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Mozilla RC3 Released
pjdepasq was one of many reader to submit the news that "Those fine folks at Mozilla.org rolled out RC3 on Thursday I noted. They say it's the last planned release before 1.0, which I'm guessing is right around the corner. As a fan of the project (I'm using it on 3 platforms!), kudos to all of you!" Here are the release notes.
It uses native widgets. I.e., unlike a lot of other apps - eg, Microsoft's own Office XP - Mozilla actually uses Windows XP's `styles'. If you get rid of the GreyModern / Netscape 4 themes and replace them with the IE theme, Mozilla actually looks and acts like a rather pleasant and featurefilled native looking web browser for Win32. Without the security holes of IE, plus tabbing, popup control, and lots of other goodies IE doesn't have.
...the DHTML performance will increase?
The current series has a bad bug in DHTML animation performance that I've noticed -- performance regressed in the 0.97 -> 0.98 release, and ever since then rapid animations etc. have often not rendered correctly.
Read through the bugzilla entry there -- apparently some experimental builds have 450% increased JavaScript animation speed, some test are linked to try it out yourself. Does anyone more in touch with the Moz project internals than I have an idea as to when this will be integrated with the main branch of the code -- I heard 1.01 was the target a while back?
I say this as Moz is looking more and more likely to turn up on user's desktops as part of AOL/Compuserve/whatever as they escape from MS's browser licensing terms. Bugs in release candidates are fine (that's what they're there for) but if mass-market NS7 has shortfalls like these, it could spell trouble for JavaScript developers like me.
Anyway, more power to the Mozilla project! It's good to see a truly free, standards compliant, cross-platform browser out there. Looking back a year, I wonder what it'll be like in a year's time...
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
Bloated? A ten meg download that includes browser, mail, news, irc client? And I don't know what machine you are using, but Moz is as snappy as anything else on my computer. I'm sorry, but nothing about this excellent peice of software seems bloated or slow to me. This is by far the best web browser I've ever used IMHO.
This is not intended as flamebait by any means, but does anyone know what sort of browser share Mozilla/Netscape have? I have been following and pushing both browsers for the past year, encouraging others to try them out, but when checking the browser statistics for my website they don't have any entry at all. Right now the breakdown for my site is about 97% Internet Explorer 5+ and 3% Netscape 4, which is a real shame. Does anyone out there have any more promising browser usuage stats?
It is also interesting guaging people response to Mozilla/Netscape on sites other than Slashdot. It seems like there is real anti-Netscape sentiment out there, an example being the response to Netscape 7 at deviantart where there is loads of "Netscape sucks" one liners. I could be wrong on this, but it seems ever since Netscape 4 a lot of people seem unprepared to give Netscape a second chance. Perhaps it is "cool" to hate Netscape because they are owned by AOL, I don't know
Anyway that aside, Mozilla is great is most definitely stable enough for public consumption as the last few releases haven't crashed on me at all. As soon as I get home I'll download RC3.
aus.music.scrapbook
Yesturday, as rc3 was released, bug ID 82534 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82534 copy and paste - they dont allow links from slashdot) was changed from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.0.1
To summarise, this bug freezes any keyboard input to mozilla under some circumstances - so its kinda major
It only happens on windows, but is very easily reproducable (there are many examples of how to produce it in the bug thread)
Two friends of mine tried using mozilla on windows, and both encountered this bug and were stumpped
I cant believe they are planning to release 1.0 with this bug still in since it will for sure put a lot of people off mozilla for a long time - what with it being a point zero...
With all the IE holes, I've been sensing more and more of an anti-IE sentiment. In fact the only browser that I've never heard a truly disparaging remark about (although I have heard honest testaments to its shortcomings) is Opera.
And when I show people Mozilla with disabling pop-ups and tabbed browsing, anti-IE sentiment grows where it never existed before.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
With pinball theme it looks much nicer than with too big classic theme. Also finally I can switch javascript support and pop-ups on and off by one mouse click with this preference toolbar tool. Tabbed browsing is also great feature. New rc3 starts up and loads pages as fast as explorer. With all these additional features and equal performance with windows native browser I can finally honestly recommend using mozilla.
hopey
You know the OS X has this nice little feature calles "Location" (Apple -> Location), which allows you to switch on the fly from one network to another. Now I use my personal iBook as well as on my home network (with Firewall/NAT) as on the corporate network (with proxy). The Location "applet", allows you to specify the proxies to use (or not to use) when on a certain network. Nifty, eh? Well I love it.
However there is only ONE browser that fetches this information and that is Internet Explorer. Why? Why? Why? Opera doesn't do it, Mozilla doesn't check it nor Chimera does. I consider all these browsers superior to IE 5.5 You always have to set the proxy information manually! I don't want to do this. Why do I have to change the preferences of the browser when I start it up on another network?
I can understand this under Linux (no central place to get proxies), or under Windows because it has no nifty "location" feature (a central place is there, if the INTERNEL.CPL applet counts).
Sorry, but *this* is my biggest issue with Non-IE browsers on Mac. (Posting from Moz RC2 on Mac OS X...btw)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
At least a few Mozilla programmers apparently are losing a whole lot of sleep trying to get 1.0final out the door. Take a look at bug 110112 comment 62 (paste the link to avoid the slashdot ban):
1 12 #c62
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110
Synopsis: there are various crashes and freezes when using the "ask me before loading an image" option. In a bad imitation of Solomon's judgement, they decided to stop the crashes by eliminating the option.
You should read that page more closely. For example: