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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!
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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 :)
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'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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
That's why the tags in the core HTML describe content like <em> indicates that the text should be displayed with emphasis as opposed to the newer <i> tag that does something similar. HTML marks content with rendering hints, but it's not designed to be able to lay out a page. It's designed to describe rendering hints on a page. Any time HTML is used to lay out a page, it's using a bastardization of tables and using tags that have been removed in HTML 4.01 strict (and are merely deprecated in HTML 4.01 transitional).
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is designed to lay out a page. CSS can be applied directly to an XML document (in the spec, maybe not via any tools yet), and it can also describe the page layout. I'd point you to my website that uses CSS to lay out the page, but it's currently offline, so I'll just have to send you to the W3 CSS site. If you're using a CSS compliant browser (Mozilla is the best at rendering it properly but IE works - dunno about anything else), you should notice the menu and the various links scattered about the top of the page that are defined via CSS page lay out rules.
HTML as originally designed is intended to describe sections of a document. At some point, people started developing fancy webpages and HTML 3 was born which included a lot of page lay out tags. However, more recently, with IE 5 and Mozilla, CSS and HTML have taken over for page design, meaning that newer sites can be designed using HTML 4.01 strict with CSS describing how it should be displayed. (This is the preferred, "proper" method.) Historically, HTML was originally designed to define a page structure, delinating paragraphs and lists. With HTML 4.01 it returns to the ideal, while using CSS to allow for fancy page layout.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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
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 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.
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!