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

ISO in the stocking

[satanami69]

Shoot, there is still not support for MSN's "Secure Password authentication". One day, one day.

Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[gayrod]

If it's ever going to topple MSIE, they need to slow their development rate. The fact that Microsoft goes from IE4->IE5->IE6 confuses enough newbie users, going from 0.0093->0.0094->0.00103 every 2 weeks is beyond most people.

Great browser, ridiculously fast development rate. Slow it down guys, release every .1

My two cents.

- Dave Brennins

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[Segod]

You're forgetting that mozilla isn't intended for newbies. That is what Netscape releases are for.

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[SEE]

Okay, let me slam you around with a very short quote:

"We make binary versions of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!"

Again,

"We make binary versions of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!"

See the first line on the release page? It says:

"We make binary versions of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!"

If you want a not-testing-purposes-only browser, go use Netscape 6.2. Binary versions of Mozilla are are available for testing purposes only.

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[SEE]

Okay. Click on the link in the article , repeated here for your convenience. You will see a heading "Releases". Look at the next sentence.

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[krackbebe]

Hey man, can you tone it down a little bit. Messages like this are unhelpful and a tad rude. It just puts off the newbies from our Linux culture. Let's keep it clean and above the belt, thanks!

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[SEE]

Trolls are a valuable part of the ecosystem, despite their low intelligence, lack of manners, and grotesque features. Those who advocate starving them are not only inhumane, they are risking the life of /. itself.

;-)

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[RLiegh]

It would seem that the versions distributed with your free unixes are not the testing versions; at least not the talk-back ones.

I'm still using 0.9 on NetBSD (when I'm not posting from IE. :p); can't wait for the pkgsrc version of 0.9.7 to show up. :):)

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[krackbebe]

Emmett is that you?

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[netdemonboberb]

That article is old and out of date. Mozilla milestones are meant to be stable releases that can be used as a personal browser. They are also for testing purposes, but not so much as the nightly binaries.

I don't understand why he wants it to be slowed down, though. He doesn't have to download every milestone release that comes out.

I download Mozilla binaries about once a week, rebuild my source tree entirely once a week, and pull and build portions of the tree every day, so a month seems like a very long time to go between versions. Its all relative.

Therefore, if he wants to see a release schedule like Microsoft's, he can just download ever .1 versions or so.

If he thinks we should make releases less often and spend more time testing, he might have a valid point, but he should realize that Mozilla changes so much in a month it merits a new release.

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[asa]

steven-ehrbar@home.com said:
See the first line on the release page? It says: "We make binary versions of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!"

netdemonz AT yahoo DOT com said:
That article is old and out of date. Mozilla milestones are meant to be stable releases that can be used as a personal browser.

It is not old and out of date. Mozilla binaries are provided for testing purposes.

--Asa

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[MacJedi]

UID means nothing. :)

/joeyo

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[netdemonboberb]

Asa: If people want to test Mozilla, then it is much better if they download a nightly build. That is what I meant. The nightly builds are the most up-to-date. If you mean testing before Netscape branches, then I agree with what you are saying, but also remember that Mozilla has evolved much further than being just a testing-ground for Netscape (as I assume you realize since you are Mozilla staff :)

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[netdemonboberb]

I talked to Asa on IRC, and what she means is that Mozilla is a testing ground for Mozilla technologies such as XPIDL, XUL, XPCOM, and standards-compliance, etc for use by web applications and development of other applications - long term testing. As I am a developer, I was talking more of short-term testing of bugfixes, regression testing, and other such things that might dissappear by the time the milestone is released. :-) This goes to show that people can have different definitions of the same thing.

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[netdemonboberb]

Sorry, I meant "he means".

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[sebol]

The original plan is

0.6 -> 0.7. -> 0.8 -> 0.9 -> 1.0

but during 0.8 , there are many bugs
so.. there are 0.8.1
but the after 0.9 it still many bugs...
then is become 0.9.1 0.9.2 0.9.3 etc..... til now 0.9.7

but if on the early stage, developer slowing down the number..
0.6 -> 0.6.1 -> 0.7 -> 0.7.1 -> 0.8 -> 0.8.1 -> 0.9 ...
(increament 0.x is when new feature added)

i think current of mozilla is just 0.9

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[Compenguin]

not quite
M1->M2->M3->...->M15->M16->M17-& gt;0.6*->M18->0.7->0.8->0.8.1->0.9- >0.9.1->0.9.2->0.9.2.1*->0.9.3->0.9 .4->0.9.4.1*->0.9.5->0.9.7

*=Mozilla-Netscape branch, continuation of previous release branch but released after following version.

And there are still new features thrown in occasionally and 0.9.7 is alot more solid than 0.9

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[Compenguin]

not quite:
first there were Milestones 1-17 then M17 was continued into 0.6 (Netscape 6.0 branch) and released after the M18 branch was released. After that it continued with 0.7, 0.8, 0.8.1 and 0.9.0 from there thare are three types of releases 0.9.[odd] (regular branch), 0.9.0[even] - regular branch to be made into a netscape release, 0.9.[even].1 - netscape branch released a few days after next odd.

Re:Mozilla is great and all, BUT...

[csbruce]

Mozilla binaries are provided for testing purposes.

That seems like a bit of a backward strategy. The people who are most likely to download and run the milestone binaries are people, like me, who are using Mozilla in a production capacity. For this reason, the binary versions should be as heavily optimized as possible. Otherwise, it's unnecessarily slow for me and very poor advertising for the Mozilla project. Most people out there will think that Mozilla is simply slow, and not competitive with IE, never having seen an optimized build.

There should be a special build for people who actually want to run a test version. Most of us will just kill & rerun the program if it gets messed up.

what, no freebsd ?

[alphaque]

sadly, they dont yet have a freebsd binary download, as they did for 0.9.6.

with something which changes so much, downloading binaries makes a lot more sense than building from source each time. would sure help in the beta-testing and bug-fix process. additionally, the binary tarballs are smaller than the source distros, so that saves on some internet traffic.

wonder if anyone in the freebsd community would do this soon for 0.9.7 ?

Re:what, no freebsd ?

[asa]

Give it time, friend.

mozilla.org provies binaries for linux, mac (9 and X) and windows. Other builds (the dozen or so other platforms you're used to seeing at ftp.mozilla.org) are contributed by "platform champions" who take the time to make binaries so that you don't have to.

It's late in the week, christmas and the new year right around the corner. Give folks a little time (usually only a matter of days) to make those builds and send them in to mozilla.org.

Or you could do one better and make a build and contribute it to mozilla.org sooner. See Building a Mozilla distro for tips.

--Asa

Re:what, no freebsd ?

[Metrol]

sadly, they dont yet have a freebsd binary download, as they did for 0.9.6

Umm, so why not just pull down the latest nightly build for FreeBSD? Moz is getting them up there perty darn regular now. Heck, it's more up to date then 0.9.7! Just untar that bugger into your home directory.

gzip -dc mozilla-i386-unknown-freebsd4.4.tar.gz | gzip -xvf -
cd ~/mozilla
./run-mozilla

It's even a faster install then a package. This is what I'm using at this very moment until the port gets completed. Wanna work 0.9.7 into Galeon's compile and all when it's ready.

Re:what, no freebsd ?

[alphaque]

Umm, so why not just pull down the latest nightly build for FreeBSD? [mozilla.org]

that's good advice. didnt know they did nightly builds for freebsd though. in fact, this is the only sensible answer to this thread, the rest being mindless flamebait which should be moderated as so.

thanx.

Re:what, no freebsd ?

[Metrol]

The other thing to keep in mind here is the amount of time involved with creating a port. Especially one like Mozilla. Don't know about you, but on here Mozilla takes ages to compile. Far longer than even a make world procedure. In order to make the port, the maintainer has to essentially compile it twice over at least. Once to create the proper pkg-plist file, and the other for testing it out. If that wasn't enough, then you need to make sure the "make deinstall" works properly to remove all the installed files. None of this includes the time to work in any patches, or what happens when things don't work as expected the first time.

It's clever stuff, even for the very experienced folks putting out most of the ports. sobomax is the fella that normally does up Mozilla, as well as a huge chunk of the FreeBSD ports tree. Busy darn fella from the looks of things. He used to be the sole maintainer for all of the Gnome install.

Anyway, I thought I'd mention some of this here as it's common to be a little impatient with the time it takes to get a port out. I know I sure can be! Thing is, with these rather complex ports there's a lot of testing and such that needs to go into them. Let's also not forget what time of the year it is.

Mozilla

[SuperDuG]

I really am trying to find a good reason to even keep netscape on my box anymore. If there were just a good repository of plugins Mozilla would be the best damned browser available ... I would compare it to Netscape, but it has obviously surpassed netscape so I will compare it to the next best thing. I think it definantelly holds its weight against IE ... In fact with all the new integration ... I think it beats IE ... all we need are the plugins ... and we're set ... at least crossover has started to help ..

Re:Mozilla

[IHateEverybody]

I really am trying to find a good reason to even keep netscape on my box anymore. If there were just a good repository of plugins Mozilla would be the best damned browser available ... I would compare it to Netscape, but it has obviously surpassed netscape so I will compare it to the next best thing. I think it definantelly holds its weight against IE ... In fact with all the new integration ... I think it beats IE ... all we need are the plugins ... and we're set ... at least crossover has started to help ..

I'm inclined to agree. With the Quicklaunch option enabled, Mozilla is faster than IE on my system. I'm loving the new tabbed browsing. It's great for keeping my place on sites like Slashdot where there are a lot of links to outside sites. Mozilla's cookie management and form management is wonderful. And I'm really starting to like its sidebars and its handling of bookmarks.

Re:Mozilla

[DennyK]

Just curious...what plugins are you having trouble with? Mozilla adopted all of my Netscape plugins without a hitch; just copy over the files from one Plugins dir to the other. It's fine with Java, Shockwave/Flash (before I deleted it anyway), Quicktime, Crescendo, and a handful of others that I don't remember off the top of my head. Never had any problems with plugins before (or at least, not that didn't show up in N4.7 also...)

DennyK

Re:Mozilla

[bn557]

The ONLY reason I still use Netscape on my box is that I know like a quarter of a million people who use Aol and the way that AIM integrates with netscape is pretty nice. I'm sure that you could hack it so it was part of mozilla, but I'm lazy.

Pat

Re:Mozilla

[netdemonboberb]

I am a mozilla developer, and I use both Netscape 6 and Mozilla. Most of the time, though, I use Netscape for browsing because there is a stability factor in the fact that I am not constantly changing it, editing the source, downloading new nightlies, etc. I have 4 versions of Mozilla on my disk usually at once, along with Netscape 6:
1) Source tree for hacking
2) Binary tree for hacking the chrome
3) Binary tree of a recent nightly to keep track of feature progress
4) Latest milestone release

I use Netscape 6 for browsing because I am not constantly editing, hacking, crashing, replacing, or deleting it. I started doing this last year when downloading a new version of Mozilla might mean that your profile doesn't work anymore.

I imagine for people who don't work on the Mozilla project and don't do what I do, it might be better just to get Mozilla and forget Netscape altogether.

There are some advantages to getting Netscape 6 instead though. It has better plugin support from companies such as Macromedia, integrated AIM, has been more thoroughly tested (as it comes from a milestone branch), has spell-checker, is made to be easier to use than Mozilla, has a better help system, is more polished and attractive, and should generally be more stable and functional - although this is not always the case.

Some disadvantages of Netscape 6 are that it is a much larger download, more bloated, always a couple months behind Mozilla in terms of features, doesn't have IRC Chat (though this may change in the future), has a somewhat quirky installation server (though this should change too), has a private bug database, and comes with a lot of bundled programs which people might not want.

