escape after typing a bunch of text, and in IE this resets the text area to the default value

I have this same problem. In case you didn't know, you can type ctrl-z to undo the reset and get all your text back.

Still annoying though...

Re:These are the days

[mcelrath]

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.

<plug type=shameless>

You want FilterProxy. It does exactly what you said, using perl and perl's regexes, and some sophisticated tag/tagblock/attrib matchers. Mostly I use it for filtering ads, but it can do a lot more.

</plug>

And I'm with you on the deleting url bar contents. But did you know you can middle-button paste the url from the clipboard into the main window and it will load it? Don't have to mess with the URL bar at all. I also have WindowMaker menu items like "load this URL" which call 'mozilla -remote' and pass it the url. I have others like "look up this word" which tell mozilla to load a dictionary.com url with the word in the clipboard.

--Bob

Re:These are the days

[vanza]

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.

Maybe you're using KDE? This is a KDE/Qt bug, not a Mozilla one. Try this: select a URL in a web page (within Mozilla), and hit CTRL+C. Select the content of the URL bar, and hit CTRL+V. Bingo.

Now, if you're using the mouse selection clipboard to do this, it is obvious that when you select the text in the URL bar the clipboard will be overwritten. The bug in KDE/Qt is that is uses the same clipboard for mouse selection and CTRL+C. This is fixed in Qt 3, BTW.

Re:These are the days

[Idaho]

[About going to the URL bar and erasing any URL that might be there]

Or place the cursor *anywhere* in the URL bar, and use ctrl-U. My only complaint about this is that some fool chose to overload ctrl-U and make it the keyboard accelerator for view source, so if you haven't quite clicked in the URL bar, you don't get the result you expect..

Ahh....but you can go to the URL bar by pressing Ctrl-L at any time.

So a Ctrl-L Ctrl-U does the trick nicely, without using the mouse.

I didn't know about the Ctrl-U thingy, thanks for the tip!

Re:These are the days

[Crutcher]

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

Hell yes. I've been dying for this for a while. Not yet desperate enough to code it up, but I've looked at some of the problems that need to be solved to do it.

Once you spawn an $EDITOR, you have to block that textarea somehow, and you have to have a way to drop that block (what if the editor crashes?). This will have to be a visual clue on the textare.

Another problem is that the widget interface is very async, and this block introduces wierd statefulness into the textarea widget.

But I want this feature!

Re:These are the days

[FattMattP]

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.

I use FilterProxy for exactly this purpose. From the docs:

FilterProxy is a Perl script that acts as a generic Web proxy. It is unique in that it allows you to install modules that can perform arbitrary transformations on HTML (or any other MIME-type) and HTTP headers. It filters ads by stripping HTML from the page, anonymizes requests by removing Referer and User-Agent headers, compresses HTML content, and de-animates animated gifs. Configuration is done via Web-based forms or editing a Perl data structure.

Re:These are the days

[GypC]

That's odd. I just tried it with IE 6.0 and it worked.

Re:These are the days

[kilrogg]

No need for ctrl-U, just hit delete or backspace or almost anykey(except for arrow keys) after ctrl-L to delete the contents.

Re:These are the days

[uigrad_2000]

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.

put your cursor at the beginning of the line, and then press cntrl-d.

For some reason, this works for Mozilla/Solaris, but not for Mozilla/linux. Can someone tell me why?

(I haven't tried it for Mozilla/Windoze)

huh?

[cabbey]

hmm... perhaps it's something with your system? I duel boot between linux (suse 7.3 running 2.4.9 at the moment) and Windows (Win2K AS) on a dual PII 450 with 256Mb of RAM. Windows has a few hundred meg of swap defined (and uses it) Linux has 64Mb of swap defined and hardly ever touches it. I run the nightly windows builds and my own builds on linux (updated every few days on each) and for me the two are very nearly at parity... actually I'd say Linux is a bit more responsive than windows.

The other posibility is that you are getting a mix of debug and production mixes? On linux my debug build is quite pokey, but the -O3 no debug, optimize it all builds absolutely FLY and keep getting better!

Way to go Moz!

Re:huh?

[great throwdini]

I duel boot between linux ... and Windows...

Freudian slip?

Re:huh?

[Yorrike]

Mozilla is actually quite slow for me on my work PC (Athlon 700, 320MB RAM, Redhat 7.2), but my work PC is stuffed (nothing works properly on it).

My home PC (Athlon 650, 512MB RAM Redhat 7.0), on the other hand, runs most things at a rapid pace. Mozilla, once loaded into memory, is lightning fast, though I'm starting to lean towards Galeon for my browsing needs at home and work. Mainly beacuse it can't be beaten for speed or configuration options. I really dig the RPMfind, Google, Freshmeat etc. search bar (talk about software at your finger tips).

good job mozilla, way to break everyone's stats

[smack_attack]

on every first page visit to a site it requests favicon.ico

I wonder how long until all the stats programmers out there figure out why bookmarked visits spiked in December?

Re:good job mozilla, way to break everyone's stats

[larien]

Yes, it caches them, at least for bookmarked sites. It's also a pain to get it to update them, as I discovered when I was working on my website.

FWIW, I actually like the icons; it gives me a visual clue to what I'm looking for in a list of 20 bookmarks/favourites.

Re:good job mozilla, way to break everyone's stats

[Ian Bicking]

BTW -- has anyone found a good way to make favicon.ico on Linux? The Linux browsers don't mind if it's a PNG or something, but IE doesn't seem to like that at all. In order to get something that IE would accept I ultimately had to do it on Windows, which was annoying.

Special options to ImageMagick? Does a program exist just for this?

Re:good job mozilla, way to break everyone's stats

[Simm0]

These two options are the defaults for the icon support pulled from all.js.

pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", true);
pref("browser.chrome.favicons", false);

browser.chrome.site_icons refers to<link rel="icon"> tags which will only load an image if explisitly requested by the page. Whereas the browser.chrome.favicons aka favicon.ico is off by default but can be turned on by default if set to true in prefs.js which will request favicon.ico on every site that you visit regardless of weather the image exists or not.

A poem...

[Pollux]

...ahem...

Those who write like karma-whores,
Get (+1) on karma scores.
Those who read those words of whit,
Reply to it with posts of shit.

Thank you.

Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[aufbau]

Pornzilla's goal is to turn Mozilla into a great porn browser. I started the project because I felt some important bugs were being neglected by Netscape engineers, even though they do a very good job with other bugs. (Are they not allowed to look at porn while at work?).

