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Mozilla 1.2 Betas Start Flowing
Asa Dotzler writes "Today mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.2alpha. This is a preview of what's to come with Mozilla 1.2 expected in early November. The new alpha contains great new features like Type Ahead Find which allows quick web page navigation when you type a succession of characters in the browser. In addition to the new features Mozilla 1.2a contains stability and perfomance improvements including a major boost in the speed of downloading mail on Mac OS X.This release comes on the heels of the security and bugfix follow-up to Mozilla 1.0. If you're a 1.0 user and you're not upgrading to Mozilla 1.1 or newer then you are strongly encouraged to get Mozilla 1.0.1 for security and stability fixes."
If humans had evolved with six digits on each hand, this would be a major, major milestone release.
Mozilla will become feature complete when compared to IE6 sometime in the beginning of next year :-) It's good to see the Moz boys picking up the pace when it comes to implementing some of the more convienent features we've gotten used to in IE on Windows and the Mac. While I wouldn't mind IE stealing the wonderful idea of tabbed browsing Im seriously beginning to wonder just what kind of "end user" enhancements will be released with IE 7.0.
Seriously beyond the commonplace protocol upgrades and reworks I think that IE 7.0 will end up being quite the hard sell for the typical Windows User. This may present an opportunity for Mozilla/Netscape to steal a bit of marketshare if things go right. This will happen anyway as AOL is planning to move their browser engine over to Moz (already been done for the MacOSX version I believe) and the Gecko AOL betas run quite well.
J
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
I can't see any major improvements over 1.1, so why the version jump? Although it's nice that they're keeping a steady release schedule.
And I wonder if they're ever going to do anything about the memory footprint. Together with Windows 2000's awful VM handling, I'm in swap city every time I copy a large file, having to wait more than 30 seconds for my Mozilla window to be swapped back in.
READY.
#
Is this some sort of new twist on mathematics or Greek?
The headline states Mozilla 1.2 "Beta" only to be told that the MOzilla 1.2 Alpha was released.
I swear you're like my wife who says's it's almost 7:00 at 6:30.
It's all relative I guess.
Cheers,
Jonathan
In all other ways, Moz has completely replaced all other browsers for me. I always laugh at friends and coworkers who send me a link, but then tell me to be careful because it comes with several popup-ads.
I have to wonder what the rationale behind including a download manager with no scheduling or restart functionality is.
Oh well. I assume that this will come along eventually, just like everything else. The team has fixed both the bugs I submitted for 1.1a (table layout problems), so I will assume that they will eventually get around to this kind of functionality.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Has anyone noticed that there's no installerless .zip release of 1.2alpha for Windows on the releases page? I will use the .exe for now but being able to unzip testing versions in a self-contained directory (as was the case with previous releases) is rather handy.
.zip distribution", yet there is none. Perhaps it's just an oversight.
The release notes even say "In this release the feature does not work in installer-builds you need to get a
What can the new mozilla do that I can't already do in Opera or IE?!?!?
That you can't do in Opera? Don't know, I don't use Opera.
That you can't do in IE:
1. Tabbed Browsing
2. Use mouse gestures
3. use radial context menus
4. use type ahead search (ala Emacs)
5. Use Mycroft search plugins to search from the URL bar or Sidebar.
6. Use other neat Sidebar plug-ins
7. use custom themes to "skin" the browser.
8. chat on IRC
I'm sure there are other things as well, but those are the first ones that come to mind.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
The headline is misleading - this is Mozilla 1.2 Alpha. See the roadmap for full details on the numbering scheme and release schedule.
1.0.1 was also released recently. This is a bugfix release for those people using 1.0 who don't want to upgrade to 1.1final or 1.2alpha.
Gerv
IE6 has mouse gestures
Is Mickey [ O ] sticking his middle finger up enough of a "mouse gesture"?
tabbed browsing
Maximize IE, and your taskbar becomes a tab bar. Or install CrazyBrowser.
and pop-up blocking?
Press Ctrl+W real quick before the pop-up finishes loading.