Therefore, it all depends on your preferences which program you use. If you are an advanced user, then Mozilla might be all you need. For the average user, though, Netscape 6 would be what I would recommend. I might also recommend always having up-to-date copies of both programs, and using the one you like the best. Remember, as Mozilla has few users compared to Netscape, the web might not be always written with Mozilla in mind. Therefore, there might be sites that - for instance - sniff for Netscape 6 but not for Mozilla, or plugins that only work on Netscape 6.

Re:Mozilla

[DodgyGeezer]

Quicklaunch is a dirty little hack to get around the real problem: slow start-up time. If Mozilla's state gets screwed up, I now have to go and kill it in task manager as it never exits when Quicklaunch is enabled.

Re:Mozilla

[IHateEverybody]

Quicklaunch is a dirty little hack to get around the real problem: slow start-up time. If Mozilla's state gets screwed up, I now have to go and kill it in task manager as it never exits when Quicklaunch is enabled.

This is true but I don't worry about it too much these days. The latest Mozilla releases have been quite stable on my system and I can always disable Quicklaunch if that changes in the future so I don't really care. In any case, I see Quicklaunch more as a dirty little hack to get around the fact that unlike Microsoft, the Mozilla team can't "integrate" its browser into the OS for faster start-up time. :-)

Re:Mozilla

[dunkelfalke]

it's actually quite an easy question. mozilla integrates mail&news, irc, tabbed browsing and some other goodies while ie does not integrate anything. outlook express is an external program.

Re:Mozilla

[harimandir]

It's not a troll, note that I'd also LOVE this wonderfull opensource browser to surpass IE. But in my opinion, it's still not the case today, and just saying "IE sucks, mozilla rules !", is nothing but refusing to face reality, and of course, it will never make mozilla better. The sad reality is : - Mozilla is SLOW (even on awesome hardware). And it's, btw, nearly not usable at all on 2-3 years old hardware. - Mozilla is UNSTABLE, and still crashs a lot. - Mozilla's JAVA support is ... i have no word to describe that, a total HORROR ? Now i reckon i've never looked at the source, and i'd be curious to see why this piece of software is so heavy and slow (could it be GTK ?). But despite that, this is the browseer i use, and i'm very happy that from releases to releases it becomes better and better. The progresses that have been done are very big, but a lot of things remains to be done, and the road is long. Viva mozilla

Re:Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a mozilla developer

Yeah you are but I checked out your bugs and noticed you on IRC and it seems that you are too cocky and annoy the shit out of everyone there. Not trying to start a flame post here, but stop trying to give a feeling of authority. Just because you are a Mozilla developer doesn't mean you're a good one.

Hell, I can fix a spell error too and say I'm a Mozilla developer....

Re:Mozilla

[Samuel Hughes]

That's exactly what IE does, too, except you can't turn it off.

Re:Mozilla

[draxil]

Mozilla did used to be slowish, now is amazing. I can't run IE on linux at home and on windows at work.
I can't see any argument nowadys for IE apart from that mozilla uses extra resource under windoze. But to be quite honest the overhead of windows itself is hideous! So I am still better off with mozilla.

Re:Mozilla

[tomstdenis]

What mozilla seriously lacks is good filters for usenet/email.

I think IE wins that battle hands down since it catches virtually all usenet trolls and email spam with the filters I set up.

Re:Mozilla

[Orp]

For me there's only one thing that keeps me using Netscape 4.78: Roaming Access.

Until it gets into Mozilla I'm sticking with 4.7.

Re:Mozilla

[cetan]

Email filters work fine for me, but for usenet, I don't even see where the option to filter is available. Aside from "ignore this thread" that is.

But as for email, I'm not sure what more can be done. You can set up as many filters as you want for each account...

Re:Mozilla

[Darren Winsper]

Err...no. Mozilla does not load the mail&news or IRC components at startup. Some parts of the editor are loaded because they're used for input boxes.

A quick way of showing this, compile Mozilla without mail, measure the load time. Now, compile Mozilla with mail, measure the load time. There is virtually no difference.

Re:Mozilla

[tomstdenis]

IE supports other esoteric filters...

for example

if TO: doesn't not contain _____
if the size is ____
if it has an attachment _____

That means I can setup IE to delete all emails with attachments from people I don't know. [for instance].

And for USENET you're right there are no filters in Mozilla. That's a pain in the buttocks!

Other than that Mozilla is nice.

Re:Mozilla

[Christopher Whitt]

Maybe I'm missing exactly what you're talking about, but Moz on Windows has had a taskbar applet for months now. Right-click(or secondary-click) on that applet in the taskbar and you can exit Mozilla entirely, and/or disable quicklaunch.

Christopher

Re:Mozilla

[Progoth]

Because explorer and internet explorer are the same, or practically so. And explorer's loaded on startup (it's your shell). Ever started up IE while using LiteStep? yeah. Anyway I believe windows loads things like mshtml.dll at startup, that's integrated. It would be like mozilla loading all of Gecko at startup.

Re:Mozilla

[cute-boy]

For the last couple of months I'd been using Moz 0.94, until in a moment of boredom I decided to download Netscape last week.

I find NS6.2 is

(a) lot faster than Mozilla (0.94) when it comes to clicking on menu's etc. and the install process was smooth and easy.

(b) a lot less likely to eat all my memory up after a few days of operation

(c) have not seen a segfault in a week since install.

(d) doesn't crash on some web sites, necessitating me to move to Opera to perform some tasks.

Once mozilla has the stability and performance I need I will go with that for ideological reasons, but for now, NS6.2 is filling a big gap in Linux browser software.

Peace 2002

Richard

Re:Mozilla

[cetan]

"doesn't contain" is very much an option.

There's also a "customize" option where you can enter in /any/ info from an email header to allow or deny.

from the release notes "What's New"

[asa]

What's New In This Release

• The Labels feature in Mail&News is now fully implemented. Organize your mail messages with the following new features:
  • Add labels to messages via context menus or the Message menu.
  • Clear labels from messages.
  • Change description and color of the labels via preferences (Edit | Preferences | Mail & Newsgroups | Labels). Five different labels are supported.
  • Add filter rules to set labels to spec.
• Mozilla Mail&News now supports basic S/MIME functionality although the UI is still incomplete.
• The Document Inspector is now enabled in complete installations. The DOM Inspector is a tool that can be used to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. The DOM hierarchy can be navigated using a two-paned window that allows for a variety of different views on the document and all nodes within. If you're using the Mozilla installer, be sure to switch from typical, to complete or custom install to install the DOM inspector and JS Debugger.
• The Mac OSX toolbar collapse button is now implemented. Press this button in the title bar to toggle display of toolbars.
• The latest and greatest ChatZilla 0.8.5 is now shipping in Mozilla.
• Springloaded folders -- Dragging and hovering over a bookmark or message folder will expand the folder.
• Mozilla works again on Mac OS 8.5.
• Mozilla now supports shortcut icons (a.k.a favicons) and custom page icons in bookmarks and in the personal toolbar.
• If you type into the URL bar while a page is loading, your text is no longer overwritten when the page load completes.
• The sidebar now has a Close button.
• Print preview is now available on Macintosh.
• Mozilla now has support for digest access authentication.
• The Save Page operation now also saves images, stylesheets, objects and applets included in the page.
• Mozilla now supports the longdesc attribute of the img tag. The longdesc attribute contains a link to a file describing the image in detail, for those times where the image cannot be downloaded. To view the longdesc, right click on an image, click 'properties' in the context menu, then click on the description url in the properties dialog.
• Mozilla has a new advanced preference panel for fine-grained JavaScript control. For instance, you can disallow pop up and pop-under windows without turning off JavaScript altogether.
• When a page using a strict document type declaration (e.g. HTML 4.01 Strict) links to an external style sheet (using <link>, @import, etc) Mozilla will only load the style sheet if it is served with a MIME type of "text/css". Style sheets served with other MIME types, like text/plain, application/x-pointplus, etc. will not be loaded. To add the proper css mime type to an Apache web servers, add "text/css css" to the system mime.types file. Or if you can't do that, add "AddType text/css .css" to your .htaccess file.
• 
  
  --Asa

Re:from the release notes "What's New"

[MadCamel]

New features AND less bloat. It loads up faster on my machine and it also appears to use less memory. I like this trend in development.

Re:from the release notes "What's New"

[Satai]

* If you type into the URL bar while a page is loading, your text is no longer overwritten when the page load completes.

This alone is worth the upgrade, in my book... I hadn't realized until now how much the *shudder* other way of doing it pisses me off...

Re:Goody Goody

[flacco]

Ooh Wow, the lastest version of a buggy, slow, bloated browser! I can't wait to downgrade my system again!

Ooh Wow, another Microsoft indentured servant!

It's obvious you haven't used Mozilla recently (like, the last three releases). Fantastic standards-compliant browser with excellent USER-FRIENDLY - as opposed to ADVERTISER-FRIENDLY - customization and privacy options.

And on my system, using Mozilla's quick start option, it loads FASTER than IE.

I'd love to chat, but I'm gonna rush off to get the new release!

favicon

[Daspek]

wow. now i can finally create one and avoid shtuff like
198.236.22.34 - - [21/Dec/2001:10:27:47 -0800] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0" 404 272
in my http logs, without feeling bad for catering only to windows ie users.

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

Re:favicon

[krackbebe]

Oddly, KDE's Konqueror makes heavy use of favicon.ico. *shrug*

Re:favicon

[Laven]

So does Opera 6 preview in Linux.

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*

Re:favicon

[weave]

You can turn it off in the preferences. It's called "web site icons." Try that in IE.

Re:favicon

[epsalon]

Or, you can make it a PNG image, so only Mozilla shows the icon and the IE users won't see it.
Also, you won't have to create your icon in a M$ format.

Re:favicon

[netdemonboberb]

Create the favicon, but please also put the in your pages so that eventually browsers will stop searching for favicon.ico. Microsoft created this mess and hopefully it can be fixed. Also, by using the method, you can have different icons on different parts of your site. Unfortunately, "shortcut icon" (also started by Microsoft as a response to complaints about logs) is not proper use of the link tag. It is saying that this is both a shortcut and an icon.

Evangalism bug for the method:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110296

Re:favicon

[Thornae]

That was a most informative little read, that link was. I've been wondering about where those cute little pictures came from since I recently started using .9.6 (along with Opera).

Although, I must say that with tabs enabled (and who could blame them for copying this from Opera =), the slashdot icon really doesn't look that different from the default green slashy thing...

Anyway, I know I'll be moving up to .9.7 as soon as the FreeBSD port of it happens. Opera, for all its benefits, doesn't seem to handle popunders as elegantly. (To be fair, though, I am using their 6.0 beta release).

I look forward to reading the finalised article.

Re:favicon

[archen]

well avoiding it is simple:

$ touch favicon.ico

Tadah..

Didn't think it would come to this

[Pussy Is Money]

Frankly I began to get doubts about whether Mozilla would ever get anywhere. Even though I pretty quickly ditched NS 4.7 in favor of Moz. Or perhaps I came to that conclusion exactly because of the experience. Tried galeon back then but it was very fussy and not very stable.

But the 0.9 releases of Moz have shaped up very impressively; add the 1.0 Galeon release and it's almost flawless. Useful window management (remember, where the computer is used to help you manage your windows) with multiple desktops and Galeon's fullscreen mode make an excellent browsing platform indeed.

Re:Goody Goody

[randomtangent]

I just started using Mozilla with 9.5 and from the last ten minutes of playing with 9.7 I've seen a few good fixes. it no longer choked on a javascript open window link that made 9.6 hang instead it gives a nice error message. I can now get rid of the side bar that I don't use too.

If the improvments and bug fixes keep coming 1.0 will rock

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.

Re:mod this the fuck down

[asa]

> KARMA WHORE!

Um, that's my text. I'm the co-author of the release notes and the originator of the what's new section. I would think that I'm allowed to post that here and save a bit of load on our releases page (not to mention the added convenience for /. readers).

