Mozilla 0.9.7 Released!

Chezypewf writes: "The newest release from the Mozilla Dev team is out. This milestone features basic S/MIME support, favicon support and the Document Inspector, a tool to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. You can grab it here: http://www.mozilla.org/releases "

Comments

Re:Freeze that Jelly

[Simm0]

For your information 1586 bugs were fixed between the 0.9.6 and the 0.9.7 releases. I actually think Mozilla has a slow development cycle. IMHO this cycle is well suited to Mozilla itself because it allows the people who want a stable build without blatent regressions to acutally be testing it for finer grained bugs. Mozilla still has a frozen period for about a week where the code to be released is branched and only outstanding issues are fixed.

0.9.7 has new pop-up-stopper UI --

[wideangle]

-- though the wording needs a little work:

Scripts and Windows
x Enable Javascript
x Open Windows by themselves
x Move or resize existing windows
x Make windows flip over or under other windows
x Change status bar text
x Change Images
x Create or change cookies
x Read cookies

Can you guess which one stops pop-ups?
Would a usability expert know what half these prefs mean?

Good job on the prefs, Moz-team, but please, hire Jakob Nielsen before 1.0 ships.

1st actual release on ideal release day!

[pchk]

I check the mozillazine.org and the mozilla site from time to time, and noticed today they've released another milestone just in time, for the first time!
If you take a look at the mozilla development roadmap, you'll believe me. Don't blame me for another exact release you see (0.9.5), 'cause .9.4 adn .9.5 were intended to be so, in order to be used for netscape 6.x products, and the schedule itself was changed. See freeze & branch date for 0.9.4 & 0.9.5, and you'll believe me again.
Anyway, the mozilla dev team have made a great work in a great manner, for many this could be a cool gift for the season. Thank you, and have a nice vacation everybody.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[SaDan]

Actually, Mozilla is one of the more web standards compliant browser out there. I can write an HTML 4.01 Strict web page that will NOT render on MSIE (IE 5.5SP2, at least).

If I can't look at a site in Mozilla or another popular W3C standards compliant browser, I quickly lose interest in what that site has to offer.

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME

[boopus]

But is it ready? Mozilla is coming along nicely(I use it on some machines, not others) but it's not perfect yet. It's usable, but unfortunately it just isn't as stable/responsive as IE. If people have mozilla forced down their throats by The Powers That Be, they'll hate it if only for the reason that it's not what they're used to. I'm all for anyone who wants to adopting mozilla, but it's foolish to try and take over the world with a browser that hasn't reached a 1.0 release yet. I admit to useing Mozilla on windows for idealogical reasons, not because it's the best browser out there. (But it'd better damn well be soon)

Stable, Documented API

[krmt]

Honestly, I want the core frozen absolutely solid. Then declare 1.0. While I love all the features that have been put in to the UI, what really needs to happen for 1.0 in my opinion is to stabilize that API so people can start coding around the platform.

The original vision is still critical, and I want to see more projects like the fantastic pubmed. These things are going to be what really kicks mozilla in to high gear. I really believe that third party stuff like this will make mozilla worth having.

1.0 is all about stability. The browser itself is certainly stable enough to go 1.0. You can add the UI enhancements for 1.1, but make the core solid so people have the platform. Then we'll start to get the plugins that we so desperately need too.

A Question About Mozilla

[Poligraf]

I have a problem with Mozilla 9.6 on Windoze, but I'm not sure it's a bug.

I visit a lot of Cyrillic sites, and the header of the window that is encoded in cyrillic is always shown as a set of question marks. Even worse, when I bookmark such a site, the letters in Bookmarks are not shown as cyrillic but as additional latin symbols (the same way as if a cyrillic page is shown in Western encoding).

Is it Mozilla or just silly me? ;-)

Re:favicon

[spectecjr]

fav icons...man... i can't wait until we have magical talking paperclips, too!

Funny... I actually find them useful... recognizing an image is much faster than reading text. *shrugs*

Need to make Microsoft support more standards

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using nightly builds and home cvs builds of Mozilla on Linux for some time now. It's support for CSS and the W3C box model leads a great deal of people into believing that Mozilla has many bugs because IE5/6 renders there pages fine. They don't realise it's IE5/6 rendering it wrong because their code doesn't do what they mean it to do...

If there is one thing I'd like to see improved in the next release of IE it's CSS selector support. CSS Selectors level 3 is basically finished, Mozilla supports most level 2 selectors, and yet IE6 trails with very limited support. Yes, you can select an element that is within another element (descendant selectors) but IE6 lacks support for a huge array of other selectors such as child, sibling and selectors based on attribute value(s).

This selectors point may seem very trivial to web authors used to writing for IE because they merely give an element a class and write a new rule for it. But that bloats the HTML/XML significantly, and can give the programmer a headache, not forgetting the problems of handling inheritance propeties.

With CSS2 selectors, I can say, td[class ~= "body"] > p:first-child { font-weight: bolder; } and have the first paragraph child of a table cell who's class attribute contains a value "body" go bolder. I can't do that in IE6 as effectively.

