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Mozilla Branches For 1.0 RC1
At the end of last month, the Mozilla Project closed the tree for what will become Mozilla 1.0. Now jkeiser writes "Mozilla has branched for 1.0 RC1, which is the first last step to a final Mozilla 1.0! Mozilla has spent four long years getting the browser standards-compliant, fast and solid. Cross your fingers for a rockin' final release around the corner." Reader whovian points to the just-modified roadmap, too.
When I first started playing around with Mozilla (mid-99) I figgured they would *never* have a usable product. The thing just plain didn't work.
.0 that means something, as opposed to most commercial vendors (and a lot of OS projects) that usually wait until 3.x to begin getting things right.
And while they are a bit behind schedule. 4 years for a 1.0 doesn't sound bad when you realize that this is a
Good job guys.
(posted on 0.99)
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The release schedule on mozilla.org shows a release of 1.0 RC1, but no 1.0. When is 1.0 scheduled to come out?
It's a funny coincidence that this ended up as a story, as I was peering around the Mozilla website tonight trying to figure out an answer to one question:
When now can we expect an official 1.0 release?
I'm not a programmer in any way, so I don't know much of anything about development schedules or whatnot. And all the FAQs seemed to tiptoe around a definitive answer.
Awfully convenient that this became a story; I didn't want to ask in any of the other stories' comment sections, 'cause I didn't want to be offtopic.
Alternately, they could declare that 1.0 is an asymptotic limit for Mozilla, and no actual human coded Mozilla will ever reach it, though future versions will come closer.
The most important feature in 1.0 is that the api will now be stable for the 1.0.x series. This means a lot to galeon & co. Nobody is saying that 1.0 will be perfect, but since mozilla is a good browser suite already, the 1.0.x series is liiking very promising.
Now we can finally integrate it into the kernel!
Then the Opera Vs Netscape trials start, and life begins anew.
It has become a quite good app; the same could be said of many open-source products. I was thinking about this the other day....I'm in my fifth year of college, and I graduate next month. When I started, I couldn't do my work on Linux without either spending loads of $$ for ported commercial products, or constantly grinding my teeth. Two and a half years ago, I went pretty much linux all the time, using StarOffice as my suite. Still, I was stuck with Netscape 4.x as my browser. But now, I'm able to do all my work in a pure open-source environment (I'm not a CS major...I'm one of those social science types). It's a big change. Mozilla is a very good product. Congrats, and thanks folks.
--typing this on Galeon, one of the many Mozilla kids.
Well, that really depends on your processor.
Anyway, now that the tree has branched (which is really cool, by the way) the only drawback that I see is that I won't get my Mozilla fix every 5 weeks (5 weeks in Mozilla development-speak is more like 7 :o). Their release schedule has changed to 13 weeks.
Well, hopefully it will be 13 chronological weeks rather than 13 mozilla release weeks, hehe.
But anyway, once I've been weened off my Install-Newest-Version-of-Mozilla addiction, I guess I'll appreciate that all the serious bugs have been ironed out (i haven't noticed a single one since an early 0.9.x), it's so fscking customizable, and the performance is far better than anything except perhaps Opera. [I'm not even going to mention lynx - whoops. Damn]
Hey, I said I was biased (^&
I don't wanna come off like a whiner here, but Mozilla is not going to find much of an audience unless freetype support is _standard_
Cheers
Bowie J. Poag
I'd much rather use something open source to redeem myself for the sins of using an MS OS,
Anyone else envision RMS (or am I thinking of another rabid/psycho three-letter nickname guy), sitting on the blind side of a confessional, with mere mortals begging forgiveness for using non-open software on the other?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
55583
oh wait... it's fixed.
nevermind.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
At least the last 0.9.9 RPM packages were rubbish; Mozilla threw Segmentation fault immediately at startup. Same both with my home comp (i586 with Mdk Linux) and my work laptop (i686 with RH 7.1), so this can't be just a random problem.
Amazingly, the nightly build RPMs seem to work just fine.
This is definitely not the first time this happens. I don't know who compiles Mozilla for packaging, but it's obviously not done very well. Problems this obvious (Segfault at startup) don't give a very fancy image of Mozilla.