The web site includes several modifications to Mozilla that make it better suited for porn browsing and a list of bugs and feature requests related to porn surfing. If you have any other bug numbers or ideas for modifications, please tell me.

(Sorry for the duplicate message. I guess using "preview" before posting isn't a good idea when you've temporarily disabled cookies.)

Themes?

[vandan]

Can't comment yet as I'm just downloading now, but in the meantime: where have the themes gone? Whenever I try to download others, I'm met with a 'page not found' error. Is this because Mozilla is moving faster than the theme developers can handle? Is there actually more choice than 'classic' and 'modern'? Not that these aren't good themes anyway. I'm just wondering...
Keep up the good work! (Oh and fix that bloody 'print selection' bug.)

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.

Fast connection to ftp.mozilla.org

[rjamestaylor]

Yes, I just completed installing a nightly build (from the "stock" 0.9.5 build) and reloaded slashdot to see the announcement. According to my reading of MozillaZine earlier I wasn't expecting 0.9.6 until later this week.

But I'm curious as to why the connection to the ftp server was so solid and fast: is it a great example of load balancing ftp?, a sign that people are happy with pre-0.9.6 versions and aren't rushing to upgrade?, or is it (*gulp*) that people aren't interested in Mozilla anymore?

I'm not anti-Mozilla at all. I'm using it for browsing, email, IRC, etc. There are things I like about Konqueror, but I depend on Mozilla. Even my biggest "Internet Explorer"-only client is asking about recasting IE-specific development in Moz-compatible terms. Its just that the server is so fast it doesn't feel like the days of M15 - M18 when I had to fight for a connection...

As an aside: it's perplexing to observe MSFT dropping the ball on browser development. They've got the market wrapped up, but they don't seem to have capitalized on this lead (except the recent MSN fiasco). Or perhaps I'm not giving proper credit to Mozilla developers for pressing ahead with features and usefulness... With the licensing pain with MSFT and the maturation of Mozilla+{Gnome|KDE}+Linux it's getting more and more palpable to switch the enterprise away from the child-settlers.

for speed...

[Anonymous Coward]

for a quick and reasonable-on-mem-usage browser, please see skipstone. it uses the mozilla-embedded lib for page rendoring, and it doesn't come with all the html editor / mail / news crap.

see ports/www/skipstone for FreeBSD users

Re:for speed...

[Cardhore]

I don't know about you but I use mozilla exclusively for the IRC chat program.

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[ihatelisp]

If Opera can run so snappy and fast, why not Mozilla?

Because Opera can't do what Mozilla can do. Opera handles common HTML and CSS just fine, but if you're pushing your web design further, Opera's rendering engine falls apart.

I use translucent PNG images on my web page, and Mozilla does alpha-blending beautifully. Opera, on the other hand, can't even handle transparency, let alone alpha-blending. Opera also can't switch style sheets through DOM or the UI. It cannot install components on the fly. The list goes on...

Re:Better and Better

[b0r1s]

Just my $.02 on why Mozilla is better:
- Mozilla is Open Source


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?


- Mozilla won't accept activeX or other such nonsense

Which limit's its use on heavily scripted, harmless, usefull sites. True, it saves you from mailicious porn webmasters who want to install their dialer programs, but that's not a problem if you know how to set up your internet security zones on IE.


- 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?


- Mozilla has tabbled browsing


Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...


- Mozilla is standards compliant


Which is again nice, but means nothing if developers dont make their sites for standards, which they dont ....


- Mozilla doesn't redirect you to MSN (or AOL for that matter) and spill your privacy for all to see


Nor does IE, if you configure it correctly.


- Mozilla has a development team that cares about the end product


More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards.


- Mozilla has site-specific image and cookie management


Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis.


- Mozilla is stable (close to 100%) and won't bring down the OS when it crashes


Just like IE6 (which hasnt ever crashed on me, even though I use it roughly 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past few months)

So.... yea, you like mozilla. that's cool. use what you like.... just realize that every one of my arguments is absolutely true, meaning IE is "better and better" too...

Slashdot crashes mozilla ?

[stefanlasiewski]

Just upgraded to 0.96, and now I see that Slashdot articles with large number of responses crash mozila (I already sent in reports with that crash feedback thingy). This is Win98 , celeron 366 with 512M of ram.

Only seems to happen on articles with a large number of responses (I'm a moderator and I'm trying to browse at -1 , but I can't).

Constantly crashes on Geek Gift Ideas 2001 and Microsoft Would Settle For The Children

I just uninstalled and reinstalled mozilla, and the crashes still happen.

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:Slashdot crashes mozilla ?

[wildwood]

Heh. I can see it now...

"Hello, Slashdot? This is the Mozilla QA team. Um, can we have 500 moderator points? We, um, need to test out this bug..."

-----

Re:Slashdot crashes mozilla ?

[Eil]

Try deleting ~/.mozilla (or applicable profile / preferences directory). This usually fixes a lot of stuff for me, especially when upgrading to a new Mozilla version.

Threads and Processes

[Carnage4Life]

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.

Many OS purists think that using multiple processes is a hack around understanding multithreaded programming especially since traditionally there is a context/address switch cost from process to process versus when using different threads. Linux merely legitimizes this hack by implementing the clone system call and copy on write semantics for pages shared amongst processes which makes the worst problems with using multiple processes instead of multiple threads dissappear.

So, now Linux has both faster processes and threads, but thread performance still sucks.

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

mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick).

Huh? How is userland programs being able to create multiple threads a bad idea? Should creating multiple processes the only way to handle multiple tasks at once in an application?

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.

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. They specifically had issues with the inconsistent way signal handling is suposed to be implemented amongst threads in the same process if memory serves me correctly.

Re:Threads and Processes

[vscjoe]

Many OS purists think that using multiple processes is a hack around understanding multithreaded programming especially since traditionally there is a context/address switch cost from process to process versus when using different threads.

It's not about "understanding". If you program in a language like C or C++ that is so lacking in fault isolation and safety features, you have to use separate processes to keep things out of each other's hair. The alternative, which is known to be more efficient, is to use safe languages and multithreading.

This kind of disconnect is also why Java has such a bad name among Linux users. Java doesn't need separate processes--you can run your whole desktop in a single thread, safely. What Java needs is fast threads.