Such are the workarounds IE users employ to emulate Mozilla features.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Recent versions cache and reuse the compose window, so it's much faster. I think this went in after 1.0 (although I'm not certain) so if you are using 1.0, upgrade to 1.1.
Gerv
Is there any reason to switch from Opera to Mozilla? The only big differences on my machine between Opera and Moz is that Moz is slow and it's a memory hog. And those aren't really good reasons to switch.
Is there some sort of preferences manager that deals with all the options this new functionality is bringing about? The reason I ask is that whilst type ahead find looks and sounds rather nice, I don't think that adding a line of text to a flat text file is exactly the most user-friendly way of doing things. Especially not in a Windows world anyway.
On a side note, it's like when NS7 is mentioned without the pop up ad filter and you invariably get the posting that says "edit this file, add this line, remove this comment and it's done!". Might be easy to us, but probably not to those people that we'd like to encourage to use something apart from IE.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Yes you can.
i lt o", true);
Put the following line in prefs.js, which is in your Mozilla profile directory.
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.ma
Type ahead find has existed for years in IE for Mac, just like it has existed in the Mac Finder since system 7. The behaviour of typing a fiex letters and getting the closest element of a set has been implemented everywhere : file lists, dropdown menus, etc.
That is the problem with the behaviours of the mozilla interface widgets : they don't behave like any plateform.
Would it be too hard to make the widgets behave diffently depending on the plateform ? For example, when you click once in the address bar, all the text gets selected. That works on Windows, but not on the Mac, where the standard is to insert the bar cursor at the point where you clicked. The same for clicking in the scrolling bars : it only pages once, not repeatedly like on a Mac. The same for the dropdown menu (see the comparison of the windows drop down menu and the mac one by Bruce Tognazzini), etc etc.
I think people like visual inconsistency (themes, skins), but hate behavioural inconsistency.
What sites are you talking about?
The DMCA part was a joke, but the discrimination against Mozilla users is real. For example, click this link with Mozilla, and you get "You have accessed this page because you are trying to view MeTV in a browser other than Internet Explorer. To enter the site, please click here and download the latest version of Internet Explorer. (Mac users click here.)" For more such bugs click here.
Now watch them lose 30% of their market when AOL 8.5 for Windows switches to Gecko. (AOL for Mac and CompuServe for Windows have already switched, but AOL for Windows has more market share.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
...considering Mozilla follows the kernel-style odd/even unstable/stable release numbering format, 1.2 should be a stable build.
Does this mean I'll be able to download a version with XFT anti-aliased font support, like I did with 1.0? I have 1.0 with XFT which I downloaded from here, and I've been waiting to upgrade but I couldn't bear to lose my AA fonts.
In case you haven't seen it, I have a screenshot of Mozilla with AA fonts here.
For
--Jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
Normally, at this point, I would mention that there's a Spellchecker available for Mozilla. However, it appears that the Spellchecker is broken with all nightly builds after August 30th (and I'm not certain whether 1.2alpha is affected as well)
The spellchecker-broken bug has been filed as a "blocker" (highest possible severity), but there's been no progress since August 31st (when the bug was filed). :-/
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
What isn't up to par, featurewise? As far as I can tell, it's as far as IE, and with the addition of tabbed browsing and the composer, it's even slightly better.
It's been a long time.
9) Block adds
10) Block pop-ups
11) Trust that the browser is not spying on me
The 3 "killer features" of mozilla for me.
Good information, but it should be able to be switched without editing a text file for all those IE-heads out there who want to support Mozilla.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Remember that Slashdot article on Paul Graham's method of spam blocking through Bayesian filters?
In case not, the basic idea is that spam can be fairly reliably detected through statistical analysis of word choice. For instance, a message containing the word "GNU" probably isn't spam, while one containing "remove" might just be (but see the write-up for more detail).
Anyhow, there's been a bug filed requesting Bayesian filtering for Mozilla. If you're interested in the feature, you may wish to vote for the bug (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Must be hardwork tabbing to all the links
The beauty of having mouse gestures/pie menus is you dont need to alternate between mouse and keyboard. I wish mozilla would have the rmb+lmb =forward/back buttons that Opera uses, that is really easy to use.
no sig.