--Asa

*drooling over this feature*

[Misch]

I know, it's beena round, but I'm happy to have this feature:

http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.7/#new

Mozilla has a new advanced preference panel for fine-grained JavaScript control. For instance, you can disallow pop up and pop-under windows without turning off JavaScript altogether.

I'd still like to have site-by-site preferences wihtout having to edit the prefs.js file, but, what can you do? (i know... i know... write the damn code yourself...)

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[ender81b]

OPera has had this feature for awhile, and unlike mozilla, doesn't take 35 seconds to load..

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[Shdwdrgn]

OK, this is just too cool! I hit all this sites I know have pop-ups... crack sites, free stuff, contests, etc, and nothing came up that shouldn't.

Mozilla team - You guys have a HUGE thank you coming from me! Thank god for software which is written by the people who use it.

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[sporty]

Maybe I'm just still waking up, but I've been looking for this feature for 30 minutes (after I've installed .9.7) and can't find it. Is it flaw that I can't find it under Prefs->Advanced? It does let me toggle JS all together but nothing else.

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[arkanes]

Opera actually doesn't - you can disable pop-ups, but you can't do things like just disable popups on page load, which is much more useful.

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[Grandpa Jive]

Edit-Preferences, click on the + next to advanced, Scripts & Windows.

It is a global modifier, but it looks like they may impliment a per-site configuration, like they do with cookies. Which would be excellent.

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).

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[archen]

being able to disable "change status bar text" is worth this update by itself if you ask me. It was cute when it first came out, but now days I really HATE sites with annoying moving status lines that don't let me see where in the hell a link goes.

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[Misch]

It's implemented on a per-site basis, it's just not in the User Interface yet. It's existed since at least 0.9.4.

http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.4/#setp refs

Re:*drooling over this feature*

[Misch]

And here it is... http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/component s/ConfigPolicy.html

REALITY CHECK TIME

[darkPHi3er]

FOR THE RECORD:

1. i use mozilla

2. i like mozilla (mostly more than exploder 6)

3. i hope mozilla succeeds past ALL our wildest expectations

BUT.

the news we NEED to hear isn't about release candidates

THE NEWS WE ALL NEED TO HEAR ABOUT MOZILLA IS THAT AOL AND/OR SUN AND/OR IBM AND/OR EARTHLINK AND/OR the EU AND/OR CHINA or ???????

is going to adopt mozilla as its mandatory standard, at the expense of other browsers...

'cause other than that we're all a bunch of ICU nurses/doctors playing a Dead Pool bet

sorry!

REALITY BITES!
......

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME

[asa]

THE NEWS WE ALL NEED TO HEAR ABOUT MOZILLA IS THAT AOL AND/OR SUN AND/OR IBM AND/OR EARTHLINK AND/OR the EU AND/OR CHINA or ???????

Amen! I'd love to hear that news. Making Mozilla better gets us closer to hearing something like that. There are lots of ways that you can help to make Mozilla better. See getting involved page for some of them.

--Asa

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)

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME

[kubla2000]

But is it ready?

No. it's at version 0.97. Wait for 1.0. That will be ready. Will it be free of bugs? Probably not. Will those bugs be resolved more quickly than those on closed-source browsers? yes.

If you're talking ideology, why on earth are you running windows at all?

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME

[draxil]

That is such a trollish thing to say. Mozilla si amazing, konquorer is nicew for people who choose KDE. Making all athoratitive statements like that leads only to flame wars and not better browsing.

Konquorer for windows could be a good idea but Mozilla is already there and personally I think it's all you could need (except possibly galeon!).

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME

[boopus]

Because I only wish I could be an idealist 100% of the time.

Re:what, no freebsd ? (and favicon.ico)

[MavEtJu]

That there sometimes is, or isn't, a release for FreeBSD is confusing.

If you see the time-scale it came in the ports-collection for the 0.9.6 release:

ftp.mozilla.org: Nov 21 01:10 mozilla-source-0.9.6.tar.bz2

In the ports-collection: Revision 1.74 / [...], Wed Nov 21 16:27:41 2001 UTC (4 weeks, 2 days ago) by sobomax: Update to 0.9.6. [...]

That's the same day!

Please wait a couple of days and get it from your own ports-collection or download it in binary format from ftp.freebsd.org (or your local mirror) in /pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/www.

About favicon.ico, I've written a small manual how to make them in a unix-environment

Mozilla runs Netscape plugins

[kimihia]

Copy the files from your "plugins" subdirectory for Netscape to the "plugins" subdirectory for Mozilla. They will work. I've been running Quicktime (under Windows) and Flash with no problems.

Well, I did have one problem ... where I forgot to copy the Quicktime 5 plugin over the Quicktime 4 plugin, and it would crash when the page was unloaded. That was fixed by getting the plugin version to match the DLLs it was linked against. Doh!

Re:Mozilla runs Netscape plugins

[SparkyMartin]

I don't have a "plugins" dir since I don't have Netscape installed. Where can I get & install the plugins without having Netscape?

Excellent.

[SaDan]

What an outstanding browser, regardless of the OS you run it on!

Mozilla is good stuff... Keep up the great work.

Re:Excellent.

[SaDan]

It's got to be a good browser to make up for that POS Linux you use it on.

I don't use Mozilla on any point of sale machines... I don't know what you're referring to. Sorry.

Re:Excellent.

[Cloud K]

Except if you run it on BeOS. Then it may be good, but it's sloooooow!

(Yeah I know, Be is dead anyway)

Thanks

[Pussy Is Money]

Thanks to all at Mozilla, Asa, Brendan, Seth, Steve, Dave, Boris, Navin, Brian, Peter, Mike, Simon, timeless... Etcetera. We know who you are. We can see the ruthless triage and the late nights, the cross platform blues. X font handling. Sorry for doubting you in the past guys. Maybe ultracapitalism, anarchy and Internet Explorer will not rule after all. And the beast shall multiply a thousandforth, eh? And the followers of Mammon shall tremble? I better find a new job

Re:Dammit! I *just* downloaded 0.9.6

[asa]

I bet they're releasing the software during the Pacific Ocean timezone to avoid the slashdot effect, cowards).

I'm sure you said that with a wink, but in case not I'll tell you why we release software late in the evening on Fridays. It's because we bust our butts all week trying to get it wrapped up before the weekend. If we work hard and luck is with us we get it out late in the day Friday. If we run into unexpected problems then it's sometime the following week. Fortune smiled on us this milestone cycle and I think we've got something really good to offer (and on time too ;-)

--Asa

S/MIME Support

[Alan]

OMG! Finally! Thankyou mozilla devs for getting this in, it is the one final thing that means I can get rid of crappy ol' netscape 4.x! Those of us stuck with email that is required to be encrypted (company mail etc) and who are linux users can now leave the realm of netscape 4.x!

The UI is still very incomplete. It didn't seem to want to let me sign or encrypt email (which sucks) but I could read it, view my certs, and do other basic operations, which is all I need. The encrypting of mail is of course still needed, but I'm going to guess that the ui glitches (the menu item not recognizing that I'd selected "always encrypt") are going to be resolved in .9.7.1 or nightly builds.

Again, great job mozilla! Thank you from this linux + s/mime user!

(and no, the boss wouldn't let us just use pgp/gpg....)

Re:being off-topic is great and all, BUT ...

[RLiegh]

Well, they are sometimes a useful gauge as to who has been around a little longer. Agreed, that can't be the only determining factor, but there doees seem to be some evidence of this. *cough*

Not necessarily; I lurked and read for at least a year before signing up...then let my account slip for another 6 months before actually using it.

I don't believe the UIDs mean a whole f*k of a lot.

Re:being off-topic is great and all, BUT ...

[maelstrom]

I agree, look at me!

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.

Re:0.9.7 has new pop-up-stopper UI --

[jedrek]

Moz-team, but please, hire Jakob Nielsen before 1.0 ships.

So they can waste a lot of money on someone who can't even design their own page? I've seen at least 3 or 4 usability tests of useit.com and all of them said that it was the most difficult and hard to understand site of all the ones they used. Most of them stopped at 'I don't understand what this site is about.'

Re:0.9.7 has new pop-up-stopper UI --

[ReinoutS]

The same Kristoffer Bohmann who thinks IE is better
because it can be easily installed with Windows?

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:Dammit! I *just* downloaded 0.9.6

[Kris_J]

I assume you weren't with me yesterday or the day before when we were discussing Internet Explorer's latest security flaw here on /. and I was debating whether or not to install a new browser. I got Mozilla running on my PC for the first time about 6 hours ago.

Anyway, it's not supposed to be insightful, I'm just expressing frustration.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[RLiegh]

Really weird you should say that...I use IE only on NT; which I'm rarely even in. I use mozilla anywhere else and can't think of a single page I've come across that it won't load in.

Hell; my gf even did her online-banking in mozilla; now that is sweet. :):)

Re:Goody Goody

[VALinux]

I think IE's security flaws speak for themselves in this argument. Would you rather live in a house under renovation, with a few scaffolds and paint cans lying around, but otherwise locked up tighter than a bank vault, or in a beautiful finished mansion with no locks on the door and a giant neon sign outside that says "FREE STUFF HERE, PLEASE STEAL MY STEREO!"

I rest my case.

You Know What This Means?

[istartedi]

Only two more releases before they... umm... add another digit of precision to the version number. :)

For all platforms!

[ericdano]

I really like Mozilla on my Windows 2000 machine. It's almost as fast as IE 6 ( I think that is what is on the machine), and yet I somehow feel safer running something NON-microsoft.....

Mozilla on Mac OS X works great. Not as optimized as IE 5 is though. Soon hopefully......

Mozilla on OS 9.1 doesn't seem to work at all for me. About 2 weeks ago the nightly builds stopped working for my Mac....

I still think the thing that sells me on this browser is the intergration of email/browser. I can do without the composer part. In fact, I don't think I've ever run it in the Mozilla releases.

Now, to try getting Mozilla to work on my FreeBSD machine.......

Re:For all platforms!

[rebug]

Mozilla on OS X still sucks nuts, mostly because it looks like a freakin windows app.

Here we've got this amazingly cool window server that moz can't make use of.

Wrap a cocoa ui around gecko and I'm sold. Omni group, I'm looking in your direction...

Re:For all platforms!

[MavEtJu]

Now, to try getting Mozilla to work on my FreeBSD machine.......

cd /usr/ports/www/mozilla
make
make install

It's not that difficult :-)

Re:For all platforms!

[Pope]

I find IE on OSX slow and crappy, but then again I don't really use it 9 either. I've been an Opera addict since it came out for the Mac, and I've gotten used to non-bloat ;)

If you're in 9, use the releases, not the nightlies. I've done a lot of browsing with 0.96, and it was pretty darn solid. YMMV, etc.

Re:For all platforms!

[ericdano]

Yeah, it kinda does look like a windows app. Sorta. I like it because the IMAP email works a lot better for me than the mail application in OS X.

Though Omniweb is awesome.......

Re:For all platforms!

[rebug]

Yeah, "looks like a windows app" is pretty much the blanket bad UI criticism for us. It looks a whole lot more like a windows app than it does a Mac app.

I totally understand the need for a portable UI. The advantages are obvious. It's just sad to see such a great browser unable to use what is (in my opinion, natch) the best windowing system available.

Mozilla does have a nice mail client, but it's not enough to pull me away from Mail.app. I haven't checked out the nntp client, tin has been serving me well.

On the omniweb note, they seem to be making good progress, omniweb 4.1 is due at macworld sf, and ow 5 looks like it could give IE some serious competition.

Re:For all platforms!

[bunratty]

Mozilla on OS 9.1 doesn't seem to work at all for me. About 2 weeks ago the nightly builds stopped working for my Mac...

There were a few problems with the Mac OS 9 installers: first a missing license file, then a miscalculation of free disk space. Both problems have been resolved in Mozilla 0.9.7 and in the latest nightly builds.

Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[BrookHarty]

*Note, im talking about windows.

