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mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8
asa writes: "Today mozilla.org released the Mozilla 0.9.8 Milestone. New to this release are improved Address Book functionality, page setup(for printing), MNG/JNG support, native-style widgets on winXP and OS X, dynamic theme switching, improved BiDi support, speed, stability and footprint improvements, and much, much more. www.mozilla.org and www.mozillazine.org have the full scoop." The build I'm posting with (2002020305) is a little crashy, but most aspects are shaping up very nicely.
Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs, you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.
Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems that have not yet been ironed out.
I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows Mac MacOSX Linux.
* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.
About once I week I scan mozillazine's build comments and download the best of the latest nightlies. Helps me stay current to report new bugs, without risking too much. I recommend it for those that like bleeding edge, but still need to get Real Work (TM) done.
Internet Explorer - for OS X this is an excellent browser. It has many awesome features. A customizeable and cool look. Kudos to MS for making a great browsers. The major problem with it, is that it hangs for a long time whenever rendering a large page. For example, this slashdot story will cause IE to hang for ~30 seconds (on my 667MHz G4) after downloading and prior to displaying. Note that each IE window is frozen until after the hung one renders. This is unacceptable
OmniWeb - This browser seems light, fast, efficient, but why the heck does it keep crashing on my OS X.2 powerbook? Crashes appear to be caused at random and usually occur within 10 minutes of web browsing. Since this continues to happen, I haven't had a chance to try out the features of OmniWeb.
Opera - I was hoping that this would be as good on OS X as it is in Linux. The version seems to be a bit behind the Linux version and it lacks Mousewheel support and tabbed windows. Mousewheel support is neccessary to me and tabbed windows is a *very* nice feature.
Mozilla - This is my workhorse webbrowser. Although it is slower than the others and has too many features, IMHO, it doesn't hang like IE, doesn't crash like OmniWeb, and has tabbed windows/mousewheel support, unlike Opera). Still it is slow. I'm anxious to start using a galeon-ish OS X browser as soon as I hear about one. Mozilla wins by default.
Can anybody add anything to my list? I haven't heard of many other graphical OS X browsers. I figured that OS X would have plenty of great web browsers since the web designers tend to use it. Although Quicktime and Macromedia plug-ins are cool, they still don't seem as fast they do on my roommates P3. Especially under Mozilla. IE playes Quicktime movies fast, but only after it loads the pages.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
To save everyone some time in common questions and answers, there's a FAQ on Mozilla's spellchecker (or lack thereof).
However, there's a new development. As you may know, bug 56301 tracks the progress on the Mozilla spellchecker. And, for a while, progress had become stagnant. Then, David Einstein stepped up to the plate and started working on a spellchecker for Mozilla. His latest work is available at spellchecker.mozdev.org.
I feel that a spellchecker would bring much deserved respect to Mozilla, and I encourage you to lend a hand to David. Or, it would even help if you could vote for bug 56301 to show your support (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
When browsing slashdot, if you follow a link from far down in a long list of comments, when you follow the history back, your old scroll position will be remembered... No longer will it force a refresh and throw you back to the top of the thread.
$cat newmoz.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd
rm -rf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz mozilla;
wget -c -t 0 -T 40 ftp.mozilla.org//pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozil
tar xzf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz;
rm -rf mozilla/plugins/
ln -s
(I keep all my plugins in a seperate dir to make things easier.)
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
New to this release is the fact that published APIs are now frozen. Mozilla has been really really annoying at changing their APIs, therefore breaking code from external developers because no backward compatibility and almost no turn around time was given from one release to another. Until 0.9.7 the Plugin API kept changing every time a dot build was made. Well, according to the cvs comments, not anymore. Developers will finally be able to release code which will work for more than 2 releases in a row? Great! This smells like Mozilla is going to be final pretty soon.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Think Mozilla's bloated? check out how much space you can save by wiping out IE 6. ...
There's a tiny and FREE FREE utility called the IEradicator can wipe out internet explorer from Win98/NT and 2000 if you run pre-SP2
Use Mozilla as your only browser (or, like me, use Opera too) if you like.
check out http://www.98lite.net/ieradicator.html
I don't mean this in a rude way, but if you're really concerned about how bad Mozilla is, get yourself a bugzilla account and try helping out a little! Just using Mozilla and posting your comments or problems to the appropriate bug page can help out a lot, and who knows, you might even find the answer to your question!
:)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
It's no use for us to stand around leaning on our shovels cursing that the hole isn't being dug fast enough.
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
flashhack.c
I have a script ~/bin/mozilla that I use to run mozilla which has:
#!/bin/sh
export LD_PRELOAD=/whereever/it/is/flashhack.so
/usr/local/bin/mozilla $@
Compiling instructions are in the file.
It just makes sure to do a nonblocking open if you open the file /dev/dsp
Totally hacky, I take no resposibilty for any nasty side effects.
The printf ("foo!\n") is there purly for aesthetic reasons.:)
The RPMs are daily and milestone build contributions from Chris Blizzard. If DEBs are important to you then make builds and contribute them or find someone that can.
--Asa
This works with all sites, and forbids them from saving permanent info on your hard disk (i.e tracking you across sessions).
Or at least a key part of it. See Bug #56301.
Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything.
The crap that really turns me off about Mozilla is the arm chair quarterbacks who mouth off without a clue. You obviously didn't even read the freaking bug report.
You might be particularly interested in the attachment to comment 23 which is an email from the author of Aspell/Pspell which gives a gap analysis of the various open source spell checkers.
In fact, it appears that Mozilla and Abiword have some alignment in goals for making a library based spell checker, so far from the picture of "reinventing everything" that you paint, this is actually an example of synergy between diverse projects that exemplifies open source development code sharing.