All packages should be tested at least somehow before distribution.
Arrgh! I can't stand the wait! We hit 0.9.9 and I thought, "GREAT! Next time I see Mozilla on /. it will be 1.0!!!!!!". Several Mozilla stories later I see this 1.0 story! Branch closed... Does that mean it's ready? No Moz! Now another 1.0 story with no Mozilla!!
I want my browser! STOP TORTURING US!!!!!
I stole this Sig
OmniWeb isn't free (as in speech), but it's darn good, and using the browser of the underdog is a small step towards restoring competition to the marketplace, which is morally good (just like using OSS).
I recommend going to omni's website and trying it out.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
What's so puzzling about being forced to use Windows at work? Plenty of companies have "MS Only" policies, or am I just missing something?
sic transit gloria mundi
Ohh, And here I thought we have a RC1 available for download. Dang. Never mind, I didn't realize Mozilla is such big news that /. publishes even plans to have a beta build :-)
.92 and moved toward the point I'm at right now, which is about 95% mozilla and rest for IE. Usually the culprit is some kind of fancy menu-system or dysfunctional scripting gimmick. The important thing is, however, that for majority of the sites Mozilla works just great!
I've been using Mozilla starting around
I'm just feeling a little odd about thinking it'd be a good thing to have AOL use Gecko so that we'd get standards-compliant web sites. Who'd have thought of it, AOL as a force for the white hats?
I agree that there's a strong argument to be made for the "back" menu to appear in the context menus everywhere. In fact, a few months ago, this would have been infuriating.
But I've switched to using gestures, and I no longer ever use the context menu for "back"; just a quick flick of the wrist and I'm where I want to be. It's so cool, I'm going to use two syllables here to pronounce the word "sweet": Sah-Weet!
I suspect that the "back" menu item will reappear in mozilla shortly, but in the meanwhile, take this opportunity to try out the gestures feature. You might end up preferring it.
Release Candidates are just for final bugfixing before the actual release, correct? Like the freezing process in Debian. So they'll just be stabilizing the code until they think it's ready. This is exciting because it means the 1.0 release can't be more than a few weeks away. It's a big deal because most people don't think of a project as actualized until it hits 1.0, which, let's face, many open source projects don't. If commercial product versions are any measure, Mozilla could probably somewhere above 4 or 5. It's nice to know that the developers have such a high standard for quality that even though it's been an excellent browser for several months now, they just now think it's 1.0 quality. Just think of how much better it can and will get from here. Props to all the Moz developers for such great work. Keep it up!
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
You can always get the nightly builds...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There are so many nice things about mozilla that make it so much easier and enjoyable to use than any other browser ... probably the most significant thing for me is tabbed browsing man one window multiple web pages, where has this feature been, must admit it makes older versions of netscape and ie seem almost impossible to use.
Another really sweet features of mozilla is UI pleasing to the eye and intuitive to boot, if you don't like it download an alternative theme, don't like any of these roll your own. I know, I know not a new idea but it has been done well.
All in all a fantastic product. Much thanks and much respect to all involved in producing such a great product, and one thats free too :)
Too bad that the Linux version has much lower priority than Windows. Some bugs I reported half of year (or even more) still show off - just becouse they're Linux specific. Some others, mostly all platform bugs, have been fixed in a few weeks or months.
Their mail and newsgroups still do not download the multipart porno for the newsgroups. What's the point of having the a full browser if you can't download porno with it. Hopefully they'll have it solved by 1.0's release. I suppose you can use it with any newsgroup, but really, let's make sure we concentrate on it for the real reasons.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
[plea for help]
Now is the time to increase the testing effort. Everybody out there, please download the latest nightly build. Get out there and test and submit bugs to Bugzilla.
You can poke fun as much as you want about the release timeline, but these Mozilla guys really work their asses off to get this product out to you at no charge. The least we can do as part of the open source community is help out by testing.
[/plea for help]
[/rant]
PK
P.S. Posted using April 9th Mozilla nightly build. A testament to how well it works and the stability of the nightly builds. I install a nightly build almost every morning and never had to revert back to using an older build because something major was broken. I always install the Linux tarballs, but of course YMMV for other platforms and installation methods. But I don't expect anything would be different for the Windoze and Mac builds.