Ive been using mozilla for awhile now, and Im very very impressed with how it just gets better. It renders quicker the IE6 which is impressive, and the Tab feature (people call an Opera ripoff) is great. You can install it into a directory with an older version of mozilla, it doesnt create a new secure directory. That salt directory it made was rather annoying.

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.)

And at home, I cant use my online banking with it, but everything else seems to work fine.

Newsgroups reader seems to be work in progress, the nightly builds seem to have a few bugs. But I am downloading the daily builds and it could be me.

BTW, I could swear the 0.9.7 directory was on ftp.mozilla.org for the last couple days.

-
I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know. - Garry Shandling

Re:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[theMAGE]

You can't use online banking because your bank is boneheaded.

Of the banks I am working with, Wells Fargo doesn't work (not even with Netscape 6) while American Express, Discover and AT&T work just fine.

Re:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[hwaara]

Wells Fargo does work, but not completely. Currently there are three open bugs in our database having to do with this site.

Two of them are Evangelism bugs, which means that Wells Fargo are using non-standard (or even invalid) standards that Mozilla does not support (such as ).

See the bugs here:
* http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65110
* http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87351

And finally, there is one Mozilla bug that is triggered with this site, although quite minor; you are not able to tab through all the widgets on the site:
* http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114119

Hope this helps.

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:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[Yosho]

He (or she) likely means one for the e-mail client.

Re:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[Mike Schiraldi]

and the Tab feature (people call an Opera ripoff) is great.

Who's calling it an Opera ripoff? I started a thread about it on the Mozilla newsgroups way back in 1999.

Re:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[PMan88]

omniweb has a spell checker in it because it is a cocoa application. it is nice when filling out forms

Re:Mozilla is faster than IE6 now

[BrookHarty]

No, its not just a browser, its Email also. Im using Netscape 4.8 because I like it. Also, its nice to spell check input boxes. (Like Slashdot)

lol, spell checking everyones webpage, god, thats a job id hate.

What do you want to see for 1.0? We need input

[netdemonboberb]

Roadmap information:
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/mozilla-1.0.html
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html

On the Mozilla roadmap, it shows Mozilla 1.0 following the same start, freeze, release timeline as the rest of the builds. I personally feel it should be started, frozen for twice as long as usual with drivers@mozilla.org being the only ones who can approve changes, then submitted to longer-than-normal testing period.

I would also like to see better documentation, and improved features. I think this release stands for Mozilla, and it should be something Mozilla.org should be proud of. We shouldn't rush into it. I would be perfectly happy if it wasn't released until the end of summer, 2002.

What do you want to see in Mozilla 1.0? Do you agree it should follow an extended schedule compared to most milestones? What features would you like to see improved or added?

You can also talk on newsgroups like netscape.public.mozilla.general

Let's make Mozilla 1.0 fantastic!

Re:What do you want to see for 1.0? We need input

[sparroy]

Usability, usability, usability!

If one can navigate mozilla with the same amount
of keyboard shortcuts that Opera has, I will switch in no time.

Features like ctrl-J that pops up a list of links that can be used to navigate to spesific URLs,
different navigation keys for forms and links, not TAB for everything, etc - just see how Opera does it.

Re:What do you want to see for 1.0? We need input

[Rysc]

I'd like to see a "stop this loading" context menu item that would allow one to selectively prevent a given image, movie, flash animation, etc. from continuing to download. Something like this was availible and worked for images in a build I tried early last year, but now it seems to have totally dissapeared.

Beyond that, I don't think new features are critical. A few UI enhancements are in order, and fixing Mail&News until it's really usable is a must, but I consider Mozilla to be basically done right now. I've been using Mozilla as my main browser and my only newsreader since the first 0.9 release, and it works (nearly) perfectly. (Read "Nearly" as "sometimes my email gets oddly corrupted".)

Re:What do you want to see for 1.0? We need input

[KjetilK]

Is there a "features" bug list? I was thinking, we're all registered bug reporters (right?), and if there were an easily accessible list of major "feature" bugs, then we could just cast our votes for the bugs in that list.

Re:What do you want to see for 1.0? We need input

[bunratty]

Here's a list of some popular feature requests.

Re:Goody Goody

[hodeleri]

Um, since when did IE beat Mozilla here? IE doesn't even support <link>!

Re:Goody Goody

[cscx]

The mansion. I live in a good neighborhood.

What I would like

[nzhavok]

to see in Mozilla is the ability to have multiple windows open, some of which always load graphics, some of which never load graphics. Of course this should be accomplished via a toggle button like in Opera not options in the preferences and hitting the image button every time I follow a link. It would be good if there were similar buttons for Java/script/cookies as well.

Re:What I would like

[NoMaster]

The Preferences Toolbar allows you to do this, and more - allows/disallow custom fonts, custom colours, auto-load images, Javascript, Java, popups, onLoad popups, proxies, cookies, & XUL cache. I'm not at home to try it, but I'm pretty sure all these can be set on a window by window basis.

Re:What I would like

[michel v]

How about using the cool Preferences Toolbar from XulPlanet ? Now this is cool stuff, enabling/disabling images, fonts, colors, javascript, with one click ! michel v [cafelog.com]

Re:What I would like

[michel v]

Oh, you just beat me to it. Anyway, it is not on a window-by-window basis. If you disable colors, all your open Mozilla windows/tabs will have basic colors, for example. And it gets a bit confusing when creating new windows as the checkboxes aren't updated on all windows. But overall, what a huge usability fix. :)

Re:What I would like

[nzhavok]

Unfortunately this doesn't work on a window by window basis :-(

However it would be massively useful and just what I wan't if it did, but for the moment it's not much better than continuously hitting the images button.

Re:Goody Goody

[flacco]

I mean, jeez, the scrollbars don't even work right in the preferences dialog box.

So Mozilla is open source. So what? Who cares?

Well, I care. And I think your priorities are pretty lame.

As for "telling it like it is" - you're simply telling it as you see it. That's cool I guess. I just think standards compliance, openness, and privacy controls are more important than whether or not the Mozilla team has fixed the preferences scrollbar yet.

And cross-platform is pretty freakin cool too.

To each his own.

Thanks Guys

[krmt]

I just wanted to weigh in my thanks. I know it's reduntant and all, but I know the moz team reads the site (hi Asa!) and I just wanted to say thanks for the great browser. I use it in conjunction with Konqueror at home, and it's my browser of choice on my windows partition and at work. I've been amazed at how much it's progressed, and now my most waited for feature (javascript prefs panel) is in! Thanks you guys. I'm rooting for you!

New Mozilla just dropped my bookmarks!

[Jorrit]

I'm on linux and I had Mozilla 0.94 installed. I at least expected the Mozilla installer to keep my bookmarks but this was unfortunatelly not true :-(

This sounds to me like a serious bug. When upgrading I don't want my bookmarks to be removed. All other settings (like subscribed newsgroups, proxy settings, mail folders, and even the history) are preserved. But not the bookmarks!

Greetings,

Re:New Mozilla just dropped my bookmarks!

[cobar]

Mozilla does not drop your bookmarks. Go look in the .mozilla folder and you'll see they're still there (bookmarks.html) unless you deleted them. Chances are you chose the wrong profile when you started mozilla. Reinstall and choose the right one.

Re:New Mozilla just dropped my bookmarks!

[Jorrit]

Nope. I checked. The bookmarks.html file was empty. What is this about profiles? I didn't see anything related to profiles when installing Mozilla.

The bookmarks are lost for good though as the bookmarks.html in .mozilla/... was simply empty after starting up the new mozilla for the first time.

Note that I upgraded from 0.94 though. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Re:New Mozilla just dropped my bookmarks!

[netdemonboberb]

Interesting... I recommend before you do anything else with your bookmarks that you go on the mozilla newsgroups or #mozillazine at irc.mozilla.org and see if anyone can help you figure out what happened.

Re:New Mozilla just dropped my bookmarks!

[cobar]

I haven't lost my bookmarks in the past when I've upgraded, but it's possible there's a bug somewhere that's triggered by jumping that many milestones at once or some other problem. Sorry to hear that.

With profiles, whenever I install a new copy of mozilla it gives me a list of 2 users to start with (in my case, Default User and maxwell). The one that matches your username I believe is imported from Netscape 4, Default User is the one I created when I first installed.

BTW, with the profiles, you probably know this, but it's located off your .mozilla folder in a folder like akthsdf.wis or some random gibberish. So if you haven't looked in there, you should.

Mozilla has been released !

[J.D. Hogg]

It's true, I can prove it, I took a picture of it earlier this afternoon :

o . . _.-_
o __.'..o."-.
o . . . .,,,'
o. . ._-_ ^^;
o _-\" . `""
o. .,}

Just remember, pre-release software...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I just ask everyone to remember that Mozilla is pre-release software. Use it if you wish to, but *PLEASE* don't have a go at web developers if a site doesn't work - it still has many bugs, and some sites fail in it.

And before someone has a go at me for clearly not using standard code, I use XHTML 1.1 and CSS for layout. Some things still go wrong.

I'd also like to ask Mozilla to make it clearer on their site that it is pre-release - you can go to mozilla.org and download a release without ever seeing a clear message that says so.

Re:Just remember, pre-release software...

[sydneyfong]

even IE (dunno about 6.0 , but at least for 5.x) doesn't support all CSS2 stuff.

Even for ANY browser (heck, ALL software even) things do go wrong sometimes....

and remember Netscape 4.x? that is supposed to be release software rather than prerelease. But i see that mozilla is much more stable and usable than netscape. maybe slower, but the overall quality is much higher.

Yay! Drop lists work

[Malc]

This is the first version that I've tried with working drop lists. Until now, they had they same bug that the menus used to have: after clicking on them, they disappeared before the mouse got over the drop down part. I dunno if it was to do with my X-Mouse policy (TweakUI), but it made Mozilla extremely annoying. Thank you.

Re:Yay! Drop lists work

[asa]

I think that the last of the known xmouse bugs was recently fixed by dean tessman. Glad it's working for you.

--Asa

Re:Goody Goody

[phalse phace]

The Microsoft programmers behind IE are a talented bunch.

Well, if they're nearly as talented as those behind Windows XP, then you my friend are screwed!

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[asa]

kazaa.com has lame browser sniffing:

//redirect for people with a less than
//version 4 browser
var NS4 = (document.layers);
var IE4 = (document.all);
var ver4 = (NS4 || IE4);
if(!ver4)
location.href= "notsupported.htm";

and hotmail.com works just fine for me on mac, windows and linux mozilla 0.9.7 builds.

--Asa

News client: Multi-part binaries?

[DodgyGeezer]

Has there ever been any talk of support for multi-part binaries in the news client? All self-respecting dedicated news clients have this feature.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[flacco]

kazaa.com has lame browser sniffing

And from the "unsupported" page:

meta NAME="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0"

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[RLiegh]

Given that KazAa (wtf ever the capitalization is on that one) embeds spyware in w/ their program; I don't think I'm missing a whole hell of a lot there.

Esp if I'm not using winders in the first place. ;)

I *Do* need to test out musiccity.com out on mozilla, though (assuming I get 0.9.7 for windows) ....

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.

Re:Stable, Documented API

[hwaara]

We have this problem (with too large windows) in many places of Mozilla's UI. The preferences window's too big window is a well-known problem, to something we don't really have a fix for so far. :-(

See: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86305

Re:Stable, Documented API

[hacker]

It would be nice if anything on mozdev actually worked, including Pubmed. I tried Chameleon, Aphrodite, Pubmed. They load fine, I restart mozilla, and then... nothing. Under the Tasks menu is a new "sliver" of a menu, with no text, that I can click on, and there are sub options, also slivers with no text, which do nothing when clicked.

Without the ability to cleanly install or uninstall these widgets, Mozilla will always be felt to be sub-par. Even an 'about: tasks' with clickable XUL uninstall options would be nice.

