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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.
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.
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.
RC1 comes out tentatively this week (I'm on the build and release team).
[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.
There is a big fix for DHTML performance that, while working well, is too big a risk this close to 1.0 (tracking bug #21762) so is currently targeted at 1.0.1.
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
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
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.
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!