Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla 1.1 Alpha Released
theBrownfury writes: "Mozilla.org has released Mozilla 1.1 alpha, the first post 1.0 milestone.
This release has been in the works for almost 2 months now incorporating
over 1700 bug fixes and more than a dozen new features. Including: Quartz
rendering for OS X 10.1.5 users, new layout performance enhancements targeted
at DHTML, faster startup times and more. Here are the release notes and
the link to the releases page
or FTP
for downloads."
Hopefully this version will fix the problems I get loading pages with lots of dhtml... takes forever to load those :( (for example, flat mode comments @ shacknews.com)
Hopefully they've finally fixed some of the problems running Java applets. For example, I can't play games at http://games.yahoo.com using Mozilla. I've seen tons of bugs at Bugzilla, but not being a Java expert I don't know what is what.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
getting to that FTP server before it gets slashdotted kinda reminds me of when Indiana Jones is diving under some massive stone door, which is about to shut him in the acient temple.
Once again we have to say well done to the Mozilla team for finally delivering a very usable product. It's great to jump between Linux and Windows and to have the same browser. Some people have complained about its memory use, but if your machine is halfway decent, it's really a simple Web browser that gets the job done.
However, there are several things that stop me from using it 100% of the time. I still stick to IE for about 25% of sites, because.. of all the little bugs! I'm hoping some have been cleared up in this Alpha. They include:
* Keyboard not responding sometimes when you open a new Mozilla window (this is in Bugzilla)
* When you click on some links, it doesn't go to the destination.. and it just displays a picture off of the current page! Hit Refresh and you finally go on your way.
* Mozilla is less system tolerant than IE. Mozilla is often the first application to lose its icons and its interface starts falling to pieces. This is probably because of my memory or the CPU overheating.. but IE remains stable until the last minute.
* Mozilla often bawks if you're loading large JPEGs into it direct from hard disk.. and it just displays a blank/white screen with scrollbars.
* Many sites still don't display well in Mozilla. This is the Web developer's fault, but still.. Mozilla can do all of those DHTML menus and stuff, yet I still run into problems on sites that use them. An optional 'IE compliancy' patch in Mozilla would be very very useful!
mogorific carpentry experiments
and to fill in the next mozilla realaes lets look at the roadmap:
1.1alpha 12-Jun-2002
1.1beta 17-Jul-2002
1.1 09-Aug-2002
Security fixes in mozilla 1.0 not included here.
If it's one of 'those' sites that positions everything with 300byte gifs, it loads alot faster than 25%.
I benchmarked it against IE on one of my p0rn sites, it loaded the page in under a second, IE took over 4, every time.
Anyone know if this has the fix for the remote DoS
when X/XFS is running?
(For those of you who don't know, you can kill X
by including "body { font-size: 1666666px; }" in a stylesheet
My email addy? should be easy enough.
Well, there's one IE emulation script here that I know of. It's a regular .JS script, designed more for designers to adapt scripts easily than for clients, but it shows off the advanced side of Moz's JS 1.5 support (getters/setters for properties...).
.JS files added to each page you load (without a local proxy)? Is it possible to add DOM properties with the user prefs JS files somehow? This could be very useful -- emulate IE, any other browser, customise the behaviour of any document function...
This brings up one of my older thoughts: you know how we can format sites with user-defined stylesheets, how about user-defined
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
If someone there is worried about people facing this 1.1 new release when, in press releases they have been told about 1.0, then don't worry. The big milestone of 1.0 is about compatibility: the interfaces have been frozen so further development will be easy to do. This is a concert only for enterprises developing applications based on Mozilla technology (PDAs, portable aps, embedded devices), not for the desktop end user.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
So how many bugs are open on IE? How do you know it's 10x as many bugs? For that matter, how do you actually raise a bug on IE if you find one? Microsoft do their best to hide that kind of information.
The fact is Internet Explorer is closed source. You have no idea how many bugs are open on it, how many are fixed between builds, the quality of patches, the quality of the code or even what features are being worked on at any given time. Mozilla allows you to do all which consequently means a lot of people are motivated to find and reports bugs and often submit patches.
Besides, a lot of the so-called bugs on mozilla are covering feature work, more deal with embedding and API cleanup, more are dupes, more are issues restricted to specific sites and more deal with issues on specific platforms. They might all be labelled "bugs" but the number of crash/non-functional/quirk issues are actually a subset.
that's funny, i've been running 1.0 on a 250 MhZ Celeron, and it works just fine. (64 Megs RAM)
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I took a couple of screenshots of Slashdot rendered with and without the Quartz rendering of Mozilla 1.1A.
Wow. What a difference.
http://www2.canisius.edu/~graciem/mozilla.html
--saint
In traditional /. style I prefer to ask silly questions instead of go googling or reading Bugzilla so here it goes.
Does anyone know if they're planning to replace GTK 1.2 with GTK 2.0 soon as default toolkit on Unix platforms? By default I mean it uses GTK 2.0 if found without having to use --with-toolkit=gtk2 configure option of whatever it's called. I think basic GTK 2.0 support has been in since February or so and I personally tested it sometime in April or May (had to get some patches somewhere and apply to source from CVS, wasn't yet committed back then) and it worked fine on my mainstream system (i686 PC running Debian/unstable). Also some days ago I grabbed some snapshot debs from an APT repository announced on galeon-devel mailing list. Packages included Mozilla with GTK2 support and Galeon compiled from source from the HEAD branch of their CVS. That GNOME 2.0 version of Galeon is already almost quite usable, very cool.
Anyway, IMHO, it would be appropriate to begin public testing of new rendering back-end in early stages of 1.1 alphas by compiling official snapshots for Unices with GTK 2.0 support enabled. Any words regarding the issue?
I can't manually log into the ftp server, and the link from the releases page returns a 0 byte file. I know others have gotten this version, so where is it? Anyone got a reliable mirror out there?
Eric
Interesting ... at home on my blazing slow 28.8* I have found that it is neither faster or slow than non-pipelined browsing when using multiple pages at once. Are you using a broadband connection?
*[no rants please about upgrading my connection, there is nothing better available, not even 56K, where I live]
Why haven't they put the 1.1a source up? I don't want to do all the CVS jazz (yes I know it isn't hard).
"More organs means more human." - Zim
And I like said, it isn't 1700 bugs since the bug system also tracks features and other work. A lot of work was in a holding pattern while Mozilla 1.0.0 was in feature freeze and QA. I also wonder where this 1700 figure comes from since it's not mentioned in the release notes and Bugzilla only lists 172 bugs as being fixed with a 1.1alpha target.
I'm very suprised by this..?
AFAIK, http pipelining is a function of HTTP 1.1, and I didn't/don't think that a lot of people or places are actually serving up HTTP 1.1 data.... much less is are any of those groups enabling pipelining, because it is implemented incorrectly, to varying degrees, across so many httpd server packages.
I'd be interested if anyone could verify or correct what I've said... but seems that my last bit of research regarding http pipelining said something to that effect.
No, it wasn't. It was released on the 11th. There has been a freeze for a while, builds might have been calling themselves 1.1a, but the official release build was on the 11th.
See here or here for the history.
In that case your connection will just about always be saturated, and you'll get no benefit from `pipelining', which works by downloading several files at a time. It's only useful if you usually have some unused bandwidth.
You can still use virtual hosts on servers. That is not required by HTTP 1.0 (it is by 1.1) but all your popular browsers since 5 years ago give the information anyway.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Kudos on the excellent browser. I couldn't be happier with it... well, maybe a little happier.
I'd love to see a way to allow/block particular plugins for certain websites, as we can now with cookies. A way to globally turn all plugins on/off easily would be useful as well.
OT... the start up speed from 1.0 to 1.1a is significantly faster on my machine, and 1.0 was fast enough for me!