The strange result is that 1.0.3 is scheduled to be released about a month after the final 1.1. Are they really planning something huge for the 1.1 branch that they don't trust themselves to re-merge the tree? I guess there is precedent for this, with Netscape 4.08 being released after the 4.5 releases were well on their way. Also, it seems that this is how Linux kernel releases work, with 2.2 still being maintained after the release of 2.4. Still, this is a new policy for Mozilla.
First off, kudos to the Mozilla project team for getting this far... it's shaping up to be an excellent browser especially once you count the security track record of the opposition.
:).
One question I have as a DHTML web designer, is that will v1.0 fix the DHTML timing issues? The v0.98 changelog indicated that "DHTML performance has regressed", which I can verify is putting it lightly -- one of my animations that revealed a DIV via clipping worked fluidly in Moz 0.97 and hardly at all in Moz 0.99, which still hasn't patched it. Check out the "Popup Menu v5" script on my homepage on a slower computer if you want to see what I mean.
A quick search of Bugzilla reveals some articles also mentioning this issue. Does anyone know what plans are afoot to improve this?
I hope DHTML performance improves before this tree is used for another NS6 or AOL browser release, as otherwise it could render some of the more technically involved sites unviewable. If anyone's more involved in Bugzilla than I and knows the bug ID that most work is going into, please post a link to vote for it, otherwise try this one
Apart from that, I'm finding new Mozilla releases to be strides above the versions this time last year. Hopefully once fully mature it'll be the cross-platform web page development environment of choice... that's one area in which IE can never beat it, with the huge differences between IE on Windows and Mac.
More power to the lizard!
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
I've heard something about the possiblity to compile Mozilla to use Qt - anyone have experience with that? And if it does work, does that mean that if I switch to Mozilla, my browser will finally look as sweet as the rest of KDE (with Mosfet's Liquid engine)? Oh, Konqueror, just doesn't do it for me functionality wise.
sic transit gloria mundi
This is why real companies don't release pre-1.0 products to the general public. Think how buggy your favorite piece of software is and imagine what people would think if they saw something before even the final codefreeze.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Tabs are only a different workspace containing your browser display, a window manager designed/configured to give a tab-style effect could be just the same. It`s a pity the more innovative window managers are often overlooked in favour of plain "straight sides and a title bar" window managers.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Now, I'm not saying that Mozilla does not do BiDi - it's just that the bugs in the BiDi implementation are so severe as to make Mozilla completly unsuable to anyone who reads and writes a complex script language. most notable are the "text selction" bugs which makes copying and pasting from pages that contain complex scripts impossible, and worse - the BiDi text input bug which causes Mozilla to spontaneusly crash when entering text in (for example) the text area boxes of weblogs.
The most infuriating thing about this, is that the serious BiDi bugs resolution dates have been postponed to later and later milestones, and now, as those are marked nsBeta1 (meaning - fixes to be submitted before 1.0 released), the source tree still has no fixes in sight, and I'm starting to doubt if we will see Mozilla as a competing browser to IE on the 'end user's' desktop - even after 1.0.
see bugs :
95228
82352
125546
112101
75011
On linux/i386 it`s a case of copying the libflashplugin.so to mozilla/plugins, wherever you installed mozilla. On windows its a case of running the installer and it works out where to put it. Netscape plugins seem to work just fine in mozilla.. However it would be usefull to have flash plugins for some of the os/hardware combinations not supported by macromedia.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Can someone please tell me how to get it to work over X. I can't believe they're calling it "solid" and "fast" when it doesn't even paint the display over eXceed. I get nothing but a black display area on any reasonably long page.
Konqueror 3 is looking pretty good. Alls' it needs are tabs.
I'm stoked about 1.0. I think the browser is solid as hell.
HOWEVER, the included Mail and Newsgroup app has a LONG way to go. There are many, many outstanding (and often show-stopping) bugs with the Mail reader.
