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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.
With the upcoming release of Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 7 will be based on that. I really hope reviewers, developers and users will take a new view on Netscape so Netscape can gain some of the lost market share. I'm tired of seeing websites which simply don't care about Netscape/Mozilla support...
And don't start saying "hey, I don't need Netscape, I want plain Mozilla!". You're right, but Netscape is for (l)users. If Netscape 7 has success, you'll also have more luck surfing the internet with your Mozilla browser.
By the way, MozillaZine is also a great source of information for Mozilla-fans.
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.
Basically, this is what posts you'll see.
"IE is faster, Mozilla cant beat IE"
Lets respond to this post right now. OF course IE is faster and always will be faster because its build into the damn OS. MSN msger is faster than ICQ and AIM, anything made by Microsoft should be the fastest considering Microsoft has advantages in terms of knowing the source code of the entire OS.
"IE has won, its too late, Mozilla team should just give up"
Isnt this exactly what the IE team should have done back in 1998 when Netscape 4 was winning 70-30 in terms of percentages?
"Opera's done it all first, Mozilla is copying"
Of course Mozilla and Netscape will copy Opera the same way Opera and IE copied Netscapes Bookmark system.
"Opera is better than Mozilla and IE because its faster"
Are you using Windows? Perhaps you should try linux on your 486, its faster. What? You arent using a 486? Well stop complaining about speed, if Mozilla is slow, its because you are too slow to upgrade
"Mozilla/Netscape cant render page X"
Maybe it WOULD render page X if you stopped using IE and wrote that same msg to the site owner
"Mozilla is bloated and slow"
Try Kmeleon, Galeon, or if both those are slow try lynx.
"AOL isnt supporting Mozilla, why wont they put gecko into their AOL package?"
They have. AOL 7.0 gecko beta. Also try Netscape 7
This ends all arguements you people will have before they begin, the rest of the arguements will be about bugs in mozilla, when will 1.0 release, why mozilla isnt availble for your obscure OS, or why the mozilla team took 4 years to build the best browser.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
copy & paste? Too hard... :-)
Drag the link onto the tab-bar.
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
As the userAgent string says : "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020513 Netscape/7.0b1"
2) Is Mozilla ever likely to support the auto-update function that Netscape has just included? (Being a sys-admin of 50-odd M$ boxes makes it a nightmare contemplating to update them all with the latest release)Thus on the 1.0 branch.
It is in the prefs but I doubt it will happen since Mozilla releases are not targeted towards end-users.
3) I know the party for 1.0 is June 12th but what is the projected/updated release date?The usual response: "when it's ready" :)
But I think it will be ready for that date (pure speculation)
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
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."
RC3 still has zero support for anti-aliased fonts.
Not true - the packages for Red Hat that are linked to by mozilla.org don't have it enabled by default. It's easy to enable it by editing the unix.js file in the defaults/pref directory of the Mozilla install tree, and setting these prefs:
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref(font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
// or whatever your freetype library is
Other packages, such as those built for SuSE (get them from ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla) have these enabled by default.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
I have just read one page of trolls and flamebait and the usual anti Mozilla responses such as it is bloated, slow, non CSS compliant, buggy, no one uses it, etc.
Consider this:
1. It is the *one* browser that is nearly 100% standards compliant. IE's non-standard standards may be de facto standards in many cases, but those pages on the web that do in fact use those are very small in number and are usually on websites which are not heavily frequented, Microsoft's own pages being the exception to prove the rule.
2.If you use Quick Launch with Mozilla, it loads part of itself into memory and then starts up about as fast as IE does.
3.It is the *one* browser that renders pages in the same manner across all supported platforms. IE does not do this for example between the mac and Windows. Opera is one version behind on the Mac and it remains to be seen when they get to 6 there.
4.It is, in my experince, more stable than IE on Win and Mac. I experience fewer crashes with the latest RC's than I do with IE on Win and mac.
5.It is definitely more secure than IE. It has it's security bugs, but in no way as many as IE does.
6.You can have an influence in the way this browser is developed. Do you have the same influence with IE or even Opera for that matter?