Hey, a 1.1a release. Maybe most of the kinks are out.
Did you try 1.0? 1.1 is clearly marked as an alpha release, it's supposed to have kinks. I've had no problems with 1.0 on Linux or Windows 2000. I miss the download manager, but that's about it. I'm looking forward to the 1.0.x releases for greater stability on MacOS 10 so I can get my mac friends using it.
People who prefer Gtk over XUL should probably use Galeon instead of Mozilla.
Not sure what it is, but from the looks of another user's screenshots it seems to improve font rendering. What can I do for !686? I'm running RH7.3 with Radeon 8500 on one machine and ATI Rage Mobility 128 on another. The fonts looks look crappy. Like reading a page where the ink has bled.
Not to mention that I can't get the screen resolution below max (16KX12K) on my laptop. I've run Xconfigurator a dozen times and tried the CTRL-ALT-Minus trick but it won't change.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
1. No fullscreen button to switch back and forth between the modes.
Have you tried Mouse Gestures yet? Latest versions include gestures to go to full screen & back again. True, it's not a pretty button, but, hey, you get what you pay for.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Here's the solution: cd over /usr/local/mozilla-1.0/, remove all Java-related files and the java2 directory. Then go to java.sun.com and reinstall.
Everything now seems to work fine. Don't ask me why it works, though.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
If you check mozilla.org you'll see that 1.1a is Mozilla 1.1 ALPHA! The roadmap clarifies more:
The mozilla 1.0 stable branch will continue as 1.0.x, and the 1.x series will continue as test milestones for evaluation of the latest features added to the trunk development. Each release cycle will be about 13 weeks long, consisting of 5 weeks work then an ALPHA release, another 5 weeks then a BETA release, then a week or so freeze before the milestone.
This release is 1.1 ALPHA. Lots of nice things in there for those who are following Moz and don't mind the shortcomings, but if you just want to complain, stick to IE.
Mozilla
Yes, I wish they'd add a "disable pipelining for this site" option, as for image loading and such.
Just so people know: Not all http-servers support pipelining properly. While these semi-broken servers wont crash Mozilla you may sometimes notice http-headers spilling on to the screen. See bugzilla entry #144574.
Actually, I found that the biggest problem with Mozilla in RedHat 7.3 was that I had installed the AbiWord word processor when I installed the system. AbiWord happens to have some really poor quality fonts named according to the Microsoft convention.. Arial, etc. So any web page that gives you something like
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
will cause Mozilla on X to go and find the lousy AbiWord fonts, no matter what you try and do in the Mozilla font preferences.
The solution is to comment out the reference to the AbiSuite fonts in /etc/X11/fs/config from finding the AbiWord MS-named fonts.
Mozilla on RedHat 7.3 was totally unusable until I did this.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I've been using Mozilla since 0.92. Only in the last month did I turn on pipelining. In Win2k, the difference is dramatic: now, Mozilla is almost as fast as IE. So I would say yes; under Win2k piplining makes that much difference.
Under Linux, however, I've noticed no difference.
BTW, I'm using a cable modem.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Unfortunately, due to a bug in one of Apple's libraries (not sure which, IANADH -- I am not a darwin hacker) Mozilla (any version since .8.x) crashes instantly if launched from a UFS partition in Mac OS X.
Really sucks, because when I got rid of OS 9 on my tiBook, I reformatted it all UFS, thinking I'd never have need for HFS+ again. Oops...
At least Chimera doesn't have that problem (although there are a slew of others...)
Who did what now?
Its amazing. Slashdot, presumably inhabited by the computer literate, can't make a stable win9x system. Hint : It isn't hard. Just have nice hardware, with decent drivers (no $10 bin vid cards), put on a custom install lacking a lot of cruft, turn off Java in IE (which leads to a lot of crashes), and don't install crap (avoid the $5 software bin).