I have been testing it recently with the hopes of deploying it throughout our company as the standard mail client. The Windows version is horribly broken. It often hangs upon startup and you cannot print many messages without first double-clicking them and opening them up in their own windows, and printing from these. For kicks, I tried the test with several different builds (including 0.99rel) on several different computers. Same results all around. Our mail server runs Courier IMAP and works great with every other mail client I've used (Pine, Mac OS X Mail.app, SquirrelMail, Mulberry, Eudora, Netscape 4.x, etc., etc.)
just out of curiosity, what compielr do they use for the Win32 builds? I mean I would guess VC++ 6.0.
.NET (quite nice i might add) and the new optimizing technologies in there are amazing. My NES emulator gained an extra 100 FPS just from a simple recompile with new compiler. Could Mozilla for Win32 gain even better performance if they compiled it with VS .NET C++ compiler?
The reason i ask is that i recently upgraded to Visual Studio
I write javascript apps and big ones at that not just mouseovers and the like.
Since 0.98 I priomarily use Mozilla as my development browser and then do the IE specific stuff afterwards.
I have found that it's IE's javascript that is the most annoying of the two.
And Opera's is just annoying "left hand side of line xxx can not be assigned to" yawn
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
OmniWeb was tested for its claim for web standards compatibility at A List Apart.
Basically they though it had great promise, but had a "long way to go before it can live up to its developers' claims to any sort of useful or meaningful CSS and DOM support."
One of the things that really bugs me is when people look at the bug cound and say hay there were 21 000 bugs in X version but there are now 22 000 bugs in Y version so X version must be buggier than Y version.
Generally most of the bugs in that were found in version Y were already in X but they weren't found. That is there aren't more bugs just more that are found.
Another thing is have you read some of the bugs submitted?
Check out these(5 new bugs picked at random):
*Bugzilla Bug 78633 [console] photon port should not print to console for opt builds (maybe)
*Bugzilla Bug 35419 solaris/gcc should use -shared instead of -G in configure.in DSO_LDOPTS
*Bugzilla Bug 108476 Error with XML
*Bugzilla Bug 56179 Broken mozilla.org links
*Bugzilla Bug 9185 Gtk command-line args crash viewer
It may just be me but none of these are show stopper bugs in my mind. The truth is if the bug database wasn't open then people would be talking about how much more stable the new mozilla is instead of how many more bugs it has.
It a couple of people went through the 22 000 bugs and removed the redundant bugs and fixed the trival bugs that most people don't care about chancers are that after one or two months the bug cound would be down to something more like 3 000 bugs BUT mozilla would be almost exactly the same.
'Civilised' is spelt perfectly correctly. It's only you 'uncivilized' Americans who spell it wrong.
But I've had real trouble installing the things successfully in Mozilla - plugin installers often "know" that they belong to Netscape, and don't seem to be visible to Mozilla, especially if I have both browsers installed on my Win98 machine. Which plug-ins are going to work? Will the Mozilla developers test the installation procedures? And how do you keep Internet Exploiter from stealing dominant-browser status?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That roadmap isn't actually new. Just look at the revision date, the last thing on the document. Mitchell Baker has indeed promised a new roadmap, but that aint it yet.
The link's still good, though - that's where it'll be when it's done, but don't get confused because that's been there about three weeks now...
An interesting idea. Does any wm do this currently? I can see that it would be useful for consoles; not sure about other apps. File managers possibly.
One-click tabs for each emacs buffer would be nice. I find one of the few times using emacs where I have to use conscious thought just to use it is when I'm trying to think which buffers I have open/what their names are.
I have been using Mozilla forever (well, since the alpha 9 release), and have been amazed by it's progress. I downloaded CVS snapshots regularly, and found more and more reason to love Mozilla.
...
However, ever since 0.9.7, things didn't seem so peachy. The same Mozilla snaps that were brining me so much joy were crashing on a regular basis. Even the official releases were crashing. The little things that I thought were really cool, were deemed to be not so and disabled.
My gripes with Mozilla, however, are now over, now that I've installed KDE 3.0. The new Konqueror is sheer brilliance, and Kmail is as full featured as Mozilla mail was. I am finally 100% satisfied with my desktop system.
