Slashdot Mirror


Mozilla Tree Closes for 1.0

fire-eyes writes "After many years, the Mozilla cvs tree just closed for 1.0. " It's been a long time coming. And I'm glad that on Unix we still have a browser war since Konqueror and Mozilla are both excellent browsers. Congratulations to every developer who committed a line of code, but mostly to you guys in the middle who had to wrangle the whole project.

15 of 717 comments (clear)

  1. Need testers now! by lw54 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Remember Mozilla 1.0 will still be a test release. This means the debug and QA menus will still be there.

    Don't assume that just because it's 1.0 means that it's perfect.

    Many people will try Mozilla for the first time in 1.0. People more than ever need to go out there and download [linux, mac, win32], test, and give bug reports.

    If you want to help open source but can't hack the code, this is your chance to help! :-)

    1. Re:Need testers now! by CanadaDave · · Score: 5, Informative
      "Many people will try Mozilla for the first time in 1.0. People more than ever need to go out there and download [linux [mozilla.org], mac [mozilla.org], win32 [mozilla.org]], test, and give bug reports [mozilla.org]"

      Yes I totally recommend doing a bug report if there is something about Mozilla that you really hate. Bugzilla is excellent, and far nicer than OpenOffice.org's IssueZilla. I don't know why, I just hate IssueZilla, it never works well for me, and seems slower.

      I've been submitting bug reports for Mozilla for a while now. Sometimes I miss a previous bug, and so mine ends up being a duplicate, but I actually managed to find 2 unique bugs already (in composer), and they got implemented in 0.9.9! It was really cool to have helped made an improvement, without doing any programming.

      You can also vote on bugs. This is a great way to tell the developers which bugs you want to see fixed.

  2. Re:Congratulations...BUT... by inquis · · Score: 5, Informative

    Learn to love tabbed browsing if you have complaints about startup time. Once it's running, hit CTRL+T under Windows to open a new tab; it's much faster than opening a new window because of the reduced window manager overhead. Hell, if you're ambitious you can configure Mozilla to open a new tab whenever you middle-click on a link; that's a KILLER feature.

    Add the Mozilla mouse gestures package and you will be setup to browse.

    -inq

  3. Moz based projects by InsaneCreator · · Score: 4, Informative

    What I find most interesting about Mozilla is in how may ways it can be used. Just look at all the different projects using Moz engine, like text/programming editors, irc clients, media players, and others. A really interesting piece of work. You can find a lot of Moz-based projects at Mozdev.org

  4. Re:finnally i can ditch explorer by shobadobs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Gee, did it ever occur to you that it is becuase that's not in the CSS Standard? Scrollbar colors are an IE "extension" to CSS, and web authors who use it are rather ignorant of their readers. Users have their scrollbar colors the way they want them; and there is no reason for authors to consider messing with their UI. It can only decrease the usability of a web site. For information about how to prevent web deezyners' screwing with your scrollbar's default settings, go to this page and scroll down a bit.

  5. Re:Congratulations...BUT... by inquis · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, Mozilla has a mouse gestures package, it's a toolbar you add and it drops a configure dialog in your Preferences dialog.

    /me whistles.

    http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/

    -inq

  6. Hope for better plugin support by CanadaDave · · Score: 5, Informative
    One thing holding back Mozilla from widespread use by the average non-geek user, is that getting all plugins to work is not always easy in Windows at least. For example if you install RealPlayer 8, you won't get the plugin. You have to have Netscaple 4.x installed in Windows. RealPlayer will detec the Netscape 4.x directory and install the plugin. I have never tried creating these empty directories, because I assumed it actually relied on some registry entry for Netscape 4.x

    And the biggest plugin annoyance of all time....installing a JRE. For the non-geek user this is just a pain. They don't want to have to download and install this as well as the browser. It makes things too complicated. I wonder if an open source JRE like Blackdown.org's JRE with the Mozilla could be included with Mozilla.

    Also, Shockwave Flash has to be installed afterwards as well. IE on the other hand includes this in their browser. IE basically works out of the box, Mozilla doesn't. And the auto-plugin-installer crap doesn't work perfectly yet.

  7. Re:View Source by shaw7 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, I believe a fix has been checked in and will be in 1.0. See: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40867 It's always good to check the latest status before passing judgement.

