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Mozilla 0.9.9 Released
OSSMKitty writes: "Mozilla.org has released the next version of Mozilla, version 0.9.9. Highlights include MathML enabled by default on Unix and Win32, and TrueType font support on Unix. Read the release notes and then download a binary to test on your platform."
I commented on Mozilla's cross platform performance during the .9.6 release, and I must say, thought still noticeably slower in linux than windows - the linux performance has improved substantialy. Mozilla has been my standard browsers on my win32 platforms and it's startup time has improved enough in linux to really be useable.
/me raises beer to the mozilla linux guys.
On another note, anyone feel that that "turbo mode" should be kept in the windows builds only? This might sound silly, but I expect every program to jam itself in my window system tray, but for some reason, I don't want it anywhere near my linux box, it's Just Not Right(tm).
There's not only that, but Newsforge has reported that the new 8.0 version of AOL will use Gecko (the rendering engine in Mozilla) rather than IE!
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
guess what, next, there will be own xserver inside mozilla, so you won't need X to run it! mozilla, the queen of bloat. ;-)
Highlights include MathML enabled by default on Unix and Win32
Why only those two?
(I'm a Mac user, and just wondering why I get left out.)
--saint
No.
Even worse, adding support is going to be a bitch because, to quote from the Mozilla MathML Project page
Mozilla does not yet support the mixture of XML and HTML within the same document. Thus a fragment inside a HTML document is not rendered in Mozilla. [1]
In other words, the doc (and therefore the whole site, practically speaking) has to be in XML/XHTML to be able to use MathML with Mozilla. We've seen time and time again that Slashdot (and to a lesser extent K5) is not even really HTML compliant, what are the chances of meeting the higher standards of XML validity?
Slim to none.
So thanks for the attempt, but until the slow among us start being good netizens then it is too little, too late.
[1]Yeah, I know it says "not yet" but
I switched to mozilla on windows as soon as they added tabbed browsing. it is the ultimate addition to web browsing. just so much simpler to manage then the old way of having 800 windows up. and no its not just for porn sites :) I've really been impressed with the latest iterations of mozilla on both win and linux. i stopped using galeon a while back and now i even use mozilla-mail. i never expected to be such a mozilla fan but I really am impressed with what they've done. my congrats to the team on doing so much for so very little.
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...and I hope they are (as I download my copy over my slow-ass 56k connection)...
1. Forms. Entering text in a TEXTAREA has been continually troublesome, release after release. Sometimes you'll hit the space bar, but the cursor won't move until you type a letter. Sometimes you get this insipid "jumping text", as the scrollbar on the righthand side continually decides to draw and redraw each time there is a keystroke. From a user's perspective, this is a terrible oversight
2. Printing has, at least on linux, been a sorry state of affairs, for a long time, up through 0.9.8. I have deep worries that 1.0 is going to get released without fully functioning print capability, and that just seems asanine.
OTHER THAN THAT --
I've been extremely happy with Moz, and have been using it in a near exclusive manner (FSCK YOU, CapitalOne.com) for many releases now.
Although it may be a bit premature, here's a hearty congrats to the Mozilla team. Looking forward to 1.0
When you start typing in the URL bar, wouldn't it be handy if the result-list was sorted by most-frequently-accessed, or most-recently-accessed? Well, that has been proposed (bug 78270).
However, it's also marked Priority P4 and Future :(. But, you can vote for the bug to show your support (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I just fired up this new release, and I must say I'm impressed. Every one of the recent releases has sped things up by around 50% (just my own visual approximation) in the interface. There used to be perceptible delays in switching sidebar tabs, opening new browser tabs, etc. which have now been eliminated. Kudos to the Mozilla team! Now all I have to do is get that TrueType font rendering working. ;)
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
Netscape Communicator 4.x had a primative but extremely useful Roaming Profiles function, but Mozilla doesn't. A lot of people have voted for it, but it just hasn't been a top coding priority. All is not lost, however:
Ben Bucksch of Beonex fame has offered to help complete this oft-requested oft-marked-as-no-time-to-implement feature. He's doing the work as a tip-jar sponsored project, so check out bug #124026 and contribute a little bit if you can.
Even if you aren't particularly interested in the roaming ability, it's an interesting situation to watch -- any open-source project the size of mozilla must have lots of opportunities for independent developers to jump in and work on a open-source-for-cash basis. If Ben is really successful here, it's a great case-study in a way for small developers to make money working at open source / free software. I'm curious to see how this example turns out....
It's not accurate to say the vulnerability was discovered "just a few hours" ago. I got an e-mail from a Mozilla security list on Feb. 19 with the subject "serious zlib vulnerability". The first line of the message was "It's very important that this doesn't leak out until after March 11th, when vendors should have fixes available." If you look at the references from Red Hat's page about the vulnerability, you'll see documents with dates like 2/5 and 2/7.