I tried to love Mozilla, and for the longest time I did
There's a reason for this apathy. OmniWeb may be small and light, but it also has no DOM to speak of, is way behind on features compared to Mozilla and is also MacOS X only as far as I'm aware.
In fact I believe the Omni crew are switching away from their own rendering engine to using Gecko, because it'd take years for them to get to the level of rendering accuracy Mozilla has. OmniWeb is currently a little like Konqueror on Linux, real nice, but can't really compete yet in terms of rendering or features.
When a crash is reported by Talkback, see if you can reproduce it. If you can, don't bother sending the repeat crash logs, there's no point. Instead, try to make a minimal test case, so you find the exact problem that causes the crash.
Now go into Bugzilla and file a bug with a brief description of the crash, and most importantly of all the talkback ID of the crash. You can find this out by running the talkback program that's in the components directory. Once you've added the talkback ID to the crash report, a Mozilla engineer will pull the stack trace from the Talkback DB and work will start.
If you don't file in Bugzilla, chances are it won't be looked at! So file them!
Finally, a quick word of warning: don't be surprised if the bug is marked as critical/futured. I've found several times now when I've crashed Mozilla it's because I've been doing some strange stuff with XML or the site contains some seriously twisted markup. Although crashes are always treated seriously, if it's not a situation the average user will ever encounter it will probably get futured.
Happy hacking!
The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes. I know this is a crap reason to not use a browser, but it's that F5, <pause>, white screen, page-draws-down that bugs me.
There are, of course, other minor annoyances, like the rather slow loadup time (but I have my browser open nearly 24/7 anyway), but those two things are probably what I still find the worst. Oh yeah, and I'm sure Mozilla supports them, but there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences.
Please note that I'm speaking purely from the point of view of someone who is using Opera, and before that IE. I find Opera's keyboard shortcuts and the ability to turn off Javascript, images etc with a single pulldown menu (F12) to be really great; I imagine you can do similar things in Mozilla, but they're not as easy to find in my experience.
On the other hand, Mozilla has a fabulous preferences system that is much easier to use than Opera's. It has a prettier interface too, although Opera certainly isn't ugly. And while it doesn't have mouse-wheel window switching, it also doesn't keep focus on the old window tab because of it. Don't think I'm bashing Mozilla because I'm not. I imagine that if you were someone accustomed to Netscape, Mozilla would seem far better than Opera. Opera seems to try to be more like IE. If Opera wasn't around, I'd use Mozilla, and I'm pleased there's a really decent alternative to Opera--both because competition promotes innovation, and because if Opera ever goes under or their browser just goes to shit, I can switch to Mozilla. I'd like to make a completely redundant statement now, and say kudos to everyone involved with the Mozilla project. Awsome work guys; I may not use your browser, but I'm still behind you 100%.
just goes to show how much dignity oss community has.to them, 1.0 actually means a good product, which is important, because it also means they are trying to just make their product better instead of stealing money from unbeknownst consumers.
lets just hope this particular trait of oss remains and does not become corporate like competition.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Actually, the simplest proof is:
0 0...
x=0.999...
10x=9.999...
-------------
9x=9.0
x=1
QED
The same principle can be used to convert any repeating decimal into a fraction without much difficulty.
There is acatully, fluxbox. It's a fork where they've kept developing the blackbox code. You can find it at fluxbox.sf.net
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
ObMozBugComplaintBitchSlap
In 2 years of reporting 800 bugs, I've been told "fix it yourself" two or three times. Mozilla developers appreciate bug reports and most don't mind an occasional "I think this bug is important because...". If you just go around complaining "This bug has been known for x months" or "I can't believe you didn't fix obscure bug y, nobody will use your browser", you might get that response, but you're more likely to be ignored.
The shareholder is always right.
One of the main things that I still haven't figured out (and I have looked) is how to go to the address bar using the keyboard. In Opera you hit F8. In IE you hit Alt-D. I'm sure Mozilla must have this really obvious feature or people would go insane, but I just can't seem to find it.
h elp/
Ctrl+L. For other shortcuts see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jruderma/mozilla/keyboard-
The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes.