Win 9x has bugs, some quite bothersome in a few situations, but it is very workable as a work station. Just realize this - windows 9x does not really understand the idea of protected memory - bad programs will crash the system. It also doesn't protect itself, so if you install a program that overwrites key system files, instability might result. Finally, have some sort of real time antivirus measures installed. Viruses cause a lot of instability.
I'm sorry, but if you can't create a win9x system that won't habitually crash, you don't know computers (at least not windows). The 9x series might not be robust enough for servers, but it is solid enough for the desktop with infrequent reboots (I'm currently doing about one a month.)
Right click on the img, do "view image". I get a screenful of garbage as moz renders the PNG as text. How amusing
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Actually, this was so soon because 1.0 was slow in ways that didn't delay 1.1; 1.0 was mainly a standardization release, which involved committing to the APIs it uses. 1.1 is things that weren't important to have done in 1.0, which were therefore not included so that 1.0 would actually get released.
That's --enable-svg
The reason is a licensing issue related to libart, AFAIK
Further hint: don't install M$Office (the #1 stability culprit) or any IE version past v5.01. There *are* alternatives (like this newfangled Mozilla thing :)
This Win95 box crashes so seldom that when it does, it's an astonishing event, and has *never* BSOD'd (nor has anything ever been reinstalled). Hell, I even have a WinME box (the worst Win32 ever made) that after I got done beating it into submission (98lite, MFD DOS patch, turn off Restore, done), *never* crashes. It CAN be done, people, and it's not rocket science. It's not even in the same difficulty league with setting up a relatively turnkey linux disty.
I'd turn this around... with all the consumate geeks working on Mozilla, why is it still the least stable app of all those I have installed?? It's the only app on my Win98 box (which itself usually runs for 2-3 weeks between shutdowns) that routinely crashes. And on reading the 1.1a release notes, I had to shake my head at some of the bugs not fixed (with low Bugzilla numbers, so they've been here a while).
Ah, well. At least when Mozilla crashes, it doesn't take Windows with it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
...on Win2K, until I uninstalled Mozilla *and* the Java engine and reinstalled both through the Mozilla installer. Now it all works fine.
Mozilla itself recommends you uninstall the last version, rather than installing on top of it. They don't mention that it's probably a good idea to uninstall the Java engine as well.
It is as simple as
ctrl+t
It's a Nice Thing than Mozilla goes on dropping new releases after 1.0, because the release often approach of free software brings new features quite often.
Microsoft does the same thing -- everytime someone publishes a security hole...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
under Win2K version 1.0 was "unable to resolve" about half the web addresses
That's very strange. I've been using it under Win2K and it works just fine. Any particular sites it does this on? Always the same sites?
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Yes, I wish they'd add a "disable pipelining for this site" option, as for image loading and such.
I'm glad Mozilla doesn't have such an option. It would discourage users from filing bugs such as "site x doesn't work with pipelining enabled" (144442, etc), which would prevent us from ever turning pipelining on by default. It would also add to Mozilla's already cluttered prefs, and would be hard to remove once it was there.
The shareholder is always right.
Mozilla 1.1 Alpha was not released "days ago". It was released on 2002-06-11 in the late afternoon.
--Asa
Thanks, i don't think I installed AbiWord, but I did install OpenOffice, SciTE and some other stuff. I'll give it a try.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I will never use IE, which if you don't know, really means "It Explodes"
Get a free ipod.
For me, the most annoying thing with Mozilla is when I click on a link, the boss walks by and I minimize the window, the page loads, and then the window pops back onto my screen.
... for me?", or "Are you busy right now?"
Without fail, it is followed by; "Chris, can you do
- sending multiple HTTP requests in one network packet, and
- using a single network connection for multiple files, rather than one file per connection
The net result being that the browser spends far less time messing about with negotiating IP connections or waiting for the server to respond, and more time downloading data.This has the greatest effect on high latency connections, not low bandwidth ones (though, of course, the two often go hand-in-hand), so that a 28.8 modem to a website hosted by your ISP probably won't show much difference, but a cable modem to a creaking, cruddy server on the other end of the planet will.