In any case, as far as Mozilla is concerned, it's slow because it's written that way, not because of anything wrong with Linux. And the Mozilla developers neither seem to understand nor care much about the UNIX and X11 world. The existence of browsers like Opera show that you don't need something as big and slow as Mozilla, and even Opera isn't all that efficient. Rendering HTML is not rocket science, and it is actually kind of amazing how many megabytes people manage to expend on it.

Re:Threads and Processes

[MassacrE]

yes, but Java also has very few things which can execute asyncronously (looking forward to java.nio); which means that you need to make threads for *everything*. Its not uncommon to have two threads per socket to handle reading and writing blocks.

When you count all the synchronization which is happening between all these threads, as well as the sheer amount of context switching, memory usage and the number of processes which have to be scanned to find one capable of being accessed, you see one of many reasons people still use 'unsafe' languages.

Re:Threads and Processes

[yorgasor]

There are two main types of threads, user threads and kernel threads. pthreads, or POSIX threads are an example of user threads, while the clone() call is a kernel level thread.

One of the main drawbacks to user level threads, is that when one thread makes an I/O call, the whole process is blocked from running until the I/O call has completed, even when other threads are available to run since the kernel isn't aware threads are really being used. However, since user level threads can be implemented with a cross platform library, using user level threads like pthreads makes your program very portable.

In kernel threads, when one thread is blocked on an I/O call, another thread can still be run. You can also have multiple threads running concurrently on multiple processors. However, since the application is written for that particular kernel, it is not portable at all.

So the original poster was trying to state that, although Linux has blazing fast kernel threads, its POSIX thread library kind of sucks. Since Mozilla makes heavy use of POSIX threads to maintain cross platform ability, it runs a little more sluggishly on Linux.

Re:Threads and Processes

[jmalicki]

linux's pthreads use clone. they are kernel threads. read the source.

Re:Threads and Processes

[vscjoe]

When you count all the synchronization which is happening between all these threads,

Synchronization between Java threads is a lot faster than any of the IPC mechanisms that, say, Gnome, KDE, or Mozilla are using.

as well as the sheer amount of context switching,

If the Linux kernel and thread libraries provided better primitives, you wouldn't need as many system calls to build threaded applications on top of them.

memory usage

If you run a complete desktop inside a single Java process, you end up using a lot less memory than Gnome or KDE: Java applications can share code and data a lot easier and with a lot less overhead inside a single process than C/C++-based systems. In fact, the voracious appetite of C/C++ GUI apps is one reason for abandoning that approach.

and the number of processes which have to be scanned to find one capable of being accessed,

I don't understand what you mean by this. If there is only a single Java process, you don't have to "scan" lots of them.

If you mean that Java using native threads makes lots of kernel threads under Linux and that that has a bit of overhead, you are right. But that's a shortcoming of the Linux threads system and Sun's particular implementation of threads on Linux, not of the Java approach. In a well-designed thread implementation, a thread is no more expensive than an object.

which means that you need to make threads for *everything*. Its not uncommon to have two threads per socket to handle reading and writing blocks.

Java lacks some APIs and Sun's Java implementation has limitations, but that doesn't invalidate the approach. There are systems like Java that have better threading support. Still, a single-process approach based on JDK and Linux, with all the limitations of the JDK and of Linux, is already more efficient than the many process approach of Gnome or KDE and similar systems.

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.

Re:Threads and Processes

[hkmwbz]

"Rendering HTML is not rocket science, and it is actually kind of amazing how many megabytes people manage to expend on it."

This would be true if everyone was to stick firmly to the standards. However, due to the sloppy web page coding out there, today's browsers need error correction. It can't just stop loading a page because it finds an error in the HTML code.

In addition to this, the web is not only HTML anymore. You have other things like images - JPG, GIF, PNG, all of which need to be viewed correctly, and this requires an image viewer built in to the browser.

A browser today also needs a JavaScript interpreter, which also adds to the size of the code.

You also have plugins...

The web isn't just about HTML anymore. It's about displaying a page even if the code is sloppy, and it is about the new technologies that offer improved interactivity and even eye candy. A browser is a complex piece of software - imagine all the different things it has to do!

I don't think you've through the above comment through. If you look at what is actually going on, you'll see that a browser is a lot more than a HTML interpreter.

Re:Threads and Processes

[vrai]

If you program in a language like C or C++ that is so lacking in fault isolation and safety features, you have to use separate processes to keep things out of each other's hair.

This is a sweeping generalisation. I have worked on a large number of multithreaded applications (at work and home) of which 90+% were written in c/c++ and all of which used threads.

Without wishing to sound too rude: the myth that production quality multithreaded programming is difficult in c/c++ tends to be propagated by people who are bad c/c++ coders and/or who lack experience developing multithreaded applications.

In the same way bad java coders produce slow code, bad c/c++ coders produce leaky code. This is not a fault of the language, but of the coder (who should take the time to learn the language properly or stick to QBASIC).

Re:Threads and Processes

[roca]

> Rendering HTML is not rocket science

Oh yes it is.

Go to the W3C Web site and ingest the HTML4 and CSS2 specifications. Throw in all the I18N requirements (Bidi, charsets, etc) (Opera doesn't do them BTW). Throw in all the image formats and plugin support. Now throw in hacks to make a million differently broken pages work reasonably. NOW, in case you think you're done, make sure your engine is fully incremental so everything updates smoothly when stuff takes a while to load, or when you resize the window, or when the document modifies itself in arbitrary ways using the DOM (Opera doesn't handle the latter). Now make it all robust and fast for when some fool writes a page with 100 IFRAMEs, or 1000 combo boxes, or 10000 paragraphs all nested inside each other. And make sure you have ZERO buffer overruns or your users are toast.

Sounds easy, huh?

Re:Threads and Processes

[YU Nicks NE Way]

No, parsing HTML on the Web is not rocket science. It's much close to neurosurgery -- theoretically trivial (cut, cauterize, and close), really incredibly delicate.

You see, HTML has traditionally been interpreted by parsers that will accept lots of errors: missing cell closure, misplaced tags, heaven only knows what else. That means that every real HTML renderer contains a huge error recovery routine which watches what the parser is doing, then backs up and recovers from erroneous source. If parsing HTML meant the same thing that parsing C did, it would be easy. But parsing HTML means much more than that -- and that's why it's so hard.

Re:Threads and Processes

[BZ]

One problem with this reasoning. The common case is poorly written code on the web. The common case is the one that has broken syntax (something compilers usually error on, not correct). The common case is the one that has 10 levels of nested tables (fairly common on major commercial sites).