Re:Stable, Documented API

[krmt]

Weird, Pubmed works fine for me. It's just another toolbar underneath my bookmarks. I haven't tried any of the other apps. I wouldn't be surprised though, if the fact that yours didn't work (I haven't updated Pubmed in a while, so I don't know) is that the API isn't stable. It could always be a chrome problem too, maybe try another skin? I don't know. Your bug definitely needs fixing though.

I firmly agree with you on the ability to easily remove modules. The install I found to be pretty easy (click the link, click ok, let it download, restart moz) but the uninstall definitely needs to happen. Either a prefs panel to do it or something in the tasks menu. Hopefully that wouldn't be too hard to add. Moz devs?

getting involved

[Analog]

Hmmm, practically the first thing it says on that page is to give feedback and bug reports. Been there, done that, didn't work. There's a layout bug in Mozilla that was introduced after 0.9.4 and has been in every release (nightly and milestone) that I've tried since then (just verified it's still in 0.9.7).

I was a good little Mozilla user and filed a detailed bug report, including instructions on how to trigger it. After several days, I got a suggestion to try a newer build and the bug was closed. Great. Way to go. I now have sites that validate perfectly at W3's validator (so bad HTML likely ain't to blame) and render perfectly in all other browsers including older versions of Mozilla, but are broken in the newest versions. I gotta hand it to you guys, I was really starting to think I could forget about all the stupid little workarounds I have to do to deal with stupid little layout bugs. So much for that.

Re:getting involved

[cobar]

Reopen the bug. Include a nice little note: "This bug is still present in current builds" and don't let them close it till it's fixed.

You failed to include why the bug was closed, which makes me suspect they had a valid reason for closing it. And not verifying it with a build from the exact day you filed the bug is an acceptable reason.

Last I heard, 300+ bugs were getting fixed a week. That's a lot of changes - some of which fix other bugs, so it's only reasonable for you to go d/l the latest build (making sure to note it in your bug report, so they KNOW that it's a valid bug) when you comment on a bug.

Re:getting involved

[Analog]

Reopen the bug. Include a nice little note: "This bug is still present in current builds"

Did that. Weeks ago.

You failed to include why the bug was closed, which makes me suspect they had a valid reason for closing it. And not verifying it with a build from the exact day you filed the bug is an acceptable reason.

It was a "works for me". Which means he either had a build somehow different than all the ones I tried it on, or he didn't follow the instructions I gave to trigger it. And yes, I verified it in and filed the bug report from the nightly I had just downloaded.

so it's only reasonable for you to go d/l the latest build (making sure to note it in your bug report, so they KNOW that it's a valid bug) when you comment on a bug.

I've downloaded the latest nightly, verified it's still there, and added a comment to that effect to the bug report twice since the original report. Nothing but silence on the other end. For whatever reason, they don't think it's worth fixing. Their call. I've found a workaround for it, and while it's kludgy and I shouldn't have to do it, it works. The main effects it'll have on me now is the time to put the workaround into my pages (which I can recover from the time that I won't be wasting filing bug reports) and that I'll no longer be recommending it to people who are upgrading their browsers.

Re:getting involved

[xah]

What was the bug number? If you can't remember, what was the description, or summary line, of the bug? I'll look into it personally.

Re:getting involved

[ReinoutS]

So post a link to the bug and ask people to vote for it. Last time I did that, the bug gathered ~50 votes in 12 hours!

Re:getting involved

[cobar]

Send me an email with the bug # and I'll try and get it verified.

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:A Question About Mozilla

[hwaara]

It's a really old bug, that now has a patch that may make it work soon for Windows... but it still needs patches for the other platforms.

The problem lies in platform-specific code, you see. :-(

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9449

Re:A Question About Mozilla

[Poligraf]

Thanks, Hekan.

But what about the bookmarks? Title bar problem is at most an annoyance whether the bookmark one is a show stopper for me; it prevents me from sending Netscape 4.72 to bite the dust.

Re:java OS_X ?

[Replicant7]

I am afraid java is not yet supported in OS X. you can watch the progress here in bug 88870.

Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[mpt]

Hi there. I designed the interface for Mozillas Javascript prefs back in September, and Doron Rosenberg has spent the past couple of months implementing it.

the wording needs a little work

Well, if you have any suggestions, do share them.

Can you guess which one stops pop-ups?

None of them do. Thats why there isnt a checkbox labelled do pop-ups. Blocking pop-ups in toto would be pretty useless, because it would stop a large chunk of the Web from working properly.

Think about it. <a href="http://foo.bar/" target="_new">foo</a> is a pop-up, and none of these prefs prevent that from working, because then the link would break completely nothing at all would happen when you clicked on it. <a onclick="javascript:window.open(whatever)">foo& lt;/a> is a pop-up, and none of these checkboxes prevent that from working either, for the same reason. (In both cases it would be nice if you could get the link to open in the same window rather than opening in a new window, but we dont have the back end to allow that yet.)

What one of these checkboxes does let you do is stop windows from opening by themselves based on a timer, or when you navigate to or from a page. Thats the behavior that annoys people the most, since the new window is usually of no interest to them whatsoever. And whats the label for this checkbox? (Drum roll please ) Open windows by themselves.

If you have a better idea of what to label that checkbox, Id be glad to read it theres been a lot of suggestions so far, but theyve all been either too wordy, too obscure, or (as in your case) just plain wrong.

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

Hah. I wrote to Jakob Nielsen a year or so ago, asking if he was interested, and he didnt bother replying. I guess whining about sucky Web sites (or sucky mobile phones) is like shooting fish in a barrel, compared to coming up with Javascript prefs your mother would understand.

-- mpt

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[rbeattie]

Just an attempt:

"Open windows by themselves"

could be

"Allow automatic pop-up windows"

26 characters Vs. 30... not bad.

The key is that 95% of the people would be looking for this option to stop "pop-ups", so there's little to no reason not to use that word. Yes it's not perfect, but that's why useability people freak out when programmers make dialog boxes, we're geeks. We think technically, not like a user. Give the users what they want.

As for Jakob Nielson, every /. user reading this should email that whiny bitch and tell him to put his efforts where his mouth is and contribute to Mozilla. (Don't get me wrong, I like Jakob and his site/opinions, but he IS a beeeatch.)

-Russ

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

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[Chuck Messenger]

If you have a better idea of what to label that checkbox, I'd be glad to read it -- there's been a lot of suggestions so far, but they've all been either too wordy, too obscure, or (as in your case) just plain wrong.

How about "Enable pop-ups/pop-unders"?

I think that would neatly capture the intent of this checkbox. In fact, what would be particularly nice about it is that, as time goes on, and other means are developed for defeating "pop-ups" (whatever people come to understand that to mean), it would be possible to roll that functionality into that pre-existing checkbox.

Actually, here's what I _really_ think. You should leave all that fine-grained JavaScript control stuff as it is, and where it is (under Advanced). What is needed is an "enable pop-ups/pop-unders" checkbox in, say, the main navigator preferences screen. This is a "digestified" function, i.e. it may do various things, which are not precisely-defined, but whose intent is to defeat what people commonly refer to as "pop-ups" or "pop-unders".

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[KjetilK]

(In both cases it would be nice if you could get the link to open in the same window rather than opening in a new window, but we don't have the back end to allow that yet.)

Yeah, if there is a bug filed for that, I'll vote for it... :-)

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[tinomeinen]

Open unwanted windows by themselves

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[jeffehobbs]

Well, for example, In MacOS X OmniWeb 4.1, the pop-up stopper preference text reads:

"Scripts are allowed to open windows:"

(and there are three choices)

* always
* only in response to a link being clicked
* never

and this seems pretty clear and straightforward to me. The word "scripts" could probably be changed to "web pages" or even "web sites" for better comprehesion by beginning users.

~jeff

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[The Pim]

Can't resist adding my 2c.

All of the entries after the first (I'm going by what the poster wrote; I haven't run 0.9.7 myself) can be read as if prefixed with "Scripts are allowed to ...". So make that the heading! "Scripts and Windows" makes little sense, since most of the entries are unrelated to windows. This change would require that "Enable Javascript" be moved to its own section, which seems appropriate anyway.

(I guess someone wanted "windows" in the heading so that people looking to disable ad windows would see it; but this is "advanced" configuration, and I think anyone going here would know that it's really a script preference.)

On to the original matter: "Open windows by themselves" is gratuitously ambiguous. "by themselves" seems to go with "windows", which could either mean that windows open in a separate part of the screen ("by" as in location"); or that windows spontaneously open without external cause ("by" as in agent). Neither one is really right.

If you change the heading as I suggest, it reads, "Scripts are allowed to open windows by themselves". This is an improvement, because "by" as in agent clearly refers to "scripts". But the "by" as in location interpretation is still possible, so it remains confusing.

"Scripts are allowed to open windows automatically" reads with no ambiguity to me, and seems no worse in any way. So I would suggest "Open windows automatically" as the text for the checkbox. "Open windows without user input" isn't bad if you want to be more explicit.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[hacker]

Hi there. I designed the interface for Mozilla's Javascript prefs back in September, and Doron Rosenberg has spent the past couple of months implementing it.

I have a suggestion for another interface for a 0.9.8 release; a UserAgent Editor. You would be surprised how intricate my junkbuster config is now with forged UserAgent strings so I can get into sites which simply block based on them (my bank now requires IE to do online banking, and nothing else will do. When I called them to let them know their previously working website was no longer working, they suggested I "upgrade" to Windows instead.. and I pay for this service?!). I should be able to selectively create/send/restrict my UserAgent string as sent to the remote system via a nice user-friendly UI that lets me hand-enter strings, or pass parts of my browser UserAgent across.

Just a thought...

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[Tony Shepps]

At one point Mr. Nielsen wanted something like $25K just to talk to people. I don't know if the bubble collapse changed any of that, but it seems like the guy is oriented around letting out just as much knowledge as will make him a valuable commodity.

Usability is such a weird thing, but it seems like it's something that's slowly infusing into the open source movement, which is great. It's one of those things that non-programmers can do if they have a knack for it. It's certainly one of those thngs that few programmers can do alone... programmers have to realize that they just think differently than the rest of the world.

None of this should take anything away from your accomplishments, mpt: I want to genuinely thank you for doing what you do. If it seems like /.ers are whiny about these things, well sure, what AREN'T we whiny about? The bottom line is that Mozilla is far, far better for what you have done. Thank you, thank you, a million times thank you!

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[SCHecklerX]

What about the preference to disable "Open on Load?" I've been using it, but it is not in the GUI. I don't want to disable the ability for javascript to open a new window, since there are sites that make legitimate use of it. What I *DO* want to disable is the ability for the bastards to open another window on opening or leaving their site.

Will this preference make it to the GUI?

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[Replicant7]

It's there actually. Just check Preferences -> Advanced -> Scripts & Windows -> Open windows by themselves and you will be rid of most annoying popups.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[slamb]

Well, if you have any suggestions, do share them.

I don't like the options stated here:

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

I propose instead:

Scripts and Windows
x Enable Javascript
Javascript code may:
x Open windows on page load/unload (pop-up and pop-under ads)
x Move and resize existing windows
x Change window ordering (pop-under ads)
x Change status bar text
x Change images (mouseover highlighting)
x Create and change cookies
x Read cookies

First, the other options definitely belong as a sub-item as the first one, disabled when it gets disabled. (If it's actually this way in the dialog, sorry, my Mozilla isn't quite new enough to have your feature. I'm going by the bug report.) There should be a little label to explain the wording of the subitems, since they are stated as what the code is doing ("open a window") rather than what you're doing ("allowing them to open a window").

Second, I really don't like the "by themselves". Obviously everything in Javascript happens because of some event firing. I think on page load/unload is more clear. (Or some other way of precisely stating what events you're talking about.)

Third, it has in parenthesis a common use of several features. This should give a better understanding of what you'll be breaking.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[HoaryCripple]

Ok, i like these too. So, which source file do I need to edit to change this? Even if the mozilla development team does not want to change the wording, at least I can do so for my parents and such.