What's wrong with incremental rendering? One thing that often annoys me when I use Opera is that it will download an entire 4MB page before displaying anything. Mozilla sometimes does that as well, but we consider it a bug (129640) when it does. Mozilla has an optimization that makes not display anything for the first 1.2 seconds of interpreting a page (unless it finishes in under 1.2 seconds), so once the first screenful of the page appears, you can usually read it while the rest of the page loads quietly.
The shareholder is always right.
Nevertheless, they rewrote Mozilla "from scratch" with access to the Netscape codebase; it was not a clean-room implementation and they did not start off with zero knowledge of the way Netscape had gone about things. It is therefore a valid criticism of early versions of Mozilla that they were so much worse than Netscape, and this is not a 1.0 release.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Wow, I never thought I'd see the day!
:)
I remember when I first heard of Mozilla about 3 years ago - it was going to make the "browser war" non-existant becuase it was so much faster than Internet Explorer, and still had a lot of slimming down to do (oh, and it was already pretty small!) Never mind that at the time, it had hardly any features, was quite unstable, and such. It was a dream people had. It would be great!
Now, the moment is almost upon us, and Mozilla is almost out in the wild. Several years ago I was quite excited, but now? Well, I'm happy, of course, but what's the big deal? It's nothing all that fantastic, other than that it's a competing (open source) product for IE. If it fit on a floppy and file my taxes (damn those taxes!), though - that's another story.
I s'pose it's like sex - everyone says how great it is, and every teenage boy wants it. But then, when it's finally obtained or obtainable, it's just kind of, "Eh, it was ok, but not what I thought."
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I use 3 browsers on a daily basis: Mozilla 0.99, Netscape 4.72 and IE 6.0. When displaying very large html pages (500K) Mozilla waits until it has read all the information until it displays it, whereas Netscape and IE will render it to screen as it becomes available. The net effect is that you can starting reading the text much sooner in non-Mozilla browsers. Admittedly, Netscape is by far the worst browser when dealing with tables whose elements are of unknown size. IE is faster than the other two browsers in almost all areas.
Is the incremental rendering of uncomplex but large HTML pages with next to no formatting impossible to do in Mozilla's current framework?
From the announcement "The trunk is now open to 1.1 alpha work, on the road to 2.0!" I don't think this is quite the time to open the trunk, but rather the time, as is done with the linux kernel, to get everyone even more focused on the final product.
Keeping the trunk closed says "No, you can't checkin your uber-widget yet, go find something to do on 1.0 for a while first."
Obviously, a closure like this can't last too long, maybe until RC1 or RC2 is released. However, mozilla has recently benifited enormously from what seems to be a real focus on the important things in the puch towards 1.0. A few more weeks of this could really make a tangible improvement in the final product.
Now that Mozilla is at this milestone (I don't know if I can conceived of non 0.foo releases of this software, it just seems wrong somehow), how do you all think it compares with Konqueror, Galeon, Opera, etc? Does Mozilla have a chance to get (back?) on-top in the not-IE browser scuffle? (yes, scuffle... the war ended when Netscape challenged IE and got its head handed to it on a plate)
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Really, there have been two browsers developed in 4 years. The intial project used the NS4 code as a starting point and eventually abandonded it as unusable. So, if you take out that initial time, you're probably looking at closer to 2 or 2.5 years. Really not bad when writing a product from scratch.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I'm a big mozilla fan, but to be forking for 1.0 and still have no splash screen or icons? And this stuff isn't even themeable, so the usual suspects can't help us.
This is the kind of stuff closed-source people are laughing at. Why can't the Moz team get this together??
--
I swear I can't hit a link in the mozilla mail program without a 50% chance of total mozilla crash. I send my talkbacks - does that count as 'bug reporting'? Under 'what were you doing?' I put 'clicking a link'.
creation science book
I'm certainly not in favour of forcing clean room interpretations; just of accurate labelling of software releases. It clearly made sense for the Mozilla team to make what use they could of the Netscape code; but equally clearly, having done that, it is not right for them to adopt a numbering convention which implies that they did not do so.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I have been galled, if not suprised, to observe the pattern of most comments regarding the Mozilla project over the years at Slashdot.
/. over the years anyway. It's not like, say, abot 80% of comments were completely unconstructive, nooo....