The fact of the matter is, a typical webpage has more "boxes" involved than a typical UI (where a "box" is something that has to be sized and then placed).

Also, if you look carefully at the capabilities provided by the toolkits you mention you will see that they are not nearly as flexible as CSS. Trasparent backgrounds? Not really. Translucent boxes? No. Decent bidi? Not in gtk as of last time I checked (not sure about QT).

There is a separate issue. When you write a toolkit you can pick a box model that will allow you to make a fast resizable engine. With web content there is an existing box model (CSS) and it's not exactly optimized for performance....

I agree that this is not rocket science. It's completely orthogonal and in some ways much harder (I can do rocket science; I can't write a decent HTML _parser_ much less layout engine).

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[The_Messenger]

Speaking as someone who masturbates frequently enough to have obtained an honorary doctorate in it, I'd like to mention why IE is the superior porn browser. Are you running Windows 2000? Okay, good. Open an Explorer window, go to the View menu, and select Thumbnails. Now, thumbnails will be dynamically generated for all images in your currently-viewed directory. I have a lot of porn saved on my disks -- over 1.5GB -- so even with my excellent directory structure (categorized by race, number of participants, and insertion types), it can take a while to locate that perfect images to bring yourself to orgasm with. Explorer/IE's "thumbnail" feature has revoltionized my masturbation experience, by allowing me to quickly analyze and navigate picture series -- with one hand. Explorer/IE will even show you the first frame of AVIs and MPEGs on the sidebar with the "preview" function!

Now you can visually scan directories -- for that perfect Akira Fubuki cumshot, Anna Nicole Smith softcore clip, or nasty nekkid ebony hoe playing with vegetables -- simply by using the arrow keys, Return, and Backspace.

In order to enjoy a comparable masturbation experience with Linux, you must use a combination of Electric Eyes (for thumbnail browsing) and Netscape (for image viewing). Oftentimes, you will even have to use both hands to get the process started -- very inconvenient. Add in the fact that UNIX-like systems don't function very well with widespread use of spaces in directory names, and you have all the makings of an extremely poor monkey spanking.

Hey, let's get a MacOS user in on this. TRoLLaXoR, does MacOS provide easy thumbnail image navigation like Windows?

Opera 6.0

[popeyethesailor]

This is not meant as a Troll. If you are a Windows user, checkout the latest beta from Opera, it rocks. Choice of Single/Multiple document interface,new skins, and mouse gestures too! Still retains fastest browser credits. Give it a try.

Re:0.9.5 in woody.

[ThatComputerGuy]

a woody with 0.9.5?! i wonder what will happen when it finally hits 1.0...

An MSers take on Mozilla

[Kraft]

I have tried to go over to mozilla as part of my slow conversion from Win to Linux. Thought it might be a good place to start.

When I installed Mozilla at 0.9.5 I was impressed. This app has come a loong way!

However, I have a couple of hickups, which someone might be able to help me with

- Load time Compared to IE, which takes 1-2 secs to load, Mozilla take around 8 secs to load. Not that much extra, but when my short term memory is 5 seconds, I most often choose to load IE, so I don't forget what I wanted to check out.
- Shortcuts 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, which brings me to
- Help You can't search the help! Hello.
- Search My seconds favorite feature in any program is text search, and I have found the search in Mozilla to be buggy (forgetting last search word and settings, needing to 5 click before it starts, not finding text which is there)

The most important to me is load time. I just don't see myself, only using Mozilla until load time is decreased. But hey, good luck to the dev team, I will hang in there.

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:An MSers take on Mozilla

[tswinzig]

Load time Compared to IE, which takes 1-2 secs to load, Mozilla take around 8 secs to load. Not that much extra, but when my short term memory is 5 seconds, I most often choose to load IE, so I don't forget what I wanted to check out.

I'm assuming you're not using the 'turbo' option, since you didn't specify that?

IE loads when Windows starts up, which is why opening an IE window is so fast. Therefore the Mozilla turbo option competes by pre-loading just like IE (well almost).

If you are using the turbo option, and it still takes 8 seconds to load a Moz window, then something is WRONG.

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[seann]

konqueror

Versions have nothing to do with the code

[HanzoSan]

Mozillas codebase currently is IE 6.0 level in terms of features quality, and speed.

It took Microsoft 6-7 years to get to this point, It took Mozilla 4 years.

4 Years is pretty good.

Opera is about 3 years behind Mozilla so dont even mention Opera. Opera isnt nearly as powerful, Opera is a light weight browser thats nothing special, its something anyone could have written up in a year or two.

Mozilla on the other hand has alot more features and the only browser to compete with it feature for feature is IE, currently Mozilla supports more standards, has better security and is more stable than IE 6.0 making Mozilla more complete.

When IE 7.0 releases, it will essentially be updated to be more secure, support more standards and basically be more like Mozilla.

As far as Mozilla 2.0, Mozilla has the base done, the base what took 4 years, once the base is done all they have to do for 2.0 is add a few new features most likely to support new standards, optimize it for speed to make sure its faster than IE and Opera, fix bugs so it never crashes, and then allow Netscape and AOL to intergrate ICQ, AOLIM, Winamp and so on into it in a way that doesnt make it seem overwelming.

Right now AOL isnt properly intergrated, but once it is, i see it being very useful, more useful than email for sure.

And ICQ intergration would be good too.

From there intergrate netscape into AOLs software suite.

Now while Microsoft fixes all their bugs and security, Mozilla will be adding new features.

If Mozilla developes at the pace it is right now, it will be about 2 -3 years ahead in development of Microsoft when 2.0 comes out.

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[jon_c]

not that funny actually, i use Mozzila on my XP box exlusivly for porn.. but it's not because i feel moz is well suited for it, but rather for privacy. I've found it way to hard to cover your tracks with IE. i mean think about it..

Clear history: too suspecius, alt: set for 0 day, still keeps 1 day, arg..

Clear Last day history: tedeius, and don't clear auto-complete address bar stuff

and don't forget the cookies and browser cache.

With mozilla i just load it up and close it down, no one knows i have it installed.

What i want is a secret 'porn' button that i can press and IE won't record JACK nothing nada about whats going on.

btw, to keep on topic, the last build of moz for windows wasn't that great. from the way i see it isn't just like netscape 4x, slow and clunky and i'll be dammed thats all fixed by 1.0.