Beautiful, a thousand thank yous. This has been the most annoying "feature" of Moz/Netscape I've run across.
/. had done that, so I wondered why it wasn't working.
Two caveats though:
1) Slashdot inserted a space in the line. Took me a few restarts before I noticed that
2) This still opens a second Mozilla window which needs to be closed.
So thanks to you for the info, and a good job to the Mozilla developers for putting this in.
The next release of IE isn't a story mainly because it's proprietary and Windows only. Mozilla is cross-platform and open source, meaning its development is accessible and relevant to everyone interested.
And those who don't like tabbed browsing, I believe, haven't given it a try. Take Slashdot, for example. I middle-click on all sorts of associated links on the right of the screen, which load in tabs in the background, while I continue reading the page. I can then peruse the other tabs at my leisure, and close them with another middle-click.
Another feature Mozilla has that IE doesn't: shortcuts to bookmarks. For example, if I type "gg [something]" in my location bar that does a search of Google Groups for that thing. "PW" takes me to Pricewatch. "Dict" to Dictionary.com. These can be combined with Javascript ("bookmarklets") for truly nifty automation.
TANSTAAFL
My experience doesn't agree with yours. I use Mozilla regularly on the following machines:
Linux @ 750MHz Athlon - Runs great, nice and quick
HPUX @ 440MHz PA-RISC - Runs great, not sluggish, but not snappy
HPUX @ 300 MHz PA-RISC - Runs a little slow, but is pretty good after first loading.
OS X @ 500MHz MAC - Runs about as fast as OS X seems to run, could be faster all around.
Win2k @ 800MHz Intel - Runs great, nice and quick.
I don't see why it runs so slow on your solaris machine? I have run it on Solaris briefly a while ago and it seemed pretty decent. On Linux I think it runs great. I guess it depends on what you think a fast machine is?
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I love Mozilla. There's just one thing stopping me using it - when I open links from other programs (including the address bar on the Start Bar) it uses an existing Mozilla window/tab rather than opening an new one.
I just can't use a program which randomly overwrites my open windows.
My Journal
Seriously though you are right there is an open source bias on this forum (one which I share), piss and moan all you want, if you dont like it dont use mozilla. Its not supposed to be for everyone, we believe in having software choice here, something the developers of IE dont want.
You seem to be one of those people who has to pan something because they dont like it, its not that youre trolling its that youre a bitter person.
I know it is probably slightly off-topic, but maybe she is trying to make you understand that waking up half an hour early may be good for your marriage.
Yes it is bloatware, if you install it that way! I just do a browser only installiation all of the features pointed out above are browser featuers (except irc chat). When I install mozilla it does not "become a part of the os".
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Apparently Mozilla developers use Vi. On the feature description for TypeAheadFind, it says: Type / before your string to search all text.
;-) This is good, 'cuz I've found myself hitting / occasionally to do a search in Mozilla.
Wonder if it supports ? for backwards searching, i for case insensitive...
User-Agent spoofing has been around for a long time.
http://uabar.mozdev.org/
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
This sounds exactly like the feature that OS/2's version of netscape had with voice navigation. Basically, you could speak a link on a page, and you would go there. Very slick. Dunno how great it is with typing. I'd rather some of the more frequent nav keys be linked to single keys, which this feature basically destroys any chance of using.
However, I'm slightly concerned about the description of this feature. I gather this appeared in IE, and I fear that mozilla is more concerned with "parity" than with the most usable implementation. (Do you realize that when using the mouse wheel to change text size, going up makes the text smaller? Copied from IE. Won't fix. Bug 146491)
It appears to start searching as soon as you type a letter. This rules out all other possible uses for the letter characters. All of the most accessible keys on the keyboard "used up", just to avoid having to hit a command key to start searching in links. Even though you already have to hit a command key ("/") to search in the full text. If we want more keyboard functions, only punctuation keys (or key combinations) are available. For example, to seach for "foo" I can type "/foo", but to get the next hit, I have to do Ctrl-G, instead of something convenient like "n". This seems shortsighted.