Thanks for any information

crip

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

I think the "Open by themselves" nomenclature is great. I understood immediately which one to click to not be annoyed (or annoyed a little less) by exit pop-ups.

Let's go easy on the Mozilla team. They have fixed about a million (estimate) bugs this year...

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[err666]

This is what Konqueror has in its JavaScript settings:

Enable JavaScript globally [x]

Domain-Specific:
...
[Add] [Change] [Delete]

JavaScript web popups policy:
(x) Allow ( ) ask ( ) Deny

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[MemeTransport]

MPT, thanks for the hard work. As a web designer I've been delighted with Moziila for the last several milestones at least. Some of the javascript preference panels being suggested to you are very detailed with many choices. I'd like to suggest something simpler:

Omnigroup's Omniweb browser (for OSX) gives very simple choices:

Javascript is enabled disabled

Scripts are allowed to open new windows...

• always
• only in response to a link being clicked
• never

Advanced javascript preferences...

• do security checks
• display panel for errors
• show debugging console

Its clear and important stuff like "do security checks" are on by default.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[skt]

It is not just on page load / unload.. some popups / popunders are timed. The user does nothing to cause the new window to be opened.. thus the pref says 'Open Windows by themselves'. I do agree though that popups / popunders should be included in parenthesis, but the original option is worded pretty well.

And actually, the existing interface in 0.9.7 is:

Scripts and Windows
===================
[x] Enable Javascript

allow scripts to do the following:
[x] Open Windows by themselves
.
.
.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[slamb]

It is not just on page load / unload.. some popups / popunders are timed. The user does nothing to cause the new window to be opened.. thus the pref says 'Open Windows by themselves'. I do agree though that popups / popunders should be included in parenthesis, but the original option is worded pretty well.

I didn't know that, but I still don't like the "by themselves". All of these are happening as a result of an event. If the distinction is user input events vs. other events, maybe that should be stated clearly: "Open windows without user request"

If these are toggling a whole bunch of event types, I think there should be text that states exactly what it does. If it's too long or too technical to put as the text right next to the checkbox, that's fine. That's what "What's this?", tooltips, and Help buttons are for. In this case, it could be something like "When this is not selected, windows may not be opened during page load/unload or timer events. This stops pop-up and pop-under ads. Windows may always be opened during events corresponding directly to user input, such as mouse clicks or key presses."

And actually, the existing interface in 0.9.7 is:

[...] Allow scripts to do the following: [...]

Ahh, cool. I'm happy with that wording.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[mixmasta]

Hi, my 2 cents regarding wording in the preferences....

I would personally prefer something along the lines of:

--------------
x Disable window.open() on page load/unload
--------------

Simple, to the point, and relatively short.

Thanks for listening,

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[FyRE666]

How about "Disable scripted pop-ups (adverts)"?

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[benb]

> 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.

That's great. Maybe you want to come on board and implement it for Mozilla, or at least give a detailed plan for implementation?

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[TheSliver]

Since mozilla.org decided to licence under the GPL it effectively excluded me from development after some three years of moderate activity on my part.

The functional method I used (and there are a couple of alternatives) is to modify the window open backend such that it always opened the same window name (I think in my case _content, though I might be wrong about that), replacing whatever name was passed to it, or if no name was used, creating one.

This achieves the main aim, all window opens happen within the same window. Then you have to exclude the scripted opens for things like adverts and such so that your actual main content isn't obscured.

The current preference changes manage that. Personally I'd prefer a point and shoot method of collecting URLs that I didn't mind created popups in much the same way as having black and white lists (hmmm I don't think anyone ever got around to doing that either).

All of this kind of behaviour was meant to come out of changes in the security model so that it would be relatively straightforward and efficient to restrict any identified address from doing any except the user's desired behaviour.

To be honest I haven't kept close enough up to date to know if that fundamental change happened, if it hasn't though all such changes are going to be much harder than necessary.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[benb]

> Since mozilla.org decided to licence under the
> GPL it effectively excluded me

Ah, hi Simon! *g* :-)

> it always opened the same window name (I think
> in my case _content

Good idea.

> This achieves the main aim, all window opens
> happen within the same window.

Don't you break much other functionality, too, then, e.g.
- File|New Navigator Window
- context menu's Open Link in New Window
- opening Mailnews
- in Mailnews, standalone msg windows
etcetc.? I thought,m this were all implemented via JS's openWindow(). Or is that implemented via different code paths?

Does it work to open a javascript link which usually opens a popup via Open Link in New Window?

> Then you have to exclude the scripted opens
> for things like adverts and such so that your
> actual main content isn't obscured.

Yes, I see very odd behaviour creeping in here. Every unwanted popup you missed to exclude (the current popup ad blocker doesn't work in all cases) might result in the unwanted popup being loaded in the main window, replacing the main page. This will confuse users completely.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[David Ham]

Darn tootin', Mr. Shepps. Darn tootin'.

Re:Well go ahead, got any better ideas?

[TheSliver]

>Ah, hi Simon! *g* :-)
Happy New Year Ben

From what I remember as it was at almost the lowest point in creating a window (or reusing a current one), things like File New Window did fail (but then that also seems reasonable you can start a new browser instance for new windows).

In practical use the popups didn't seem to take over the main window content. It is a while since I did this though.

Re:Goody Goody

[cobar]

> The mansion. I live in a good neighborhood.

Until some robber happens to cruise through your neighborhood and sees your nice house and walks in the door :)

As Jack Handy once said: "I can envision a world entirely at peace. And I can see us invading that world, cause they'd never expect it!"

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[weave]

and hotmail.com works just fine for me on mac, windows and linux mozilla 0.9.7 builds.

Except for downloading attachments. This is a big one IMO since it appears to be a genuine cookie handling bug and not some quirk of hotmail.

Bug 105917. Target fix release, 0.9.9

Re:mod this the fuck down

[Anonymous Coward]

Go check www.mozilla.com.
Asa is one of the main developers, you dipshit.

small bug

[atif_ghaffar]

The scrollbar in the messagelist window is missing for me.

Anyone else seeing (I mean not seeing) this?

Snapshot

Other than that, its a vastly improved release.

kudos to mozteam.

Re:small bug

[Rysc]

Scrollbars in Mozilla (apart from the Big One in browser windows) have a habit of dissapearing at random times. Try resizing the window/dragging a sidebar/in some other way convincing it that it needs to rerender that section, and poof! the scrollbar is back. Twil be a miricle when this bug finally gets fixed.

Re:small bug

[atif_ghaffar]

thanks for your suggestion.
The resizing did fix it.

Re:small bug

[hwaara]

Yes, it will be fixed in Mozilla 0.9.8 -- it didn't catch the 0.9.7 train, sorry.

See: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=111101

Some things about Mozilla are broken now.

[HanzoSan]

This site Chess Line totally screws up now in the newest mozilla

Re:Some things about Mozilla are broken now.

[michel v]

A quick look at the code shows these lines:

Chess Line - play chess online for freeby
Antonio Vilei

Now, this is wrong mark-up. And I suppose such basic error means there's more errors in the rest of the code.

Sorry, if the guy can't code sh1t, then it's not the browser's problem. :)

Re:Some things about Mozilla are broken now.

[arkanes]

Well, aside from the way that it tries to open up full-page popunder adds, it renders fine for me. Exactly the same way Opera renders it, anyway.

QuickLaunch is the same hack Microsoft uses

[HanzoSan]

Please, a dirty hack is what everyone else is using too.

The only one who isnt is opera.

Re:QuickLaunch is the same hack Microsoft uses

[Brummund]

And the new Opera is gorgeous, especially with dynamically loaded Qt-libs and anti-aliasing turned on. (I'm a gnome-man, but it blends very good into my desktop.)

In fact, it's the first browser I've ever bought and I do not regret it.

The bookmark system is sane, and the possibility for "user-mode" (hit CTRL-g) is really handy for those awful designer-monkey-sites.

User-mode allows you to specify your own fonts, turn off tables, use your own stylesheet which will override the author's etc. When you want to switch back to the "design", just hit CTRL-g once more.

Also, it supports Netscape plugins, so you can have Flash, Java etc.

The browser is rather quick at rendering pages, and if you find something it doesn't render "properly" (a rare case for me, YMMV), you can file that as a bug.

The tech-support is excellent and the deveopers frequent their news-server.

The only thing I really miss on Linux is to be able to choose between MDI/SDI, but that will hopefully be implemented.

Check it out:

Opera on Linux

For you Debian-users who wants anti-aliasing:

$ apt-get install anti-aliasing-howto

Read it. (Heh, I even managed to get anti-aliasing
for GTK. Whooaa. :)

Be sure to download the dynamically linked version of Opera. Also, get the "msttcorefonts"-package for those MS-fonts, make sure freetype et al is enabled in XF86Config-4, and set the env-var
QT_XFT=true in the shell before launching Opera.

*Droooool*

(Ståle, if you're stalking me and reading this, thanks for showing me Opera on Linux :-)

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!

Mozilla isnt slow, XUL is slow

[HanzoSan]

Just like JAVa is slower than C.
Try using a native interface and Mozilla suddenly is fast. Try kmeleon or galeon

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.

Re:Goody Goody

[netdemonboberb]

I am a Mozilla developer, but I must give credit where credit is due. IE is a nice piece of software from a usability, appearance and stability standpoint. On the other hand, it is lacking in terms of standards compliance and number of features. I don't think its fair to attack the programmers for Microsoft because you don't like the company. They are just doing their job and following orders.

Moderated incorrectly

[netdemonboberb]

Whoever moderated didn't get the joke. He (or she) meant Mozilla "the beast" was released as you can tell by his ASCII art. Whoever moderated this to redundant probably thought he was talking about the software being released.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[mrscorpio]

Well unfortunately, until my credit union updated their website, it was only compatible with IE for online banking. Now it works with NS 4.7x + 6.2. It conveniently ignores 6.0 through 6.1 :)

Chris

Re:WARNING: Imposter

[Anonymous Coward]

See: http://www.mozilla.org/about.html

Asa is one of the Top Men behind mozilla.org

This isn't accurate

[BillyGoatThree]

I can't verify most of this list, but this one:

Mozilla now supports shortcut icons (a.k.a favicons) and custom page icons in bookmarks and in the personal toolbar.

...is working even as I type into 0.9.6.

Mozilla Release vs. Mozilla Nightly

[Zach`]

Oddly enough, Mozilla crashed and burned after I installed the 0.9.7 release (win32). It gave me an error when I first tried to launch it that "a device attached to the system is not functioning" and that there was a file missing "linked to export XPCOM.DLL."

So I installed Linux. Haha, no. I first searched the bug database and didn't find anything on either of the error messages. Uninstalled via Control Panel, which gave me another error, something about an uninstall log and the Registry. I said, screw it, and just deleted the c:\program files\mozilla.org folder. Wasn't ready to give up yet, so I went to mozilla.org and downloaded the latest nightly build.

Installed that and Mozilla has been working perfectly. It's fantastic, and my father-in-law, who was very fond of Netscape and has suffered the past year and a half with IE, absolutely loves it.

I'm not sure what the differences between the 0.9.7 release and the nightly build I downloaded are; I'm just happy I got the browser to work -- it's fantastic. If it's of any interest, when I was first downloading Mozilla, I used the 209kb net installer. It said it found CRC errors when it was verifying the files, but redownloaded them. Perhaps my problems stemmed from that... but the nightly is holding its own with IE right now (IMHO).

online banking ok

[gruntvald]

Once I was able to access wells fargo with mozilla, I quit using ie. There's some minor javascript stuff I have that doesn't work, but everything else is great. I'm just waiting for deployment kits, so I can slam it on the 50 W2K boxes I maintain. Only real gripe at this stage, after having used mozilla from early M releases (M8 I can remember, but I think I was using it before then, too) is lack of a pgp plug-in in the mail client. This has been the case for some time, though, and I'd gladly accept gpg, but I suspect that's not going to show up anytime soon.