-Jon

Mozilla does not take 8 seconds to load

[HanzoSan]

Use the turbo feature, Mozilla loads faster than IE.

Re:Mozilla does not take 8 seconds to load

[Kraft]

Ok, that sounds great.

But how do I load it? Do you have more info on it?

Re:Mozilla does not take 8 seconds to load

[The Evil Beaver]

Edit->Preferences.

The Advanced page in Preferences has a check box near the bottom that turns it on and off. However, I (and quite a few others) have found it to be pretty buggy, and a source of memleaks. Hopefully it's better now, but I'm not using it until the 1.0 milestone.

Of course, other than that, no worries. I've been using Mozilla as my default browser since M18, and haven't looked back since!

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:Better and Better

[itarget]

- Mozilla is Open Source
Zealots aside, why is this better?

It's there if it's needed or wanted, and can't be taken away.

- Mozilla won't accept activeX or other such nonsense
Which limit's its use on heavily scripted, harmless, usefull sites.

I honestly don't know of any sites that are heavily scripted while remaining both harmless and useful.

- Mozilla has tabbled browsing
Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...

Then use windowed browsing. It didn't go anywhere.

- Mozilla doesn't redirect you to MSN (or AOL for that matter) and spill your privacy for all to see
Nor does IE, if you configure it correctly.

I never found an option to prevent getting passed off to MS on a DNS lookup failure, but then I almost never touch IE outside of HTML testing purposes.

- Mozilla has a development team that cares about the end product
More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards.

I'm sure the IE developers pat each other on the back all the time, but you won't see it since they don't have public mailing lists.

- Mozilla has site-specific image and cookie management
Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis.

That it does, though personally I prefer the format of Mozilla's privacy tools. Probably a familiarity thing.

- Mozilla is stable (close to 100%) and won't bring down the OS when it crashes
Just like IE6 (which hasnt ever crashed on me, even though I use it roughly 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past few months)

Last time I used IE (5.5) it crashed several times a day (usually on malformed javascript or activex), taking the whole OS with it half the time. I haven't tried IE6 though.
I've been using the Mozilla nightlies, and I haven't had a crash since before the summer. Some really funky regressions like the expando url bar... but no crashes.
I put my browsers through HTML/Java/Flash/script hell though, so YMMV.

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:Better and Better

[7seconds]

You forgot to itemize the good XML-CSS-rendering, Mozilla or Galeon are pretty close to w3-standards. I saw some XML documents which were not correctly rendered in IE or Opera. I nearly want to call Mozilla not only browser, but also HTML/CSS/XML-Validator:-) It helps to find bugs in page code!

Re:Better and Better

[Platinum Dragon]

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?

Does IE even give you that option at all? Can you directly e-mail any of the IE developers? Were the IE developers a diverse team from multiple companies and institutions?

Which limit's its use on heavily scripted, harmless, usefull sites. True, it saves you from mailicious porn webmasters who want to install their dialer programs, but that's not a problem if you know how to set up your internet security zones on IE.

Can your mother do that? Should your mother have to do that, just to be able to surf the web without having crap installed without her even being aware? This is assuming your mother looks at porn sites; substitute dad/brother/yourself as necessary...

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 UI for turning the feature on and off at will hasn't been implemented in Mozilla that I know of, but Galeon currently allows for this. I think it's also possible to selectively allow and disallow popups from certain sites.

Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...

'Course, there are those who find it more convenient to have one window with multiple tabs, than several windows to flip between. Ever since Galeon picked up tabbed browsing, I haven't gone back; just saves desktop space, looks cleaner, and doesn't give that much of a performance hit. At least with Mozilla, the option exists, and works rather well.

Which is again nice, but means nothing if developers dont make their sites for standards, which they dont ....

Nice to see you speak for all web developers.

Nor does IE, if you configure it correctly.

Again, can your mother do that, and should she have to just to be able to safely surf the web? Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the inevitable process of upgrading and patching bugs here; I'm talking about closing potential privacy and security holes deliberately set as defaults by the browser manufacturer.

More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards.

No, they just have MS Marketing to whip up press releases and hype it as the Next Big Thing. Seriously, do you think the developers spend their time in the netscape.mozilla.* and Bugzilla boards holding public circle jerks?

Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis.

In short, they're about equal, and the Mozilla team doesn't have the need to give it the wankeriffic term of "privacy zones" or whatnot. Just cookie management and image management. Works damn well, too.

.. as an alternative

[GauteL]

.. if you are considering moving to Linux.. Galeon is a good alternative.

It uses the Mozilla-engine, so it renders excactly the same, and uses the mozilla-plugin-system etc.

It takes care of a few things for Mozilla:

• Load time - Load time on Galeon is for me at 3 seconds with all my plugins installed.
• Look - it adds a GTK+-interface, which fits very nicely in with GNOME
• Shortcuts - they are at least way better than Mozillas.
• Search - more simple and standard search-dialog

Re:.. as an alternative

[Ian Bicking]

I like Galeon too, but it's keyboard shortcuts still need a lot of work -- mostly in terms of focus. Half the time I try to use a shortcut it doesn't work, because the focus is on the URL or tabs or some other pointless area.

Apparently this is a problem with integrating with Gecko, though... IMHO the basic problem of keyboard focus exists across all GTK apps... I wish there was never any concept of focus besides being in a text-entry area. You always have to guess what the behavior will be when you hit a key otherwise. It bugs me a lot in evolution, too (which I otherwise quite like)

Re:.. as an alternative

[GauteL]

You'll be happy to hear that accessability is THE big promise for the GNOME2-platform and GTK+ 2.0.

Use Nautilus, dimwit!

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Damned wanker. All salami-slapping, no brains.

Nautilus is the best thing on Linux. It's all that windows wanted to make. I'm not sure if it thumbmails movies, but it sure thumbnails pictures.

Linux is made by geeks. Geeks also look at porn and masturbate. Why would our technical solution be technically inferior to Microsofts?

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[Velex]

In order to enjoy a comparable masturbation experience with Linux, you must use a combination of Electric Eyes (for thumbnail browsing) and Netscape (for image viewing). Oftentimes, you will even have to use both hands to get the process started -- very inconvenient. Add in the fact that UNIX-like systems don't function very well with widespread use of spaces in directory names, and you have all the makings of an extremely poor monkey spanking.