In the early days, it was:
"My GOD, this will NEVER be a usable product! Blah! Mozilla bites!"
This attitude has prevailed (morphing to nitpicking) even with the most recent 0.9.x releases:
"My GOD, Mozilla doesn't cook my bacon and eggs, and make my bed in the morning! Blah! Mozilla bites!"
Now with 1.0 days away, we finally see many more encouraging messages:
"Way to go Mozilla! We were with you all along! Hooray for the glories of Open Source and Free Software!"
I guess I'm being a bit cynical, but it's a good thing that most of the Mozilla developers probably ignored
s/abot/about/
jesser has covered keyboard access to the address bar. Thanks! I was wondering about that one myself.
As for speed, the UI chrome can be a little sluggish on a slower machine, but I find the HTML renderer to be quite swift.
rather slow loadup time
I use QuickLaunch and find startup quite reasonable. You can turn it on under Preferences->Advanced, or during installation.
there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences
For now gesture navigation is an optional module that you need to install yourself by visiting the OptiMoz site. The installation is really painless, and you can configure or uninstall optimoz through the prefs panel. One caveat: the latest nightly builds seem to have changed some interfaces that OptiMoz uses, so the prefs are no longer visible, though I expect the OptiMoz project to have an updated release available soon.
And while it doesn't have mouse-wheel window switching...
...it does however allow you to configure the mouse wheel with a modifier key to scroll pages at a time, line at a time, change text size or go back and forward through history.
All the UI people are already screaming that Moz has too many prefs. I guess I wouldn't be hired for UI design since I like lots of configurability. I don't see a RFE bug in bugzilla to add switching windows using the mouse wheel, but you can search bugzilla yourself and if you're sure such an RFE doesn't exist, then add a bug.
Of course, RFE's are low on the totem pole right now...
Christopher
Mozilla
Mozilla is starting to run into an odd problem here. Back at 0.8, and even as late as 0.9.2, there were enough bug-fixes coming in for enough major bugs that it was well worth the time of the average well-clued user to run nightlies instead of releases. The nightlies would only be truely unstable for a week or two after a release (as the flood gates opened up), but then they would stabalize, and I found them very usable.
Now, though, the 0.9.8 and 0.9.9 releases have been so stable that I haven't wanted to load a nightly. It hasn't been helped by the fact that Mozillazine used to do a great job of reviewing each set of nightlies, but they've been falling WAY behind for a while now.
I've got work to do, and was really only a tester because being one got me a better browser than NS4. I wonder how many other folk are equally lazy...?
Mozilla has been my browser of choice for a while now, but it still has some serious bugs. So consider this criticism based in love. It's also encouraging that all these bugs have a real chance of being fixed. Even I could theoretically fix them.
There is a huge bug with bookmarks:
51683: Unable to have 2 differently named bookmarks for the same url.
This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.
Another, less serious bookmark bug:
85469: Bookmark select/cut/paste operation is sensitive to order of selection
This is a major meta-bug:
73812: Browser doesn't fit with Mac OS X UI Specs
Anyone who uses a Mac uses it because of the user interface--having a program that doesn't comply with the guidelines is extraordinarily frustrating. But they're definitely getting closer.
128658: Typing in textarea really slow
Large textareas overwhelm Mozilla. This makes editing in WP, for example, very frustrating. Totally unacceptable.
However, it's great watching bugs get steadily fixed. So vote for the above bugs, get them fixed, submit patches, hooray. The rendering engine really is marvelous.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
<news truth="0">
Mozilla.org has signed a deal with Distributed Computing Technologies Inc. to include encryption research software in the official binary releases of Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 5. The RC5 build will include a distributed application to measure the strength of RSA's RC5 cipher, described in RFC 2040.
</news>
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ironically, Netscape 6.2 does work on MSNBC, including all the cascading menus/DHTML stuff. So it's purely due to MSNBC doing *incorrect* browser sniffing - looking explicitly for Netscape 6.x rather than for any Mozilla/Gecko-based browser.
I emailed them via their feedback form last week. Don't know if it will help, but since they *do* support the arch-competitor TWAOL Netscape-branded browser, maybe it was just a coding bug.
