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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).
On Linux, I switched from Netscape to Mozilla around M18, I think, and quite frankly although it's taken forever to get there it's now just about the best browser around (for me anyway).
At work the desktops are all NT4, but I use Mozilla there as well, rather than IE. Why?
- Tabs. Can't live without them, and on Windows it means that your taskbar isn't cluttered with 10,000 unidentifiable icons.
- Keyboard operation. Open a new tab (Ctrl-T), type your URL, switch back to what you were reading (Ctrl-PageUp) and wait for the new tab to stop spinning. Switch back (Ctrl-PageDown), read it and close it (Ctrl-W). I know you can control IE with the keyboard as well, but to switch windows you have to use Ctrl-Tab, which is an incredible pain if you've got a bunch of windows open.
- Speed. It's damn quick.
I just wish they'd build for more platforms... anybody got an Alpha build that doesn't need glibc2.2?
Getting Mozilla news from Mozillaquest is like getting kernel development news from ZDNet - it just shouldn't exist.
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.
-
MathML is currently not quite ready for prime time on mac. It is being worked on and should be in a future release near you. Something the Cross-Platform nature of moz has to bend a bit to allow new features to come in sooner.
/me gets back to fixing the mozilla mac build system
Zach
I can hardly wait until a release of Mozilla that fixed the annoying behavior of Mozilla's mail and news system - you cannot select a message without displaying it, thus you cannot forward a spam onto Spamcop without Mozilla starting to render it (and fetching any webbugs in it).
They supposedly have a patch to fix this, but I don't see that bug fix listed in the release notes for 0.9.9
www.eFax.com are spammers
...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
Exactly. If you want real news about the development of mozilla, check out Mozillazine
They keep you up to date on the status of nightly builds, rate them for you, and even have a build-bar talkback area so you can chime in on what works/doesn't work. It's the first place I go before I download a nightly.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
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
Developers fixed a little mroe than 2000 bugs in the 0.9.9 cycle.
--Asa
According to the road map, Mozilla 1.0 will be out March 27th. Only 16 more days. Of course, according to the roadmap, 0.9.9 was supposed to be out a month ago.
Unlike most people actually working on this project and other Mozilla-based projects, you don't know how to read the roadmap. Those aren't even the branch dates. Those are the freeze dates when the tree is closed to all but approved checkins. A week or so after the freeze is the branch for that Milestone. But, guess what, that's still not the release date. That's the date that the development for that relase goes onto a branch and there is parallel development for the release branch and the development trunk. During that time the branch takes strictly monitored fixes and at some point on the branch (for most milestones it's a week or so) the release tag is made and binaries are served up to the testing community. All of this becomes a little more obvious if you read the roadmap in addition to looking at the pretty picture (even just looking at the picture and reading the key would help a lot)
--Asa
Ok, every here should know by now that MQ is just one huge troll. The only good I can see could come from this would be to slashdot the server...
If you aren't familiar with MQ, go ahead and visit the site. Just be warned: treat it as a troll, and don't take his word for anything.
So anyway, linking to him is just going to expose the unsuspecting to the MQ misinformation. Don't do it.
Mozilla
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....
For those wondering, yes, there is a spellchecker for Mozilla (bug 56301). Or, if you're in a hurry, the installer is right here.
I've been using David Einstein's spellchecker for week's now without problem. Of course, it has its own quirks (such as there being no way to dismiss the spellchecker and avoid sending the message) but it's still a tremendous effort.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
If you have a bug to report, or a suggestion to
make, can you take it to here?
--
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.
Tabs are a nice idea, but they're still quite immature in Mozilla. For instance, they don't close in the correct order, so they're no substitute for real tabs or MDI, as found in Galeon or Opera.
:-)
:-)
I accept that Mozilla is still in development, but many good ideas that make the GUI work better (like this one) are actually being turned down.
Something else that reminds me of this is there is no Apply button in the Themes Preferences dialog box.
I'm getting into many bad habits using Mozilla's interface, and when I go to use something that works properly I find myself doing what I would've done in Mozilla, and it doesn't work (and nor should it). It's a bit like people who double-click on web links.
It seems to me that Mozilla's GUI is made to pacify Netscape 4 users, rather than making it as usable as it should be. I think this is bad for several reasons, not least because Netscape 6 still has a smaller market share than Netscape 4, so Netscape 4 users aren't migrating at all! To me this means that:
a) some users are sticking with Netscape 4
b) some users are moving to Internet Explorer or something else, because they're better, regardless of the menus being somewhat different
Maybe this shows us that open-source projects really need to spend more time on proper GUI guidelines, because as much as I hate products made by certain other companies (that one that makes Windows in particular), I find their apps much easier to use (when they don't crash, etc.).
I think I'm going to end up using Galeon or SkipStone, because the Mozilla rendering engine seems quite good -- it's the GUI holding Mozilla back (regardless of how pretty the "Modern" theme is!).
Having said this, I'm still downloading 0.9.9
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
Linux users unite... Go vote for fullscreen (other platforms)
How about "Linux users unite... Go implement fullscreen for Linux Mozilla" ?
--Asa
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.
Enter this into the URL field:
javascript:void(window.fullScreen=true)
And you get full screen! Note that this implementation is incomplete, and does not work with all window managers. But it's a start
I have a good 60 or so bookmarks, and I hate taking the time to scroll to the bottom of the list. It's so much nicer in Netscape where it just spills over to an additonal column.
Of course, I'm sure that others prefer the current IE style scrolling, so I'd be happy if it is implemented as an option. If you agree with me, please Vote for this bug!
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.
Before:
The last time I tried it, a year and a half ago, it was so buggy, slow and lacking in features that I gave up in disgust after a week of software pain. Ever since, I had dismissed as overly idealistic advocacy the mumbling I kept hearing from various developers who touted each new Mozilla "milestone" release as incrementally better than the one before.
Now:
As I write these words, I've been running Mozilla for Windows for almost five hours. While that's obviously not enough time to make a detailed technical appraisal, I can say that Mozilla has already become my default browser and that it is as fast and slick and full-featured as I want.
Nuff said!
How do I get it to launch into the browser automatically without first selecting the profile? Is there a command flag to specify the profile?
./mozilla -P "<profile name>"
run
--Asa
I'm not sure what you're doing but Java works for me for the applets I've tested. Download and istall Sun's 1.3.0_0x and copy the NP* files to your plugins folder in the install directory or to a plugins folder you create in your Application Data/Mozilla/ directory. Do this with Mozilla not running and when you start it up it should work.
If this doesn't work then type about:plugins and see if the Java plugin shows up in the list. If it's not there then you didn't put it in the right place. If it is there then go to java.sun.com and click on the applets link in the left nav area of the page. Test some of the games and other applets there and they should work.
--ASA
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
MathML on by default! That is great!
The old notation for math is so boring and obsolete:
x^2 + 4x + 4 = 0
I much prefer:
<mrow>
<mrow>
<msup>
<mi>x</mi>
<mn>2</mn>
</msup>
<mo>+</mo>
<mrow>
<mn>4</mn>
<mo>⁢</mo>
<mi>x</mi>
</mrow>
<mo>+</mo>
<mn>4</mn>
</mrow>
<mo>=</mo>
<mn>0</mn>
</mrow>
because it is XML and standardized and non-proprietary and cool. I want my <elite>XML</elite>!
You can get an (alpha) spell-checker - it's one of the projects on Mozdev.
Gerv