Well, I'll have to try it before I can be sure of my criticism, but from what I understand, this feature could become much more powerful if the implementors design it well, instead of merely copying IE.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
This game, written in JavaScript, using DOM, UNICODE, CSS, etc. Works in Mozilla only (AFAIK). I feel that it's probably pretty close to all being valid code; it was written using the W3C specifications and "just works" in Mozilla.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Seriously!
/.!
/tmp/mozilla-1.0*.rpm;
I tried the Moz 1.1 RPM on my RH 7.2 system, and suddently, the textarea tag screwed up constantly. Text did not wrap, and an "A" tag would cause not only the text in the textarea to become a link, but also submit buttons, and just about everything in the form!
I couldn't even post to
rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep mozilla`; rpm -Uvh
Now it's better...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The beauty of having mouse gestures/pie menus is you dont need to alternate between mouse and keyboard.
:)
What exactly are you doing with your other hand? For me, keyboard+mouse is faster than mouse only or keyboard only. Left hand hits all the keyboard shortcuts, mouse in the right hand clicks all the links and scrolls. I never really have to adjust. If you are using the keyboard completely, then you have a lot of time on your hands. If you are using only your mouse, well...you have a lot of other stuff on your hand.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Man, I love tabbed browsing and pop-up add blocking but can't they make the UI a little faster and the memory usage lower?
I try to use Mozilla but I'm always drawn back to IE because its just snappier. I think that Microsoft pins the IE pages also. Even when I keep Mozilla resident, my system swaps like no tomorrow when using Mozilla on a PIII 866Mhz system w/ 384mb RAM
Its the same experience I have with emacs. I keep trying but always succumb to vi. vi is just more responsive.
Can't you just unzip the .exe file as if it were a .zip? I've had no problem doing that on self-extracting zip files in the past, though that was from Linux (where I couldn't easily execute the .exe to begin with).
1) dont care.. If anything I find this annoying.
/ever/ used it?
/behind/ the current one I'm reading; never obscuring what I'm currently doing. I finish the article, go to the next tab to see what the first link was all about, go to the next tab after I'm done with that, etc. It's fantastic. It's made browsing so much better.
How long did you actually use this? Have you
The very first time I tried it, I stumbled, closed the wrong windows, and thought "man, this is a step back." But I kept working with it.
Now, I'm never going back. Middle-click mapped to "open in new tab" let's me browse articles with ease. An article has links to 3 sites that look interesting. I middle-click and it opens the tabs
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Ha ha ha!
For fun, click that link. You'll see this:
-----
Ook! (title)
Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
-----
So, copy the link, then open a new window and paste. (You think you can protect your servers from the likes of us? mwa ha ha ha ha!)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Unless the percieved value of the alternative product is 'lower' than the one you happen to currently use, you feel hunted, ill at ease and inferior.
Head spaces like this tend to also lean heavily on denial structures in order to maintain a mental comfort level, which leads in turn to increasingly faulty and difficult to maintain world-views. This causes the whole system to cycle whenever somebody points out a flaw in your belief structure. Round and round you go!
Hint: The easiest way to escape from such a merry-go-round is simply to step off. (You are NOT the products you use. You are far better. Products are there to serve you. If a new product comes along which serves you better than an older one, then using it instead does not mean you were a fool for making your initial decision. All it means is that you are allowing yourself to learn and grow stronger without needless resistance. There is ALWAYS room for upward movement; nobody is 'done', and nobody need feel bad for not being 'done'. Embrace this thinking and you will grow very quickly indeed; so quickly that others will step back and look at you in awe.)
-Fantastic Lad
...which, as far as I can tell, you can't do on OS X - you're stuck with the whole damn thing, and no matter how much I try to convince it that I LIKE Mail.app, it refuses to let mailto: links open it instead of its own client. 'Course, there's prolly some fantastically easy way around this I'm missing...:)
Triv
I've been dying for a feature like 'type ahead find' for the longest time! I prefer keyboard navigation in most situations, but web browsing never worked well for me, as I hate having to TAB, TAB, TAB, ad nausem throughout a link-filled page. Mozilla just got even better! Thanks Mozilla team!