Asa informs me that the zlib bug and its announcement on Slashdot today didn't influence the decision to release Mozilla 0.9.9 today. He was already planning to release today, and since the zlib vulnerability was made public this morning, it made sense for the release notes to mention that it is fixed in this build.
The shareholder is always right.
In IE, if you enter ALT-D, your cursor moves to the address bar and you can enter a new URL without using the mouse. Is there an equivalent shortcut in Mozilla? I need to use Netscape at work and I always find myself typing ALT-D. :-)
cpeterso
Browser
MailNews
Unfortunately, voting won't get stuff done any faster. Most of the moz community is pretty aware of the feature requests. A lot of time is being chewed up with stability, performance and bug fix work, as well as sorting and triaging bugs.
Hit the link in my sig, and find out how you can do more than just vote, by helping with QA, working in the bug database, tweaking the front end code (mostly scripts - fairly easy) and hacking the back end code.
While I'm at it, I hope mpt won't hate me for mentioning his The top ten usability problems in Mozilla. Don't get me wrong, I love moz, but that list is a great summary of some important work left to be done (thought it's a bit out of date - there is now a fullscreen on win32, and there have been a lot of textedit bug fixes).
Christopher
Mozilla
Now that they've got the javascript problems introduced in 0.9.6 ironed out (my test was IHT, since they're reputedly a site designed to take advantage of NS6's capabilities), they just have to fix printing.
I still don't know why when the Mozilla team has created one of the best rendering engines on the planet, they can't apply the same techniques to create good looking output for a printer device. Instead, the result always seems to look strangely sized and poorly laid out -- not at all like the original page.
Now, I still use Moz for my daily browser (and mail), but this shouldn't be that tough.
----
Everyone must learn how to protect themselves from a malicious person wielding a banana.
Lets see part of dpkg --list |grep " 0\."
amp version 0.7.6
aide version 0.7-11
apt version 0.5.4 (_the_ debian godsent tool)
aspell 0.33.7.1-8
atftpd 0.5
c2html 0.9.4-1
daemontools 0.70-20
dia 0.88.1-2
ed 0.2-19 (yes, _ed_ is still at 0.2!)
fakeroot 0.4.5-2.1 (for dpkg-buildpackage)
finger 0.17-9 (but nobody even uses finger anymore)
ftp 0.17-9 (ftp client never actually reached 1.x, so who's going to worry about the http client)
gedit 0.9.6
mpg123 0.59r-11
mpt321 0.2.3
openssl 0.9.6c-1
telnet-ssl 0.17.16+0.1-2
usbmgr 0.4.8-5
usbutils 0.9-1
wmaker 0.80.0-3
word2x 0.005-4.1 (they expect a lot of versions to go!)
xscorch 0.1.14-2 (Clone of Scorched Earth, the best oldtimer multiplayer game ever)
If it's in the true spirit of open source, it will achieve full acceptance by the users before the developers think it's perfect, hence by the time 1.0 comes out, all users will respond 'duh, 0.9.9.4pre4-test2-rc4-pl9 already was just perfect for me'
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
0.9.9 (build 20020311) is running much faster than the build from the previous day (build 20020310). Is there some obvious difference? Is debugging enabled in one and not the other? Is it more highly optimized? Is there something else making it feel faster?
I am posting this with 0.9.9 right now. I just went for a trip around some pr0n sites that have multiple popups (when using internet explorer). With this version of Mozilla, if you go to:
Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Scripts, then unclick "Open unrequested windows"
You will get no more popups! Pages that use javascript to open in new windows when you click on something still work, but pages that open up other windows when they load (popups) have no more power over your browsing experience! Yay!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Mozilla is quickly becoming the poster child of the open source movement. You don't need to know how to recompile a kernel, and yes - it'e easy enough for your grandmother to use.
It has been kicking some major butt on my linux desktop for over the past year, though it's been kicking my butt on OS X for the past 2 months... constant crashes with no log files can drive a man nuts.
Maybe I should take up Moz hacking
- passion
The problem in presentation alone means that equations published on the web is often being published as images, because presenting it as text can be a nightmare.
Allowing cut and paste of mathematical expressions between different tools (and HTML editors for instance) also isn't an easy task if you don't have a uniform, standarized way of expressing yourself.
Thats all MathML is: A uniform way of expressing maths. XML or not is a secondary issue - XML is useful because it means you don't have to deal with writing your own parser, and because it easily let multiple domain specific data representations coexist in the same document, but thats just icing on the cake.
Well, intrigued by that, I went to look at the site. I was amused to see that the very first sentence of the first article on the front page states that:
The Mozilla Organization has not yet released the Milestone 0.9.9 edition of its Mozilla browser suite.
Excellent reportage.
> finger 0.17-9 (but nobody even uses finger anymore)
Since you've quoted output from a debian system, you might be interested to know that debian has a finger-enabled developer database.
Look at:
$ finger @db.debian.org
Want my GPG key?
$ finger dsb3/key@db.debian.org | gpg --import
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.