  8. Re:AOL/TW testing Mozilla by MindStalker · · Score: 5, Informative

    That contact ended almsot 2 years ago I believe. The contract was basically that AOL got the AOL icons installed automatically with windows, and AOL agreed to use IE. With XP MS refused to resign the contact unless AOL agreed to not just use IE, but also WMP (instead of real), and many other microsoft technologies where AOL was using other products. AOL told MS to shove off, and thus the contact was not extended.

  9. Try the bookmark manager by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's very nice. I just found out about custom keywords today, and they rock.

    You can set up a book mark that takes a parameter and has a shortcut keyword. So now when I type "g keyword" into the urlbar it searches Google for my keyword. Browsing will never be the same :-).

    --
    It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
  10. It's not over yet by asa · · Score: 5, Informative

    We've still got a ways to go here. Check-ins to the tree are being tightly managed by the Mozilla "drivers" and we're working on getting it into shape for branching. When we get a handle on a few more bugs we'll create a Mozilla 1.0 branch and do a fairly quick Release Candidate 1. This will be a preview of what's to come with the final Mozilla 1.0 and an oportunity to gather feedback and TalkBack crash data that we will respond to over the following weeks as we approach the Mozilla 1.0 release.

    --Asa

  11. Opera faster at what? Loading up? by HanzoSan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Opera may load up faster but its slower at rendering pages.

    IE is faster than Mozilla but not faster at rendering pages.

    I dont really care how fast the browser loads, as long as it renders pages fast.

    Theres no way anyone can convince me IE or Opera can load pages faster than mOzilla, in my own tests Mozilla beat both browsers on every site I go to.

    Mozilla does have issues with javascript, thats one area IE and Opera win, but in all other Areas, Mozilla kicks ass.

    I compared IE 6(or whatever the newest one is), Mozilla nightly, Opera6.

    Mozilla is just fast as hell, pages render instantly no matter what page it is. Mozilla has never crashed, Konq has crashed, I admit Opera doesnt crash, but IE crashes more than Mozilla at this point.

    Have fun with slow rendering fast loading Opera.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
  12. Re:AOL's Pressure To Close by asa · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is both good and bad that AOL has decided to use Mozilla in the next AOL release. Unfortunately they are applying pressure to the Mozilla team to wrap it up and get the product out the door.

    This is a rediculous statement. AOL could care less about when 1.0 ships. Netscape 6.x and other AOL efforts haven't been delayed in their prior releases becuase Mozilla wasn't yet at 1.0.
    The pressure to make a 1.0 comes from within Mozilla, not from outside. We have a great set of technologies and it's time to let the world know. There are dozens of commercial projects (and even more non-commercial) using Mozilla technologies and we're working hard to give them a stable and long lived 1.0 branch on which to work. The 1.0 release is just the beginning for many consumers of Mozilla code and it will ba a fine place to start.

    --Asa

  13. Re:Recent speedups by BZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    > Why is Moz so much faster under Windows than
    > under Linux ?

    A few reasons:

    1) More Windows developers means more optimizations in platform-specific code on windows

    2) MSVC is a better C++ compiler than gcc and produces smaller and faster code

  14. Mozilla Mail not ready for prime time by jgarzik · · Score: 4, Informative
    Mozilla browser is pretty decent, though it still has rendering problems I occasionally run into.

    Mozilla Mail is a different story. Functional, but very unpolished and not ready for heavy use. I should know, I've been using it heavily for the past two weeks as a trial run. Basically it needs a UI guy to go over it and flesh out the bugs.

    • Scrollbar insanity. If your message has attachments (this occur sometimes in other conditions, too) you have no scrollbars. Or to be more accurate, the scrollbars are present but completely obscured and inaccessible.
    • Blank messages. Crossing folders when going to the next unread message, the message text doesn't appear at all. One must highlight another message in the folder, then return to the chosen message.
    • Problems with large selections and large attachments. UI freezes for a looong time, and occasionally crashes.
    • Multi-folder navigation. "Next unread message" and similar commands take you to the next unread message... but still leave the folder highlighted. Read the message, hit delete, and you just deleted a folder.
    • Constant subwindow resizing. Going from a message with attachments to one without causes multiple redraws of the same window... at different window sizes.
    • Crashes once per day, typically.
    • ...and more. If you live and die by your email, as I do :) there are other buglets you run into as well.

    In short, works but definitely not ready for prime time.

    Jeff