OTOH, I wonder what MS considers more of a threat? Another monopoly-style media/internet conglomerate like AOL Time-Warner, or the Open Source movement? Maybe supporting branded-Netscape but not Open Source Mozilla is deliberate...
it's terminology like that that slows the whole project down! that's like saying "ok, first we're going to write half of the project, and then half of what's remaining to do, then half of what's now remaining, etc." it's an infinite series!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I guess I'm being a bit cynical, but it's a good thing that most of the Mozilla developers probably ignored /. over the years anyway. It's not like, say, abot 80% of comments were completely unconstructive, nooo...
/. syndrome. Some people complain about the topic. Some people complain about people complaining about the topic. And some people complain about people complaining... etc. And then everyone agrees that /. is going to hell, and wonders why.
This really is the
I vote we should just stop complaining.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
F6 works for me under Linux. Same key works in IE 5. I have no idea if that works in Moz under Win32.
I'm sure Mozilla supports them, but there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences.
Optimoz does this. I don't think Mozilla has it natively.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Then you come along and notice "Hey, yesterday that guy poo-poo-ed Mozilla, but today this other guy said it was good. What gives?"
Well clearly what gives is that you think this is the same person when in fact it is different people saying different things.
SIDE NOTE: Complaining about how Slashdot people are inconsistant is just STOOPED. There is not one voice here, there are many. If you came to compalin about inconsistancy, then track one person and look for inconsistancy.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.
I was stunned and amazed when I read this sentence. I had to read it twice before I believed it! Someone actually spelled "ridiculous" correctly on slashdot! Its gotten so that it doesn't even look correct anymore. Nice work!
if this will run on OpenBSD.
I wonder about this every then and now, mostly when
I read about new releases on slashdot.
The last mozilla that natively ran on OpenBSD/x86-32
is, if I remember correctly, 0.9.3
Newer versions run in Linux binary emulation (I should
s/emulation/personality/ though), ok, but you will have
to have a tens-of-megabytes package (the RH 6.2 libraries)
around unless your Moz-Linux binary is fully statically
linked - preferably against a 2.2 or even 2.0 kernel.
I currently work on a pentium-75 notebook that has only
32 MB RAM, thus rendering Linux binaries nearly unusable,
and even BSDI Netscrap 4.7? is sucking slow. Maybe I should
try konq-embedded, but you still need kdelibs for this.
So my solution is, and I am quite happy with this, to use Lynx
and xloadimage for browsing only (even without starting X11).
But _when_ I wish to graphically browse a website, I have no
real option.
*considering Netscrap 3 for BSD/OS* hmmm...
Anyways, I hope the folks at Moz are working to get OpenBSD
on most platforms (minus vax, I suppose, and probably minus
hppa and sparc64) to run.
Many people I know of would like to hear of success.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
If you want elegance and superb antialiasing and standards compliance, consider Chimera.
I hope it will be...but there are a couple of serious gray areas that need fixing:
I've been using Moz for a couple of years and I love it, but I can't understand why these two areas are still outstanding. Does no-one print from Mozilla?
There's always the possibility that one of the nightly Mozilla builds will have a nasty IMAP bug that corrupts/damages the online folders.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
hell, this will probably get mod'ed "Redundant" by the chimps with mod-points anyhow.
Yeah, probably. It's not really redundant, but until Slashdot gets a (-1, dumbass) moderation, it's the most fitting.
"One-click tabs for each emacs buffer would be nice."
XEmacs has had this feature since v21.something - it's present in 21.4, which is what I use.
Star Office hasn't changed since 1998.
It does. having come from ie5, it's what I always use.
-no broken link
It would make sense that windows would be considered the primary platform, but I'm perfectly content with the Linux version. In fact, there are many things about the windows version that I dislike as compared to linux. (which is pretty much anything to do with the middle mouse button...)
Personally, my experience with some of the other bug fixers and reporters has been very positive in regards to linux-specific bugs. The Mozilla team is a very dedicated group of people who want to see this thing succeed.
I don't know if "asymptoting" is a word or not, but it sounds vaguely illegal.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.