The mozilla people know, that it's not implemented in the best way right now (see bug #167921). If this stays, as it is, many JavaScript applications won't be useable anymore, for example our recently open sourced Wysiwyg XML Bitflux Editor (*shameless plug*) and other similar applications.
And there is no way to prevent it from the application side. But Mozilla promised a fix in the next week for that problem.
chregu
I agree with the original poster. I have a PIII/733 w/ 256 MB RAM. Try this: run Moz for a while. Open up several or many tabs/windows, then leave them open and do other stuff for a while. Then, start switching between Moz and other apps and you should see the slowness. I've seen it take 15+ seconds to get back, and I've only been using it a few days. (I'm using the IE theme, if it matters... shouldn't, but might.) It's great for some things, like browsing slashdot's front page and middle-clicking to open all links in a new tab in the background. Very, very nice. But leaving it open with several windows while I write code in Homesite and make images in Photoshop? Death on a stick, and I'm using it just like I've used IE and NS for years.
:-) Everything is relative. My aunt thinks her Celica is fast. Having ridden in my friend's 13.17s/114mph Firebird, I know it isn't. :-) But she's happy with it.
Something I've learned from endless Mac-OS-X-is-slow discussions-- don't just say 'fast' or 'slow', measure!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
If you do a custom install and unselect the mail client, Mozilla will use your default mail client.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
It's nice, however I'd far rather than when a new window is opened, it is put in a new tab rather than firing up a new window. CrazyBrowser does this and it's great!
Finally, is there any way (a la CrazyBrowser again) that I can set up a "Group" of bookmarks, so with one click I can open 7 or 8 pages in tabs all at once?
These two features alone (including the pop-up blocker) keep me with CrazyBrowser. If Moz can't do them (and I'm sure it can) then it would be a shame because I'd end up probably sticking with what I have.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Regarding the direction of wheel movement when resizing text in Mozilla, I think it's more intuitive that way. It feels more like I'm 'pulling' the text towards me.
Ah well, different folks, strokes etc.
--Jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
I can confirm that the version on the Spellchecker installation page does indeed work with builds from mid-August and earlier (likely including 1.0 and 1.1).
Really, it's just the recent nightlies (and possibly 1.2alpha) for which the Spellchecker is broken.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
...of mozilla-browser newer than 1.00-3. Don't need all that other stuff on my system; just the browser. But there's no mozilla-browser 1.1 yet...let alone 1.2a.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Countless times have I tried to search a web page using the slash. That is so very cool.
Thanks, you just made my night...
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
I can see that, actually. You might also think of it as a "zoom" operation, so scrolling down makes the eye go down and the text get bigger (never mind that it affects only the text, so it's not truly zoom). But it's hard for me to believe that many people would find this intuitive. Even when I think "zoom", I have to model it consciously in my head before I can decide which way to scroll. Moreover, the feature is called "change text size" (or something like that--not running mozilla ATM), which clearly implies that up should increase the size.
So while I believe you, I think there is a much stronger case for "up means bigger" as the default. I also think it should be customizable, but the mozilla people have decided that software, the most malleable stuff we can create, should not be adaptable to the user.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I'm always surprised that yet another Mozilla version does not fix big usability bugs.
These include the broken line wrapping that happens occasionally, the bizarrely greyed-out `launch file' option after downloading some types of files and finally, the irritating way in which if you download a file which turns out to 404, mozilla happily creates the file on your disc containing the 404 html and doesn't tell you!
Thank you, Mozilla team. I'm typing this into the 31st tab of one instance of Mozilla 1.0.1. I have two other instances of Mozilla running with a total of 14 tabs.
Actually, the keyboard could have been much more useful, like in Opera. In Opera amost any normal key is bound to some useful operation. The con is that incremental search must be activated before (by pressing ctrl-f). Since in mozilla no plain key (without alt or control) has a function, it was possible to use them directly for type ahead find.