Has our culture really reached the point where we are too lazy to type vowels?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
is awesome. I'm on a 28.8 modem connection for the summer, and I was pretty bummed about how slow webpages were loading up. After turning on the pipelining option, load times dramatically decreased.
There's an explanation on how it works here.
:wq
Quit being ignorant.
Mozilla is not meant as an end user application. It is meant as a resource for developers and bug testers. The fact that you even thought it was for end users shows how good of a job they are really doing. This point as been mentioned numerous times, and it's even stated when you download Mozilla.
There are distributions of Mozilla meant for end users. Netscape 6.0+, Galleon, hopefully AOL soon. =)
:wq
No, I Don't want to go wading through mostly undocumented configuration files to figure out why it doesn't work - It just should work by default - That's what's called usability and why people still see Linux (apps/os/&c) as hard to use.
To the best of my knowledge, to get a stable system running on any end-user OS in existence you have to limit your choice of software.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the team working on Mozilla - up till now I've been a bit disappointed with the slow dHTML performance, but this latest version... well... AMAZING, on Windows at least...
Unfortunately the OS-X version is still as slow as before, though no worse than IE5.1 on the same machine. I get the impression it's OS-X itself that's the problem here...
Yet to test the Linux version, but I'm full of hope now!!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
A lot of servers and proxies claim to do HTTP/1.1, but don't do pipelining properly. This is why pipelining is switched off in Mozilla by default.
The way they're dealing with the problems at the moment is to have a list of bad servers/proxies, and, if Mozilla spots that the server is one of those, drop back to HTTP/1.0 for that connection.
The goal is to get pipelining working reliably and transparently so that it can be switched on by default. Anyone who's used Mozilla with pipelining will understand why that's a Good Thing :-)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Another tidbit to increase Win9x stability - don't install AIM. I don't know for sure, but it really looks like when AIM changes ads, it doesn't free the memory from the old ones. You'll notice if you run AIM for a while, you'll start getting UI glitches around the system with UI objects not showing up. First thing to exibit the problem is the AIM ads.
For those who don't know, Windows 9x has a 256k area of memory where *ALL* UI objects are stored. Once that memory is filled, things start disappearing. Win 3.x was worse, as it was only 64k total. Don't know about NT/2k. Hence why not freeing the ad objects is such a bad thing.
Interestingly enough, Netscape 4.x's stability also goes up drastically if you don't run AIM.
I've got used to opening tabs in the background and closing them as I've finished with them. With this 'enhancement' It'll close my first (primary) tab instead. Great :-(. I hope that's removed or at least set as an option fairly quickly.
I have two computers, a Linux box and a Windows 98SE box. One for work, and the other for play. On my windows box, I have replaced IE has the default browser. Some people are going as far as to use Lite98 like utilities to rip IE completely from their Windows system, and then configure Mozilla for quicklaunch. Under such a setup, Mozilla truely is faster than IE! Not only that, but I only had an IE crash on average once a day, but with Mozilla, I have yet to crash it... even after 12 hour browsing sessions!
The next thing Mozilla needs is to become the default AOL browser.
After that, Sony uses Mozilla has the default browser for the net addon to their PS2.
In addition, Apple replaces IE with Mozilla as OS X's default web browser.
Then the nail in the coffin would be an Outlook worm that transparently replaced IE with Mozilla. Overnight, the tables would turn. Wishful thinking? Maybe. Mozilla is not just a web browser, but an application platform for developing full featured software applications using open XML based languages. Enough market share would allow commercial desktop applications to be developed for a cross-platform paltform as was the desire with Java. Mozilla truely could be the turtle to Microsoft's rabbit.
When I first started using Linux, that had to be the number one UI irritation I suffered. However, once I got used to it, it ended up feeling more correct than the standard way of doing things (the selection becomes the home for things to be copied, which makes sense because it defines selected text as text upon which operations are performed, not some mysterious, invisible paste buffer.)
That having been said, a couple of mysterious invisible paste buffers with a status viewing application (which I would leave perpetually open on head 2) would rock.
Oh yeah, that and Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark ports. Honk.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Try gaming. Sometimes old DOS is the best platfrom. Several of the console emulators out there really like DOS. And I'm sorry, but console emulation on linux sucks. Argue with me all you want, but first, do this. Take a console, (lets try NES, since its been out forever), and compare the Linux emulators to the DOS emulators. System requirements and mapper support would be two easy to measure things. Now tell me what platform has the better emulator.
Just my $.02
It's too bad the Windows version of Mozilla sucks ass. Now, I'm not trolling here, this is honest.
I've been using Moz since beta v0.6, if I remember correctly - and I switched to using it as my primary browser (no IE at all) at around 0.8. I just recently removed Mozilla entirely from my system, at RC3. Why? Because it SUCKED. Mozilla's windows version has steadily regressed in major areas, due to developers checking in flawed code.
I personally have submitted or commented on a number of major bugs, only to see people trading blame and pushing back fix dates.
A number of MAJOR bugs that appeared in recent versions, and prevented me from using the browser, STILL have not been fixed. Things like the fact that Pipelining is horribly buggy, and corrupts caches, how JPEGs are inexplicably flagged as corrupted by Moz when every other app doesn't mind them, how Moz decides to ignore mouse clicks and key presses at random, all have made me rather upset with the developers. I can list off from memory a number of bugs that a first-year computer science student could have caught, but were not caught before being checked into the source tree, and then caused major screwups.
Moz's developers have done a great job, but the Windows version is horribly screwed up, and needs to be given a thourough once-over. It consumes excessive amounts of RAM, crashes randomly, and is very sluggish in various cases. Compare all this to IE - IE has been fast, and for the post part, stable (though not secure) since 4.0. Mozilla, as far as I know, has never really even gotten close to equaling IE in the reliability department, and only occasionally runs decently fast. I would pass my problems off as due to my machine, but I've run Moz on at least 7 different machines from different companies, with different configs, and they ALL have major issues. I've reinstalled multiple times, reformatted, etc - And yet the problems persist.
I was pretty faithful about submitting bug reports every time I found problems - but apparently spending 2 minutes searching for my bug in the database wasn't enough. I was consistently shamed for not finding some obscure old bug with a weird name and keywords, and also consistently ignored when posting comments about bugs. I finally got tired of being screamed at on Bugzilla, and just decided to screw Moz. I'll let them catch their own bugs.
Perhaps if I ever get a working Linux partition on my home box (I've had bad luck in the past), I can use Mozilla as the kickass browser it's meant to be. Until then, I'll stick to IE.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Or buy a decent monitor with some resolution. Sheesh. AA fonts are worthless if you have good Adobe fonts and a decent monitor.
Pretty nice proggie actually, wouldn't want to be without it...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
MacIE and Netscape/Mozilla both face the same basic problem. They are ports of applications written for a system with a very limited architecture (Mac OS 9). Until the apps work in the way that is best suited to the OS X architecture (this can be done from within Carbon), they will not reach their full potential.
Try Chimera, which is a Cocoa browser app wrapped around Gecko. It's not complete feature-wise yet, but the rendering engine is quite solid and development is moving quickly.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
They can't use native widgets for forms because no native widget prowide all the functionality one can specify with style sheets. And given they have to use their own widget set (XUL) for forms, it makes sense to use it for the entire application. Especially since there are other browsers (Galean, K-meleon) that provides the native widget application around the Mozilla (Gecko) rendering engine.
However, Mozilla does the next best thing. It speaks with the native theme manager to draw the XUL widgets, for systems that have a theme manager. So the widgets will look native.
Someone mod that up as Funny.
"A resource for developers and bug testers"?
You mean its only purpose for being developed is to be developed.
And it's obvious goal of mimicking IE to the pixel and hitch is just a parlor game.
What's the point of having different code bases with different bug paradigms for the development platform and the release product?
--Blair