C'mon Microsoft, you helped create the selectors standard, now let's see you implement it!

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[TheSliver]

Its always been relatively trivial to do that, I showed that more than a year ago and I know some have implemented similar techniques to prevent any window opening under any circumstances and show the link in the existing window.

The problem with the wording is not that its inaccurate, its entirely accurate. The problem is that the user is searching for something to stop windows opening and so naturally grabs at whatever seems reasonable. After that assumption is made they are going to be satisfied 80% of the time but consider the actual behaviour a bug because windows can still be opened.

Simon

Edit boxes in mozilla (esp. MailNews)

[MadAndy]

Does anybody else still see strange behaviour with text and the cursor at the end of lines when composing plaintext email in mozilla? If for example I click at the end of a long line of text in a message and press RETURN to insert a single blank line Moz inserts two lines instead, and only if I haven't already inserted a line there before.

I tried looking for it in bugzilla but couldn't spot it - I suspect I'm probably searching for the wrong thing though. Maybe it's something wrong with my setup?

Apart from that, it's all coming along rather well and I use it as my main browser and mail client on my primary work machine. The only real thing left from my point of view is to trim down on the memory leakage (eg try switching between IMAP folders with the welcome page visible in the preview pane and watch Moz chew another 30-50k).

Re:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[hacker]

Using it as a daily browser for both work and home, I do have a few problems with it. Some javascripts dont work with internal business sites. (LiveLink and Eroom which we use for documents and communications) No spell checker yet. (But im told its coming.)

Excuse me? A spell checker? It's a browser. Say it slowly. BROWSER. What are you, a grammar nazi, spell-checking everyone's webpages now?

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[Tim Macinta]

I'd still like to have site-by-site preferences wihtout having to edit the prefs.js file, but, what can you do?

You could use this handly little preferences toolbar. You can leave pop-ups disabled in general and then when you come across a site that you actually need pop-ups for, simply un-check the checkbox. And don't let the screenshot fool you - it allows you to very quickly turn on/off more than just the 4 preferences you see there (right clicking on the toolbar will give you a big selections of what checkboxes should appear).

native widgets?

[tim_maroney]

The strangest thing I noticed about the new Mozilla for the Mac is that it seems to be using some native widgets in the UI. Bring up Preferences and what ho, those are Macintosh buttons, check boxes, and radio buttons, not the clunky Mozilla ones. But look on a form page and you'll still see the boxy Mozilla controls.

Is there a partial adoption of native widgets in progress? Bug 112980 seems to imply so but details are scanty. The bug does not even have a description, only a title and comments.

If the Mozilla team has finally caught on to the importance of respecting platform UI standards, though, hats off to them.

Tim

Re:Freeze that Jelly

[mbrod]

I don't believe they are ignoring any incoming bugs but if you look at the number of bug reports they skyrocket when they make major changes. That is of course to be expected. I just see projects like Debian taking longer to release and when they do it is uber frozen to only fix security concerns and it kicks ass. I think if Mozilla did this more people would jump in to help the project. I for one can't keep up with it enought to help it. Debian on the other hand I can. I hope there is a method to there madness because I do think it an awesome piece of software just a 'jellified one'.

Take for example i386 machine instruction set. It is a disaster but a frozen one. RISC is much better but because i386 is frozen it lives. Mozilla will be the RISC of browsers forever if it won't freeze. Or at least make a 'stable' 1.0 release we all work on bug squashing in while they work towards 2.0. Maybe that is already their plan I hope so.

I wish...

[javaaddikt]

One "feature" that bugs the hell out of me is the automatic conversion of >'s in mail and news replies to vertical gray bars. This wreaks havoc in the Python newsgroup where some session code like

>>> spam = "asdf"
>>> 1 + 2
3
>>>

looks more like this...

||| spam = "asdf"
||| 1 + 2
3
|||

Except with really ugly gray vertical lines. This really needs to be an option to turn off. I haven't been able to find the setting in the options, however.

Re:Mozilla isnt slow, XUL is slow

[knorthern knight]

And let's not forget the debug code built in (Mozilla is still officially in beta). The standard 0.9.6 milestone release sucks dead bunnies through a garden hose on my 450 mhz machine with 128 megs running Redhat 7.2 linux, with FVWM2 as my window manager (As for Gnome/KDE "desktops", the pox on both your houses).

However, when I build with optimizations up the wazoo, and no debug code, it's actually quite snappy. My .mozconfig file looks like so...

ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-ldap
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-optimize=\
"-O2 -march=i686 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops"
ac_add_options --without-system-nspr
ac_add_options --without-system-zlib
ac_add_options --without-system-jpeg
ac_add_options --without-system-png
ac_add_options --without-system-mng
ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --enable-strip
ac_add_options --enable-strip-libs

The only thing that -O3 adds over -O2 in gcc is inlining of functions. That seems to cause segfaults at startup in the resulting binary. Of course -march=i686 is specific to Pentium II's and higher.