/) so that any other plain key could be bound to some operation.
I think it is a waste of keys. It is better to activate type ahead find with some key (such as
Stripping html from emails is possible. Importing mail from Netscape worked with the IMAP accounts, and it will convert the profiles. Nobody ever complained about missing any of their locally filed mail - so I'm guessing it works fine. YMMV.
Back up your Netscape mail (you do that anyway, right ?) and try and convert the profile to Moz. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn't you lost an hour and have a current backup of your mail 9which you wanted anyway).
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Downloaded and installed 1.2a. Typeahead works well and also took the time to try bannerblind . It works well for the few sites I tested it on - no more banners on pages. With a tool menu item you can turn it on and off and you can tweek its effect - removing them entirely or hiding them (leaves page layout the same). Way to go mozilla.
Well then, don't download it then. (And luckily for you it's not "intergrated into the OS".)
... " idea is really getting old. If you are going to complain about how the Slashdot community is big and don't agree then why don't you at least find a new way of doing so?
Moz has benefits over IE, personally I like the tabbed browsing and radial menues best. And it's benefits compared to Opera is mainly that it's free, OSS and more flexible.)
And the "If it were Microsoft then
So the obvious missing feature of mozilla is a spell checker. Is this planned for any upcoming version?
Yes. See bugs http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56301 and http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129704 , as well as the mozdev project for spellchecking at
http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/index.html . (I'd link, but bugzilla rejects links from slashdot, so you're going to have to get there the hard way.)
One of the coolest features that people are working on (I'm pretty sure it's tracked under a different bug) is to enable reall-time spellchecking (underlines misspelled words in red as you type) in form widgets. Very cool.
The Mozilla Spellchecker is scheduled to be added to Mozilla.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You need to download a recent Linux JRE (Java Runtime Environment) from Sun and link to the included Java plug-in from your mozilla plugins directory. I believe there are more detailed instructions in one of the readme files that come with the JRE.
You have to build the sun jre from source code. This is something that Gentoo 1.3/1.4 users have had to do for quite some time, and it is quite a pain in the bum. You can find instrutcions on how to go about building the jre from soure here.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Instructions on how to change the IE user_agent string can be found here.
If a bunch of us geeks would start going over all PC's in computer labs and the like to change the IE useragents, this could lead to endless fun. (And perhaps some more realistic percentages for the various browsers - undoing the Opera damage.)
There have been problems installing some xpi's on Linux and some other systems.
Check the bottom of the page that reads:
Linux rpm's are available browse (html) or download (ftp)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The ability to select links w/o the mouse has been around for a while, it just wasn't teribly user friendly. THe TAB key would cycle through the links/form elements on the page, and the enter key would activate the link.
;-)
;-)
I know... not exactly what you wanted
Consider this to be a game of go fish. You got what you wished for. Wish again, and this time, wish for something cool, like, "Have Micro$oft give us all money when we download Mozilla."
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
except if you're a touch typist, it's difficult to use right-side kb shortcuts with your left hand. It just doesn't "feel" right (analogy -- try using emacs when your fingers are trained to vi).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The same keystroke-for-searching decisions could have been made without any of the Mozilla developers ever hearing about vi.
The more commonly-used commands in vi have been adopted by so many different programs that many people know about / and ?, not from vi, but from something else, like a pager program (less and more are big examples here).
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'm almost totally switched over to mozilla; I only use IE for Outlook Web Access, which is of course kinked only to work well with IE. Also, Microsoft Q articles don't render correctly - again, big suprise.
I decided to try 1.0 out when it came out, mostly for the experience of banging my head against the mail client. I use IMAP, and netscape/mozilla has always had the most screwed-up IMAP client out there. I mean, they made Outlook Express look good.
I was shocked and pleased to see that the mail client in Mozilla 1.0 was great. It worked well with SIMAP and SMTP/STARTTLS, it handled folders on the server well, the address book works in a convenient manner, and it's easy to add PGP/GPG support with Enigmail.
