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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.
According to the roadmap, Mozilla 1.0 will be released on or shortly after April 5.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
I encourage all who experience this phenomenon to continuously download and install the latest versions of all software so that the next version will become immediately available. Please note that the slower the connection you use, the more likely you'll successfully push out new versions. Imagine how you could help in accellerating open source development! Keep the developers on their toes in their quest to keep your software obsolete!
Why bother.
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.
Why don't they just use OpenSSL? Mozilla - reinventing the wheel, one spoke at a time.
Seriously, Mozilla's biggest problem is that they don't know how to narrow the scope of what they want to accomplish. They've written all these abstract libraries, widgets, and application frameworks just to write a browser. There are easier ways to build a cross platform browser than rewriting everything from scratch. How about using other open source libraries? Partnerships with or just taking over existing projects? These guys are almost as bad as the KDE guys. The other (related) thing they are fundamentaly wrong-headed about is staying with the integrated news-reader,mail-client,address-book,(internet-app -of-the-week), browser plan. Huge apps that do everything suck. Build a nice browser. Work with others on how to communicate between your browser any MUA out there, etc. Release 1.0 in 2 years instead of 5.
That said, I use mozilla or galeon (mozilla rendering engine) exclusively, it's really coming along - nice work guys.
XML causes global warming.
As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.
I think the favicon in the url is aesthetically pleasing only, but the favicons in tabs becomes really usefull when you have lots of the open. Almost to the point where I can't live without them.
And with favicons in the personal toolbar, you can rename your bookmarks to nothing, and you can cram about 30 or so of your favorite sites on one toolbar, each with their own icon. It makes my browsing easier, and it looks damn cool.
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'm a sysadmin (yes, Windows :P ) and I've actually started rolling out Mozilla with new workstations instead of our standard Netscape 4.7x (I will never encourage our users to use I.E. for political and security reasons). I'm finding that Netscape 4.x is becoming a hassle to many users as they're often finding sites that it can no longer handle. Rather than drift into I.E., I'm trying to give them a solid alternative.
I've been impressed by the reception so far... only one user has rejected it wholesale, but the first question after I loaded on Netscape for him was, "Now how do I turn off pop-up ads in this one?". That seems to be the most-loved feature so far, as many websites now have pop-up ads (I wouldn't know, as I turned them off at 0.9.4!).
IMHO Netscape has made a very bad name for itself by releasing 6.x too early from buggy Mozilla builds, and loading them up with advertising and AOL stuff to boot. I've found that telling clients that Mozilla is a new browser based on Netscape is a good way to go.
I've actually found that the few problems users have had have been minor, and the mozilla bug tracking site almost always has workarounds for those show-stopper bugs...
Anyhow, just something to think about; this is a nice foothold that open source software can make in your office workplace. It's kind of the Apache of desktop software I suppose...
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
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
the instant it has smime support in email I'll be there.
You're there! Get 0.9.8
--Asa
I like your enthusiasm, but making a quality piece of software takes time. There are many things on the list that developers want to accomplish before version 1.0, and features other people want to see. This is a big release for developers and for people involved in the project not only because its one dot zero, but because it has taken a lot of work to get here. So, its not just another release for us, even though it might seem like that to others. We, people who work on the Mozilla project - volunteers and staff, are hoping we can make it shine above all the rest of the releases.
The question is, do you want it to be a great release, or just some ordinary release? From your statement, it seems you want it to be special. If so, then why try to pressure us into releasing it too early? I realize you were joking, but there is a lot of pressure coming to freeze parts the code.
If we freeze too early, then people might not be happy with the way the code we freeze is laid out. If we freeze too late, we might anger a lot of people and also slow down development also because code changes too often. There has to be a balance that makes most people happy.
A lot of things are going on before the release of 1.0 including: increased modularization of the code, UI changes, functionality additions, build system enhancements, cleaning of the code, testing, feature additions, performance tuning, XUL/XPCOM etc documentation, stability improvements, and legal issues.
Some people want it to come out on time. Others want it held back until they are happy with it (including I). Some people have long lists of things they want finished and have to finish. Therefore, it is unrealistic to give any estimates on arrival time. All I can say is that we are going to try our best.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
I haven't tried Mozilla for some months, so this information could be out of date - but I doubt it, it's been this way from when I first used Netscape up until the last Mozilla build I used, maybe 6 months ago.
Disabling cookies causes the browser to refuse them. This will break many websites, unfortunately. However, there is a little trick that avoids that problem, and still prevents cookie data from ever being saved. Your browser will still accept and return them, satisfying those pushy websites, but will never actually save them, so they all get erased whenever you close the browser, in effect. Well, actually they never even get written.
Netscape/Mozilla stores cookies in a file named cookies.txt, in plain text format. (I wish opera did that, why they have to store them in some wierdo formatted file I don't know, but I digress.) If you simply make that file a link to /dev/null (in *nix) or delete it and make a directory with the name cookies.txt in the same place (on dos systems, this is a minor hack to overcome the deficiency of not having a /dev/null) then everything works fine, except that the cookies never get saved. Since a copy is kept in memory as long as the session lasts, websites get what they want, but as soon as you close the browser, it's all gone, so you get what you want too.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
That technique doesn't work on all platforms which run Mozilla. Also, ispell isn't available on all platforms, and it would seriously slow Mozilla down, since spawning a process is usually pretty slow.
The cross-platform nature of Mozilla is very, very important, and very critical to its development. All features must be incorporated into the codebase and written in such a manner that the platform doesn't matter.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms. Probably the reason they didn't use OpenSSL is due to limited support on other platforms, I don't know.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
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.
What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze ... Tabbed browsing [is an unnecessary feature that should not have been added to Mozilla at this time] ... In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9.
One man's gold is another man's crap. A spell checker is completely worthless to me, along with the entire Mail/News package. On the other hand, tabbed browsing is my life, my love, and my passion.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again