Re:online banking ok

[bunratty]

The request for a PGP plug-in is bug 22687.

Ideal Release

[cafelatte]

The release date for this release is smack on the estimated release:
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
In the past, mozilla builds were never released on schedule. They seem to be getting it right now.

back button

[Larson E. Whipsnade]

Anybody else have the problem that hitting the back button while reading /. takes you to the top of the previous page instead of scrolling down to the section where you left off?

Re:back button

[ewan9]

Yes, it's very annoying.

Fortunately, I think they're finally fixing it.

See these:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1053 95
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1125 64

Re:back button

[dytin]

Unfortunately, the first bug that you listed, 105395, is marked as wontfix. This bug is most annoying. On my windows machine, I have 0.9.6 installed, and it is almost impossible to read long discussions on /. As a result, I have been hesitant to upgrade Mozilla on my Linux box. I was hoping that with this new release, this bug would be fixed, but it appears it hasn't. Does anyone know of a good workaround to this bug? Also, does anyone know why they won't fix the bug? I looked through the discussion on the bug page, but I couldn't find a good reason why they wouldn't fix it.

Re:back button

[ewan9]

Unfortunately, the first bug that you listed, 105395, is marked as wontfix.

Yes, but fix for the second bug is going to fix that too. Read the comments more carefully. I don't know of any workarounds, but I'm pretty sure that they are going to fix this. (This problem is due to no-cache directive on slashdot pages...)

Back button behavior?

[siglercm]

For me, the behavoir of the back button (or pop-up) has changed from 0.9.6 to 0.9.7. Previously, Back would take you back one frame in a website using (yuck) frames. Now it takes you back to the previous web site, totally off the one you're on. And I prefer the "back one frame" behavior.

Please tell me if I'm a doofus and there's a setting that controls this. I can't find any such thing. Or is this the "correct" behavior of the Back button? TIA.

Re:Back button behavior?

[bunratty]

It could be bug 102156.

Re:java OS_X ?

[marmoset]

anyone have java working yet, ANY hack out to get it working in OS_X ?

Actually, there is progress being made.
Here is a development plugin that supports some (but not all) java pages.

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).

Updated and Slashdot still looks the same...

[Quazion]

It looks like it boots faster though, but that could be my imagenation...

Quazion...

What I'd like to see...

[Stenpas]

From http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html: "Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness"

Right on. I think they got stability and correctness done right, because every webpage I've been to renders correctly and I've never seen a single bug for quite a few versions of Mozilla. The performance, well, to be honest, is kind of on the low side. And the memory useage is really on the high side. In my opinion, more speed and less ram-hungry are the only things it really needs.

Page icon support is indeed new in bookmarks.

[xdc]

Mozilla now supports shortcut icons (a.k.a favicons) and custom page icons in bookmarks and in the personal toolbar.

...is working even as I type into 0.9.6.

Although icons have been showing up in the address bar for some time, they did not appear in bookmarks until Mozilla 0.9.7. So asa's statement in the release notes is correct.

Re:Goody Goody

[geekster]

On the internet the world is your neighborhood.

Weird bug in this one

[SCHecklerX]

The past few nightlies, and also 0.9.7 now kill all the text in the UI (back, forward, etc buttons) after one run. Oddly enough, running as root here is fine. Could be a number of things. *sigh*. I really wish they'd stop breaking things that once worked.

Re:Freeze that Jelly

[SCHecklerX]

For your information 1586 bugs were fixed between the 0.9.6 and the 0.9.7 releases.

Too bad they introduced 3172 new ones, and broke 1586 things that worked before though. </not entirely sarcasm>

Finally, a Mozilla I can *use*!

[dangermouse]

I haven't had much luck with previous releases (or nightlies, for that matter) under Linux. Konqueror still holds down its position as my favorite browser over there, for a variety of reasons.

But I just got the 0.9.7 binary for OS X, and it kicks all ass. Finally, a Mozilla that is stable, fast, and featureful enough for daily use has been released... and I now have an outstanding (and [Ff]ree!) browser I can use on this OS.

Bye bye, IE. Bye bye, OmniWeb. Thanks, Mozilla team!

Re:mod this the fuck down

[Anonymous Coward]

then maybe you can get rid of the commie icons

eh?

[slittle]

IE shows PNG just fine..

Re:eh?

[epsalon]

In favicon? Are you sure?

Re:eh?

[archen]

no, IE only supports icons (.ico) for favicon. Besides which, if IE really supported PNG just fine, it would be able to show PNG with alpha transperency.

OSX Missing feature?

[sporty]

Odd..i checked there again and its not there. All I have is Cache, Proxies, Software Install and Mousewheel

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:native widgets?

[Ebon Praetor]

I don't think its just on Macs either. If I change the GTK widgets (or the colours on them) then they show up in Mozilla as well. The old 'clunky Mozilla' widgets still appear in Preferences, but there are native widgets when veiwing and dealing with forms in pages.

And I agree, hats off to them for not forcing me to theme yet another thing in the same way I have everything else themed.

Re:native widgets?

[tim_maroney]

The old 'clunky Mozilla' widgets still appear in Preferences, but there are native widgets when veiwing and dealing with forms in pages.

Hmm. That's the exact opposite of what I'm seeing on the Mac. I see Mozilla widgets in form pages, but (some) native widgets in Preferences and other dialogs. If the bug report said something about what the intent and effects of the change were, that might help make sense of this.

Tim

Re:Mozilla May Well Be Doomed.

[unapersson]

That's completely untrue and the very reason the original codebase (Mozilla Classic a.k.a Netscape 5) was thrown out. Mozilla has been written from the ground up specifically to support standards. And why doing things like adding support for the CSS2 selectors has worked so well.

Try this out

[brad3378]

I thought a lot of you might find this interesting.
In Windows 2000, I've checked my Hotmail account with both Mozilla and I.E. Surprisingly, Microsoft's own hotmail website works better with Mozilla than with their own IE browser!

Try it yourself when you get a bunch of messages that need to be deleted:
Check the checkboxes for the messages you want to delete. Mozilla will react instantly, while IE lags 5-10 seconds to react to the checkbox. Am I the only one who has that problem in IE at the Hotmail website?

This happens for me on a BP6 with dual 533 Celerons with 512 Megs of PC133 - Perhaps it's time to upgrade ;)

Re:Try this out

[ainsoph]

I cannot log into hotmail with mozilla.

Seems to not like my security settings :)

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.

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME...Head up your ass???????

[darkPHi3er]

"That is such a trollish thing to say"

Really? so if you pay any attention at all to ***REALITY****, which appears to escape you, you might have noticed the following:

1. The Linux market share on the PC desktop is so small to almost unmeasurable (as related HERE on /. a few days ago)

2. That a key component to getting mindshare on new desktop users or those desktop users who are thinking about getting away from Windoze is the browser and the related email/chat/IM clients

3. That a browser needs to support ALL the MIME data types that IE does AND offer a better browsing experience than IE, Zilla is close but not their yet

4. Every new generation of MS OS provides additional "lock in" from the OS to the hardware and the apps and that means that it becomes harder with each generation to offer an alternative paradigm and get it accepted....both O2K and OXP have substantially better OS integration than they have ever had...making a steeper hill for any other product to climb

TO THE *NIX POLITICAL CORRECTNESS BIGOT(S) who wrote the above post and the asshole who modded my parent post as "Flamebait"

"Making all athoratitive statements like that leads only to flame wars and not better browsing

NO, making rational discussive statements about the REALITY of a product leads to further discussion about the product

further discussion leads to an open exchange of viewpoints

and that can lead to involved parties reassessing their approach and priorities and, if they're smart enough, making changes that lead to an even better product

The Stallmanian Political Correctness, *NIX Style you would insist on leads to the inane belief that "If you build it, they will come."

Microsoft, whom i know very, very well, loves having fools and cheerleaders on other products development teams.....

....because while everybody on some other project is reassuring each other with heartwarming "Shit, man. This thing is Da Bomb!"

MS just quietly goes out and locks in another market.

From a market share point of view, if ALL the users and readers of /. went to Mozilla, Opera, NS 6.2, SmengeBrowse 3.1, whatever and NEVER used or discussed IE, EVER AGAIN...

MS would throw a party and have a large laugh at the people who don't seem to understand that they have just deprived MS of a whooping .001% of the total browser market

I have had 3 customers of mine call me in the last month INSISTING that they had to upgrade to XP NOW!

i explained to them that XP is pretty much a simple dot upgrade to 2K and there was absolutely no reason to upgrade if they were having no problems with 2K and that, in 2 of the 3 cases, that XP doesn't have certified drivers for some of their h/w...they all DIDN'T BELIEVE that XP isn't the "greatest new OS of all time" and that their systems wouldn't work so much better with XP installed

THAT'S the mentality that Zilla, et al have to suceed against and that won't happen unless the products are way better than the competition (sa, "Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen)

My respect and admiration goes out to all those actually working on Zilla/Opera/Netscape..i've spoken to number of them...they actually making a difference and fighting the good fight

Bigots like you just make rational and reasonable discussion either difficult or impossible

BTW, it's bad enough that you're a narrow minded anti free speech bigot, please learn how to touch type

VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[mgkimsal2]

It *seems* that when I "view source", the browser hits the server to download another copy. I don't WANT *another* copy - I want to the see the source of what is being rendered in the browser. With many web-based apps, doing another request (especially without resending the proper POST info, etc) will give back different results.

The same behaviour was a huge problem for printing in Netscape. Rather than print what was in the browser's memory and on the screen, netscape would do a GET request on the URL. If it didn't come back with the right results - oh well! Too bad...

Why on earth can't we simply see what's in the browser's memory already? It seems this is the EASY thing to do and Netscape (and now Mozilla) are unnecessarily complicating the matter.

Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[bunratty]

See bug 55583 for details.

Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[Quixote]

I second that. Often in Netscape I print something, and an error message gets printed (in large font, no less) instead. For the life of me I can't understand why its so hard to just show whats in memory, dammit!

Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[mgkimsal2]

That whole bug page is just ridiculous - a shining example of bad open source stuff at work. There's an expected behaviour, which IE and earlier netscapes had (opera? dunno) which has been removed, and it's been discussed for over a year, but it's still not resolved. Why? Issues of "it *should* be this way" or "let's have 3 options as to how it should work" etc. I guess NONE of these mozilla coders actually ever does any type of serverside scripting and needs to view the HTML output of a script in a browser. I need the source of WHAT THE BROWSER IS SHOWING AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME, not what I next 'GET' request. Get the basic EXPECTED and USEFUL behaviour worked out first - worry about 'kewl' features later.

While I'm on it, Netscape (and I think earlier mozillas) would choke because of this bug when you tried to PRINT. You basically could never print a page that was the result of a POST (or used cookie data) because it'd simply GET the same URL, and print that. And forget trying to PRINT an HTML page that was gzipped - you'd get binary data printed on the paper! :(

Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[BZ]

> I need the source of WHAT THE BROWSER IS SHOWING
> AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME

Which, with client-side scripting involved, has nothing to do with the source that was served from the website (consider a page that dynamically creates and appends some elements.

The fact of the matter is, there is no good reason to keep the source once it has been parsed, so Mozilla do it. The only place the source stays is in the cache. Thus the problem becomes one of extracting the correct cache entry.

And Mozilla always prints exactly what you see; it prints based on the DOM, not on the source.

Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[mrbnsn]

If that's the philosophy, then a "View current DOM as XHTML" menu item is clearly in order.

Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[BZ]

Sure. That would be fairly easy to do. Or you could fire up Document Inspector (which is a lot more useful than raw source).

Speed, Stability, Power

[HanzoSan]

In that exact order.
Freeze it for 1 month and work on bug fixes, and for a month work on just increasing its speed.