If Netscape dies, Mozilla will carry on.
7.For those who say that the browser share market belongs to IE, I say let's look again in a year. Netscape used to own the market and lost it because of Microsoft's tactics and a poor product that was less standards compliant than IE. This could change again.
8.For those who troll that Mozilla is only at 1.0RC3 and in one year has only gotten here from a 0.9 version, perhaps you should realise that the Mozilla developers are not in a competition for version numbers with IE. Netscape plays this game and has released version 7.
All that said, you're free to use whichever browser you like best on your platform.
People who started using the Internet before IE don't mind Netscape and would go back for a previous version. Most of the world see IE bundled with Windows, compared Netscape 4.77 with IE5 and say "IE is better", and don't recognize that Netscape could possibly change.
Add one part Mozilla and shake.
The sort of people who would use IE over Netscape because they had a bad experience with Netscape around 4.77 will be impressed with Mozilla, and they don't even need to know that it is based on Netscape! I installed Netscape 7 preview yesterday, which for most people may as well have been a Mozilla skin. Additions: IM, which closes when the browser closes and isn't important in a business environment, and no menu option to remove all those AOL popups.
We don't need to wait for Mozilla 1.0 so Netscape 7 can come out and compete with IE; when Moz hits 1.0, we should be pitting Mozilla against IE. It doesn't feel signifigantly different, but there are improvements that grow on you quickly - tabbed browsing, being able to selectively disable Javascript - which make people stand up and watch. Netscape will have as many ads and links to AOL in it as IE has to Micrsoft. Mozilla is infinitely more pure! And when the last few bugs are ironed out, I'll look forward to seeing what new innovations the crew have in store. (Remember, as far as most people are concerned, all that changed between IE4 and IE6 was the loading logo and the widgets if you're using XP.)
That, and maybe Mozilla could end up being the application that make people think "Wow, that open source community aren't so bad after all."
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)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fonts/unix/enablin g_truetype.html
As stated somewhere else it's already included. Maybe you should set up your linux and read some howtos before complaining. FUI I've run with anti-aliased fonts on my mozilla since 0.9.9, when I found out it was possible. One reason I could think of, why mozilla doesn't support aa fonts on your system is that you need the damned true-type fonts. That's what did the trick for me. Why doesn't mozilla supply these? Because it isn't their responsibillity. In short: RTFM
------- I fumbled my registration and I now must suffer
Read this document to find out why the spaces appear and what you can/should do to fix it. Nobody said standards compliance wouldn't hurt.
user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);
From: the customizing mozilla-guide:
When the dom.disable_open_click_delay pref is set to a non-zero number, window.open will fail when called more than that number of milliseconds after a mouse click.
It was fixed in RC2 (and netscape 6.2.3)
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
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.
The Mozilla Project today announced Release Candidate 28, in otherwords version 0.9999999999999999999999999999. The open source community has embraced this project fully and are doing everything in their power to get it released on time.
When asked about the timetable for 1.0 release, they stated "We are definately making progress. Look for it soon! Internet Explorer XXXV will go down in flames!!!".
Mozilla is the open source "clone" of Netscape. Netscape, if you remember, was a pioneer in the early days of WWW browsing. After being bought by AOL-Time Warner, some hoped that the huge cash flow would help the floundering former giant. AOL declared bankruptcy in 2010, bringing down all companies underneath it, including Netscape.
All in all, Mozilla really does look like a promising piece of software if the Mozilla team could actually release version 1.0. Just wishful thinking on my part...
Wow! You manage to bring this up every time they release a "bug-fix-only, no-new-features, release candidate"! And you know it! And you complain anyway, every time! And use exclamation marks, too!
I shall look forward to seeing your same post again when Mozilla 1.0PR1 comes out, when Mozilla 1.0PR2 comes out, and Mozilla 1.0 Final comes out, too.
When they said "you're not getting a pony for Christmas. Maybe for Easter," they meant it. Does this suck? Maybe. Do you have to whine about it every time? Apparently.
Cheers.