Bah. Just use Nautilus -- it does everything that IE can do with the thumbnailing and whatnot, and it automagically scales those overhuge images down. Before I used nautilus, I'd end up with these huge images that I had to scale down. Not that the detail was bad sometimes, but I need to see every part of the picture to get off. In fact, I like to take advantage of the fact that my ReiserFS partition for pr0n supports many more characters in filename than an NTFS partition. Linux clearly is the superior pr0n OS.

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:Browser wars? Sigh.

[krmt]

To explain why I think IE is inferior: One example is that it fails to provide the user with basic functionality. IE appears to be created to allow the web page author to control where the user goes (much in Microsoft's tradition), while Mozilla and Opera both allow the user to control more of their surfing.

I'm curious about this. How do you mean? The only example I can really give for this is in Mozilla (I've never used Opera) that you can disable popups. Other than that, I don't really see IE preventing the browser user from controlling their own destiny. The prefs aren't any harder to get to, and it does have security zones and whatnot. It's also got great fantastic plugin support (runtime install kicks ass) and a convenient sidebar.

Granted, I like Mozilla better for a variety of reasons, but I don't really understand yours. Could you clarify them a bit?

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[onion2k]

What i want is a secret 'porn' button that i can press

There is one. But its secret.

Why does Galeon still req full Mozilla install?

[PRR]

I use Mozilla with KDE, and haven't used Gnome for nearly a year. At the time Galeon required you to have a full Mozilla install - this was because of the licensing of some of the main Gecko components. Supposedly the licensing was changed, and word was that Galeon would no longer require a full Mozilla install because it could just ship with the few Gecko components it needed. However, I notice on the Galeon site it still requires a full Mozilla install - was the component license issue never resolved? What's up? (not a flame, just curious)

Tabbed browsing vs MDI

[EditDroid]

This has puzzled me... Why are people raving about tabbed interfaces, while at the same time ridiculing MDI? Aren't they, for all practical purposes, the same thing?

Re:Tabbed browsing vs MDI

[Explo]

This has puzzled me... Why are people raving about tabbed interfaces, while at the same time ridiculing MDI? Aren't they, for all practical purposes, the same thing?

With MDI applications everything tends to be inside the one master window. For me, the difference between tabs in Mozilla and typical MDI applications is that you can freely mix and match the approaches between one window with everything (MDI) and N windows with one specific thing (SDI). For example, when at work, you can keep your work search engine queries ("what the hell this isolated parameter meant in tc command syntax") in one window tabbed and have another window with more leisure-spirited (eg. slashdot and friends) material tabbed inside, possibly even keeping the windows in different virtual desktops. Or whatever is your ideal preference between pure MDI and SDI (or either extreme, if you wish so).

It's probably the X-server

[MongooseCN]

Moz for linux has to push every request and event through the Xserver which is sloooow. Windows on the other hand has no clue about user space and lets every application have direct access to all the hardware it wants. Much faster buch much less secure.

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[Dr. Evil]

Internet Explorer 5 still runs on a 386 with Windows 3.1 and 8 MB of RAM. Slow yes, but quite usable, and think about what the Internet used to be when such machines were common... Animated Gif's were cool and high-tech.

Odd that it is MORE usable than Mozilla under Linux on a P200 w. 48MB of RAM. Unless of course you open more than one window... then the 386 just can't deal with the RAM requirements. The Mozilla machine can open at least two or three before it drives the swap too hard.

I really hope they get the memory usage down. I don't think it will be THAT important for long. RAM is cheap and systems are getting faster, but no matter how you look at it Internet Explorer or even Netscape 4 is far more lean.

I have a feeling that Mozilla is not out to compete with those browsers though... it is out to set a new standard... it just looks like a browser.

Re:good job mozilla... - Not in release notes

[Tim Macinta]

on every first page visit to a site it requests favicon.ico

Take a look at the release notes for 0.9.6. They say that to define an icon for a page you need to use the <LINK REL="icon"> tag in your document and I don't see anything that would indicate that Mozilla will be requesting icons automatically as you have implied. To me, it sounds like Mozilla will only request an icon if the page defines the <LINK> tag (which would indicate that's what the author intended) or if the user bookmarks a page (coming in 0.9.7). That seems like a pretty non-intrusive way to handle things and doesn't sound like it will skew stats at all.

Imagine....

[sebol]

Imagine if IE change it version number to IE 0.9.7 just to compete with mozilla

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:dhtml is worthless in mozilla

[roca]

> It's a known bug that mozilla sucks when viewing
> dhtml.

That's a bit of an overstatement. Tons of complex DHTML works fine. Some of the major remaining DHTML bugs are being fixed (e.g., "Cannot modify contents of dynamically created IFRAME" was just fixed). We'll slowly but surely track down the rest.

Believe it or not, Mozilla is faster than IE for some DOM operations. Of course you don't see bugzilla reports about those :-).

Re:Better and Better

[Jucius Maximus]

"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?"

I try. I am not a coder to begin with but I frequent bugzilla and have at least one non-duplicate bug submitted.

"- 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? "

If you disable it correctly, it only disables during page load and unload.

"Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows... "

I can live with that. It's better than having 8-10 browser windows open and not knowing exactly which one you're trying to alt-tab to.

"- Mozilla doesn't redirect you to MSN (or AOL for that matter) and spill your privacy for all to see"

I have blocked off the relevant msn domain in my hosts, but you are right on this one. But IE's behaviour defaults to an insecure mode which troubles me.

"More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards. "

Uhm. I was iffy about putting that line in there in the first place ...

"Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis."

Like I'm going to load IE6 which has the set of WinXP core technologies.

"Just like IE6 (which hasnt ever crashed on me, even though I use it roughly 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past few months) "

Damn man. I was about to put "you need to get a life" but that would make me no better than the flamers. If you spend > 50% of your day surfing ... well ... it sounds unhealthy to me.

"More ramblings from a zealot. "
Correction: "More ramblings from a karma whore ..." I have paid. ;-) There original thread is now at zero.

turbo

[mattdm]

Use the turbo feature, Mozilla loads faster than IE.

What this does, by the way, is preload most of Mozilla when your system starts -- which is exactly what IE does to make it appear to start so quickly.

Emperical test - original statement is not true

[Tim Macinta]

It asks for it regardless of whether is declared or not.

Repeating this will not make it true. Your statement goes squarely against what the Mozilla release notes imply. So, thinking that maybe this is undocumented or implemented improperly I decided to test it out for myself. I tested it by using Mozilla 0.9.6 to look at my local copy of Apache (http://192.168.55.111/ for me) which does not have any pages with the necessary <LINK> tag. The results? There were no requests for favicon.ico as you have stated that there should be. Please indicate where you are getting your information from that Mozilla always loads favicon.ico because this contridicts both the Mozilla release notes and direct testing. Here are all my log entries from today (note the lack of ".ico" files):

192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:05 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 4716 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"
192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:06 -0500] "GET /icons/back.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 216 "http://192.168.55.111/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"
192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:06 -0500] "GET /icons/blank.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 148 "http://192.168.55.111/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"
192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:06 -0500] "GET /icons/folder.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 225 "http://192.168.55.111/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"
192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:06 -0500] "GET /icons/unknown.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 245 "http://192.168.55.111/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"
192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:06 -0500] "GET /icons/tar.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 219 "http://192.168.55.111/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"
192.168.55.111 - - [21/Nov/2001:09:44:06 -0500] "GET /icons/text.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 229 "http://192.168.55.111/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120"

Re:Emperical test - original statement is not true

[smack_attack]

This guy explained it better than I could, and had more insight to the nightly builds. I'll just assume that someone overlooked this in the nightly build that I have 2001112003.

I don't know why it would be different in the nightly than it is in 0.9.6, but I am not claiming this as fact simply to be belligerent.

chicago.national-net.com - - 21/Nov/2001:11:23:09 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 826 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.6+) Gecko/20011120"
chicago.national-net.com - - 21/Nov/2001:11:23:10 -0500] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 217 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.6+) Gecko/20011120"
chicago.national-net.com - - 21/Nov/2001:11:23:10 -0500] "GET /images/logo.png HTTP/1.1" 200 11437 "http://www.gurucode.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.6+) Gecko/20011120"

Re:Better and Better

[drsquare]

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, but I know that there won't be any backdoors or trojans in there. Can you say the same about closed-source? No, you can't.

- 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?

Then enable it for that site only. Can this be done in IE? No. IE is shit.

- Mozilla has tabbled browsing
Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...

Have you ever heard of "Ctrl+tab"?

- Mozilla doesn't redirect you to MSN (or AOL for that matter) and spill your privacy for all to see

Nor does IE, if you configure it correctly.

You mean you actually have to delve into the slow, complex configuration just to stop it automatically sending you to sites you don't want to go to? Wow, I never realised IE was this bad.

- Mozilla has a development team that cares about the end product
More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards.

In that case, why is IE so bare and featureless compared to Opera, Mozilla, Galeon etc? Why does it provide such a basic, lacking browsing experience? Does it even have tabbed windows?

- Mozilla has site-specific image and cookie management
Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis.

Unfortuanetly, IE's configation is slow and confusing. It really is the worst browser out there. With Galeon, I can turn off javascript via a single menu. With IE I'd be delving into countless menus and windows, trying to find elusive checkboxes.

When will you idiots realise that IE is literally the worst browser out there? Even Netscape is better.

Depends on the version

[lkolesza]

The current daily builds 0.9.6+ do ask for /favicon.ico by default. The released 0.9.6 build does not.

Re:Mozilla is a great browser if...

[roca]

Google for the "Mozilla user agent toolbar"

Re:Browser wars? Sigh.

[platypus]

I can give two examples, things that I really hate with IE and which IMO clearly exist for websites to dictate what I do:

1. If you configured IE to ask whether it should accept cookies, it asks. But where's in the dialog which pops up to get IE to _ignore_ cookies from this page. If you check "don't ask again" it will accept cookies from now on. This is wrong.
2. If you disable ActiveX, IE will always pop up a window which informs you that this page may look sucky because of your current security settings.
   
   Maybe I'm just to dense to configure IE correctly, but then it's too hard to find, IMO.

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[mav[LAG]]

Argh - I moderated this as funny and it somehow selected Underrated. Sorry :)

What is this tabbed browsing thing?

[Robotech_Master]

At the risk of seeming a little stupid...how do I use this tabbed browsing feature? Mozilla 9.6 still looks the same as any other Mozilla; I hit control-N and a new window pops up--I don't see any tabs anywhere.

Is there some configuration option I forgot to set?

Re:What is this tabbed browsing thing?

[gorgon]

Is there some configuration option I forgot to set?

Look in Preferences|Navigator|Tabbed Browsing.

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.

Re:What is this tabbed browsing thing?

[Zulfiya]

At the risk of seeming a little stupid...how do I use this tabbed browsing feature? Mozilla 9.6 still looks the same as any other Mozilla; I hit control-N and a new window pops up--I don't see any tabs anywhere.

Try control-T instead.

Or File -> New -> Navigator Tab

-S

Re:What is this tabbed browsing thing?

[Robotech_Master]

Thanks for the responses. One more possibly stupid question...is there a keyboard shortcut, like Control Tab, to switch between tabs without having to take my hands off the keyboard? Or is there a way to configure one?

Re::-(

[the Man in Black]

:-D And the award for 'Most Clever way to get Site Traffic' goes to....

tabbing really is better than separate windows

[David Jao]

Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...

Try Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn to switch between tabs. Yes this is configurable.

Personally I actually prefer a separate key command to switch between tabs because then I have an easy way to switch pages without interference from other windows that aren't browsers.

Low end, alternate platform browsing (~OT)

[saintlupus]

I realize that this isn't specifically related to the Mozilla release, but it seems somewhat germane to the topic.

I've got an old Sparc IPC workstation running OpenBSD that I'm playing around with right now. Does anyone know of a decent, lightweight browser that I can compile and use on this platform? I'd prefer not to install Netscape, both because of the closed source and because I'd have to compile SUNOS compatability into my kernel for one stinking app.

I don't need Flash or anything like that, just something barebones that I can read static pages on.

(And yes, Lynx is already installed, but I do sort of like graphics.)

--saint

Re:Mozilla vs. Netscape 4.7x

[zericm]

It seems to me, from my experience with Mozilla, that after 4 years and starting from scratch, it has nearly reached the quality and usability of Netscape 4.7x. I have yet to see any really major feature enhancements (besides tabbed browsing and support for multiple mixed - IMAP, POP3 - email accounts) that would prompt me to replace IE with it as my or my company's default browser or replace Netscape 4.7x as our default email client. And it is still too darn slow!