The only thing Mozilla needs is speed and stability, it has the power.

ITs a bug, it happened to me too

[HanzoSan]

The same thing happened to me when i upgraded from around 0.94, i lost some of my bookmarks but not all of them

Re:Goody Goody

[talonyx]

Ooh Wow, another Microsoft indentured servant!

--That would explain the several Linux boxes I use as servers both in the workplace and at my house.

It's obvious you haven't used Mozilla recently (like, the last three releases). Fantastic standards-compliant browser with excellent USER-FRIENDLY - as opposed to ADVERTISER-FRIENDLY - customization and privacy options.

--It's still slow, and sure it "looks nice" but I'd rather be able to view most of the sites on the internet than have a blue browser.

And on my system, using Mozilla's quick start option, it loads FASTER than IE.

--Well, I wish I could say the same but it seems on my Athlon XP 1800+ that when I click the "e" the brwoser window has appeared before I let go of the mouse button. Mozilla still takes a second, even with Quick start.

I'll get the new release too, but it's still inferior. I would like it to be better, I was always a Netscape fan but seriously IE has stolen the crown. The point is no longer HTML standards compatibility - it is IE compatibility and all the competitors are failing.

Re:Mozilla and no AIM, thank you

[qubezz]

It would be nice if Netscape gave a checkbox to remove AIM from the 4.xx releases during install (didn't notice if they do in 6.x), and thanks to Mozilla for not making me waste the bandwidth downloading it. It was my ritual to install Netscape, then kill off the AIM directory and the shortcuts. Not being able to option out of AIM at install time puts Netscape up there with other spamware like Real (not that 'SmartDownload' ie 'DumbAdDownload' got Netscape any points from me either).

Now let me put my Junkbuster list in Mozilla somewhere & I'll be a happy guy. Moz rocks.

Any quick launch plans for Linux ??

[shaji]

Are there any plans for quick launch option for Linux? I just discovered that there exists one for Galeon. Start "galeon -s" from your gnome sessions, and there you go ..

And one thing that bothers me always is this bug

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:I wish...

[cymen]

I totally agree with you. The "|" stuff reminds me of HTML email/news postings and generally bugs the crap out of me.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[bunratty]

Bug 116595 is a Tech Evangelism bug for KaZaA's bad browser sniffing.

Re:Goody Goody

[talonyx]

I pay for performance when I spend $3000Cdn on a computer. If a simple, tiny thing like a browser takes ten seconds to start, I am not getting my money's worth.

mozilla getting better but ...

[jopet]

mozilla is getting better, but two problems still remain: there are many features from 4.x still missing, especially in the mailnews component (see bugs marked 4xp in bugzilla as a first aproximation). And there are still a lot of sites that just dont work or that dont get rendered correctly because of web programmers and site designers failing to strictly follow w3 standards (those are the 'tech evangelism' bugs). i still doubt that the market power of mozilla will make those people reconsider.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[WhiteKnight07]

It works just fine in Mozilla 0.9.7 if you turn off JavaScript.

Re:Mozilla obsolete

[WhiteKnight07]

musiccity.com works fine under Mozilla 0.9.7 for both Linux and Windows (Mandrake 8.1 and NT 5.2 respectively)

Installing over existing versions

[klui]

I am just happy that I can download a new version under Windows/FreeBSD and install over the existing installation without problems like in the past.

Re:Is this Mozilla version any faster?

[Shadowcaster]

I 've got an AMD K6/200 machine (which used to be Cyrix 6x86/PR-200) and Mozilla works fast enough to be useable. It could be faster, but it's "fast enough".

Back when I gave Milestone 12 a go it really sucked balls, but it's come a long way since then. :) Now I use it almost exclusively.. almost. I also use K-Meleon for a more lightweight Gecko-based browser with some frills (and a taskbar loader like Moz ;), and OffByOne when I want a browser that works, and works blazingly fast. (though OB1 has no plugins support, javascript, java, etc.. it does do cookies tho)

A bit of warning though, Mozilla and K-Meleon loaded up at the same time will lag your system! My guess as to why is that you'll have essentially two complete instances of the Gecko engine loaded up, and they don't want to play nice together. *shrug*

Those are the ones I use in Winblows (three cheers for LiteStep!!).. in Linux I use Lynx, or I wget it and read it raw like all REAL men do!

Hyperlink Cursor

[morpheus800e]

I just installed 0.9.7 under windows XP. Previously, the cursor that it showed when I hovered over a hyperlink was the same little finger/hand that I've been seeing since Netscape 1.1N or whatever it was that I first started using. Now, under 0.9.7, the hand has been changed to the cursor that IE uses when hovering over a hyperlink. Any idea how to change it back?

Re:Hyperlink Cursor

[bluenirve]

get the source change it recompile repeat

Re:Hyperlink Cursor

[Down8]

I think this is a good 'feature'. Moz is using the operating system's [hyperlink] cursor, instead of an arbitrary one of its own. This is a good thing for ppl who use skins/themes/whatever for their OS, that include cursors.

Just my thoughts,
-bZj

Re:Hyperlink Cursor

[jonasj]

On Windows, Mozilla now uses the default system cursor which can be changed from the control panel.

You can download the old cursor here.

Shockwave Flash and RealPlayer

[kimihia]

For the Macromedia Flash plugin, visit this page: ShockwaveFlash

Currently it has a link to flash_linux.tar.gz.

For RealPlayer 8 follow that link and fill out the form.

The other alternative is to look at Anon Cowards post which has a link, or borrow your mate's computer and steal his plugins. :-)

Getting there..

[Tony Hoyle]

I've been using Moz for 90% of the sites I browse these days. It has some annoying rendering bugs on some sites (one of these days the barclaycard website will render correctly... it used to render like shit; with recent builds it goes into a loop reloading the page).

Netscape 4 is still useful for these sites though.

They're almost there. Took a hell of a long time, though.

Re:Getting there..

[bunratty]

The problem with the barclaycard site is described in bug 88556. It's a problem with the JavaScript on their site.

This one actually works on my computer!!! :)

[Newer Guy]

I had Mozilla .9.5 on the computter. It worked great. Upgraded to .9.6 and it would crash whenever I tried to open a second window. Uninstalled .96 and reinstalled .95. Same problem with .95 now! So I downloaded Netscape 6.2 and have been using that ever since. Today I tried Mozilla .9.7. It works great! No more crashes and it seems really fast and responsive.

Re:Goody Goody

[To Mega]

Well, 0.97 takes 8 seconds on my 3 year old CAN$5000 laptop (P2/366). I could easily buy a computer today for CAN$1000 that beats this laptop senseless.

So you either bought your computer a long time ago, or some component is limiting performance in some way (i.e. you got screwed).

Re:Goody Goody

[To Mega]

Oh, a few other points:
- a browser is not a simple tiny thing anymore.
- Mozilla is not just a web browser.
- you didn't pay (and will likely never pay) for Mozilla.
- the Quick Launch feature works well.

One Good Reason Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[alacqua]

BZ: The fact of the matter is, there is no good reason to keep the source once it has been parsed...

I submit to you that there is at least one good reason to keep the source: View Source.

Re:One Good Reason Re:VIEW SOURCE still sucks

[BZ]

Agreed. The core netwerk developers seem to feel that this is not a good enough reason to incur the extra memory overhead... Again, the source _is_ saved (in cache) so all that needs to happen is that it be retrieved. The API to do that is being (slowly) put in place.

Re:mod this the fuck down

[G Neric]

Um, that's my text. I'm the co-author of the release notes and ... would think that I'm allowed to post that here and save a bit of load on our releases page (not to mention the added convenience for /. readers).

um... posts are supposed to be modded based on what they contain rather than on who wrote them. Your post was identical to what other people would get accused of karma whoring for. You were saving mozilla.org some load? smirk.

but, you were correct to calculate that Slashdot sycophants do mod on the basis of who is famous. That does not make it right, however, so while you win the karma race, you lose the respect of rational readers.

Looking good...

[PlaysWithMatches]

Two things I'd really like to see in Mozilla:

• Gestures, a la Opera. I really like these, and it's nice to not have to mouse up to a toolbar just to navigate my history or reload a page.
• Anti-aliased fonts on Linux. I know this is pretty unlikely right now, since it'd be "interesting" to do without relying on something like Qt or some X hack for anti-aliasing the fonts. Still, after playing with Konqueror and Opera, I realize how much I missed those nice, smooth characters. :)

Just my 2. Otherwise, I gotta say Mozilla is shaping up pretty nice, and feels more solid with each release (on my system anyway). Keep up the great work, MozTeam!

Re:Looking good...

[simifilm]

For gestutres check this link http://optimoz.mozdev.org

Re:Looking good...

[bunratty]

Anti-aliasing in Linux is covered by bug 31296.

Re:Dammit! I *just* downloaded 0.9.6

[innocent_white_lamb]

How is it their (Mozilla folk) fault that you are behind the times?

I don't mean to be snarky, but if you're going to express frustration then it would be most sensible to be frustrated about something that is beyond your control. This situation wasn't beyond your control, though you appear to somehow think it was.

Re:REALITY CHECK TIME...Head up your ass???????

[cymen]

What company is going to announce that they are hereforth moving to a beta browser platform for all their needs?

None.

Wow.

Oh My God.

Lets just get real today, ok? Wait until 1.0 or even > 1.0 is out the door and doing well before you expect the clouds to break and jubilent drops of honey dew mozilla goodness to fall onto humanity.

Re:Goody Goody

[hodeleri]

View | Show/Hide | Site Navigation Bar

Interesting Project, But What's The Relevance?

[sdijkstra]

Flamebait, troll, call it what you like.

I downloaded and installed the latest version of mozilla (on a Win98/AMD machine). It ran smoothly, rendered a lot more pages correctly than that horrible CSS-less Netscape does. And it doesn't crash (although from what I've seen mileage varies amongst different users).

However, I seriously question the relevance of ANY project that tries to 'start a revolution' in the browser market. The de facto situation has arisen that a browser is part of the OS. This may have been accomplished in part by scheming, bully tactics and FUD, but it is true nonetheless.

So you have the situation that someone who buys a PC gets an OS, including a browser, installed on it. If said PC is bought at, say, CompUSA you have a 99.9% chance that that OS is some Windows version. Regarding the person who buys the PC: there's a 95% or even higher chance that he or she has little or no affinity with computers, let alone can compare the compliance of different W3C standards. The most likely desire of that person for the browser is that it renders web pages the way their creators designed them. Now, who do you think those creaters have in mind?

The browser with the largest market share!

WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Web standards are being set by Microsoft, and people who get a browser installed that complies to THOSE standards flawlessly are unlikely to replace it. As are most Linux/Mac users by the way. So Mozilla is destined to attain a market share of no more than 1%, if even that is possible (personally I think Opera's current market share of .25% among IT professionals says it all, really).

Hidden pref

[jonasj]

There is a hidden preference for that. Close Mozilla and open the file prefs.js (it is located in your profile directory) in a text editor. Now add the following lines to the file:

user_pref("mail.quoted_graphical", false);
user_pref("mail.quoteasblock", false);

That should do it. See bug 83907 for making it configurable through the Preferences dialog.

Re:Goody Goody

[sdijkstra]

What a crock of bullshit. What are 'they' going to steal? My history logs?

Sure, you can say: my CC info. This is NOT true, however. And by the way using a credit card in a restaurant is INFINITELY more unsecure than using it online, regardless of the browser used.

Re:Goody Goody

[flacco]

The mansion. I live in a good neighborhood.

Your comments have the carefree quality of someone who has not yet been bitten by Microsoft's lousy security record or its customers==sheep attitude.

Enjoy it while you can - your day will come.

Mozilla 0.9.7

[jaseman21]

The best web browser yet is finally out. The latest version of Mozilla is excellent. Being able to disable popup windows and leave javascript enabled is the best new feature of a slew of new features. Gone are the days of the popup x10 cam ad!