I've had IE5, Netscape 4.7x and Mozilla on my desktop for almost two years now. IE is our corporate standard, so I only use it when forced by certain web pages. Until the middle of this year, Netscape was my day-to-day browser. I would load a Mozilla nightly or milestone on a regular basis, but found that it was a bit too buggy and unstable to meet my needs. I was waiting for the day when Mozilla was ready.

That day came in early August with the release of 0.9.3. Ever since, I've been using a version of Mozilla as my default browser, with no problems. Sites that are "optimized" for IE load just fine, and I grit my teeth when I have to go back to Netscape (regression testing, dont' you know). In fact, I've been so damn pleased that I decided to skip 0.9.5, wait for 0.9.6 (downloading right now) and continue running a nightly instead (20010928-09-trunk, to be exact). Sure, there were bug fixes, feature enahancements and performance imporvements that I didn't get, but what I'm running right now worked great. When you skip an application upgrade because you don't see the need, then you have a good appliction on your hands.

Mozilla is a good application that I'm going to push as our new corporate standard.

eric

I confess...

[laserjet]

I confess, I have selectivitus too. I have been selecting (highlighting) test as I read in web browesers for as long as I remember. I thought I was the only person who did this. I think it helps me remember where I am in the page, despite the negative color shifting. Band together, selectors!

Re:I confess...

[Tackhead]

> I confess, I have selectivitus too. I have been selecting (highlighting) test as I read in web browesers for as long as I remember. I thought I was the only person who did this. I think it helps me remember where I am in the page, despite the negative color shifting. Band together, selectors!

Another selector speaks!

Me? I started when I realized I no longer needed to load images - 90% of the graphics were crap, or banners, or both.

So when some d00f decides to code his web page as all-white text on an all-white background, with a black .GIF as a background image, I just select the text, and voila, I can read.

Even now that I've Junkbustered-out all the banners, surfing without graphics and selecting the text still beats wasting time for 20 "spacer.gif" "upperleftroundedcorner.gif", "upperrightroundedcorner.gif" and similar files to get DNS lookups and download.

its not slow, use the turbo feature

[HanzoSan]

Then mozilla is as fast as IE. I admit some parts of the code are slower because its not a native app, but they are working on speed right now. It should eventually be just as fast.

Lets see

[HanzoSan]

Opera doesnt support even half the standards of Mozilla.

Opera doesnt have an email app.

Opera doesnt have spell checking, composer.

Opera doesnt have very good bookmarking.

Opera doesnt have good security features.

Opera doesnt have password auto complete, form complete etc.

Opera may have tabbed browsing but so does everything else.

Opera doesnt have themes.

Opera doesnt support MathML.

Opera to me is at the level of Netscape 3x

Its a slim downed browser, compareable to other slim browsers, but not to something like Mozilla.

Opera has built in ICQ but so what, Mozilla is owned by AOL and will always has the best built in ICQ and AOL support so lets not go here.

MOzilla has built in AOL, opera does not. MOzilla has built in jabber support so you can load ICQ, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc.

MOzilla has a full functioning news reader, Email Client, Composer, Spell checker, IRC chat, Address book features, Multiple Language support, Themes, Security features, Full plugin support, Java support, XML support, XUL support.

Opera is more compareable to konq for linux, or kmeleon for windows than to Mozilla.

Mozilla beats it feature for feature, standard for standard.

Re:Lets see

[Tackhead]

> Opera doesnt have good security features.
> Opera doesnt have password auto complete, form complete etc.

Consistency is the hobgoglin of small minds, no?

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).

Re:Replace new window with open tab

[Todd Knarr]

Use Ctrl-T (open new tab)? Seriously, I can understand wanting to replace a mouse click that would open a new window with one that'd open a new tab, but a command keystroke? No, if I tell it deliberately I want to open a new window I want it to do what I told it, not do something else. There's a way to rebind the menu accelerator keystrokes, but frankly I'd prefer to leave them the way they are and just use the proper keystroke.

try GeekZilla

[BroadbandBradley]

from Mozilla or NS6.x click the link to get an early "mockup-preview" of my new XUL application Geekzilla everything a geek needs in one place!!!
GeekZilla

Re:rpm -Uvh mozilla*....

[lal]

I have 7.2 with mozilla and galeon. I installed the mozilla 0.9.6 (--nodeps) and galeon segfaults. So it looks like the latest galeon binary is not compatible with 0.9.6 which is pretty much the way it always works with galeon and mozilla.

Re:Blame the OS, resources, and compiler patents

[ksheff]

Has anyone compiled mozilla with the Intel compiler? If so, please post the results.

This is NOT XML

[evilviper]

This is not XML, HTML renders should handle bad code. Netscape 4.x does this with no problems. If it finds something written badly, or that it doesn't understand, it ignores it and still has no problem rendering the rest of the page correctly. Now why is that too much to ask from Moz?

Re:This is all well and good...

[fault0]

try using linux > 2.4.10
I had probs with konq and leaks before that

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[Sentry21]

I use Mozilla on my mac exclusively for pr0n, because the default browser on this (MacOS) box is Internet Explorer, so no one ever sees my history.

I used to tout Mozilla as a superior browser so that everyone else would use it. I've stopped doing that now. =;>

--Dan

Re:So...

[SCHecklerX]

Disable the 'search' button, and instead have your search engine show up in the drop down list under 'smart browsing'

page icons!

[jejones]

The page icons are quite cute, though I was disappointed in one respect...I went to www.microsoft.com, and the page icon wasn't Bill Gates as Borg. Can I correct this?

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[Tackhead]

> I'd like to mention why IE is the superior porn browser.[ ... ]

Bah! Thumbnails! You wimps have it easy!

From a mailing list I frequent:

In *my* day, of course, we all have well-developed muscles in our right arms *from* whacking off, and well-developed muscles in our *left* arms from typing. ftp and xv are like that, of course. These days, well, just about *anyone* can find (and whack off to) Internet Porn. What *is* this world coming to? Fucking GUIs. Fucking Netscape.

...and you tell this to kids raised on GUIs and HTTP these days, and they don't believe you. (Uphill! Both ways, I tell you!)

Re:Aargh! Old versoin now.

[tempfile]

Have you tried getting/making patches for 0.9.5->0.9.6, fetching Debian source and making your own 0.9.6? I've found the Debian mozilla packages rather slow to update, so that's probably what I'll do to get to 0.9.6, if it's feasible without pain.

Re:Pornzilla 0.9.1 also released today

[onion2k]

No matter. I have 50 karma anyway. Any else disappears into the ether.