After a week, I dumped OE and switched over to mozilla mail, and haven't looked back. Sure, there's a few minor bugs, but I can file bug reports on those or, if I feel ambitious, try to submit a patch. There are equivalent or worse bugs in OE that I'll probably never see fixed (deleted mail shows up as new - yeah, that's fun). I also switched to the browser, because it worked well (another first for ns/mozilla, IMO) and I was a little less worried about getting slam-bam-thank-you-maamed by the virus du jour.
So, yeah, its worth the switch, and this is coming from somebody who hated and disparaged all the pre-1.0 releases I tried. The largest remaining issue I have is that it is a memory hog.
I get weird problems trying to run shockwave apps/whatever. ANy shock site makes browser go "poof", no talkback, no annoying Dr Watson stuff neither, just window go bye-bye. Anyone have any ideas?
Funny - the time to type www.mozilla.org and look is faster than typing that text. :)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Read the new section, Deliberately designed to crash, in my article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. The article tries to document a few of Microsoft's abuses and limitations.
I was using Windows XP when I had all those tabs open.
Be sure you are using Mozilla 1.0.1 or later. Version 1.0.1 is very different from 1.0, as the Mozilla web site says.
I also run Mozilla on a 200 Mhz Pentium without problems. Its not speedy, but it works fine.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
If you install the preferences toolbar and decide you don't like it, you'll have to delete some files and edit some XML RDF files to uninstall it.
I never thought it had to do with minimizing/maximizing, I thought it just swapped apps that a) weren't in the fireground and b) only when it needed to (or c) if you don't have enough RAM to run your foreground app anyway.) In any case, no, I rarely minimize apps, I just run them full screen and use the taskbar or alt-tab to get around. And no, I can have a dozen Explorer or Netscape windows in the background and when I bring them to the foreground there's a much, much shorter (1-2 seconds vs. 10-15) amount of time before they wake up. I'm not saying Mozilla is bad in general, just that it doesn't perform as well under Windows. Is M$ evil? Sure. Does Mozilla work great on other platforms? Sure. Does that change the fact that Mozilla in Winodws performs worse in some ways than other browsers? No. Most programs have flaws (or just plain things you don't like) that you have to learn a workaround for. For me, this is Mozilla's.
When you've been using web browsers for 7 years, and you try a new one and use it the exact same way you always have, things like this jump out at you. It's not like I spend all my time at w3.org or tuxedo.org and now I'm going to cnn with Mozilla and complaining that it's slow. Same sites, same number of windows open, different performance.
By the way, *every* OS swaps if it needs to. (unless you issue swapoff, ha, but that just makes things wose.) Run Gnome on a PII/266 with 64 MB and a slow hard drive (like my laptop) with a few apps open if you don't believe me. When I'm *using* mozilla, it runs like a champ, it's just when I leave it alone for a while that things get bad, and then it's worse than other similar apps.
OTOH, it kicks IE5/Mac's ass when it comes to rendering 1MB+ worth of HTML--6 seconds vs. 22 on an in-house test page. (That same page in Windows opens in 6 seconds in Moz, vs. <3 seconds for IE5. c'est la vie.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
God, I love gestures.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I agree with the concern, that was what I had initially thought as well. By taking away that many keys, keyboard customization is going to be a problem (figures, they release this as soon as I find this page on mozilla.org. I think that both features could be very useful to people wanting to use the keyboard more for browsing, but they seem to conflict with each other (I haven't tested 1.2 either, but based on the feature description I agree with you).
but the mozilla people have decided that software, the most malleable stuff we can create, should not be adaptable to the user
Not to start a flame war, but there are discussions all over about preferences for this and that, witha hard effort to lessen the amount of thingies stuck in the preferences panel. There's definitely a philophy in some folks that "less is more", pick one way and live with it. Matthew Thomas seems to be an influential GUI dude at Mozilla, you can read some of the debates in his weblog.
The options don't all have to go into the standard preferences panel (at least not at first). The mozilla developers resist even adding the hooks in the code. At very least, they should add the hooks, so that integrators can tweak them, and outside developers can experiment with ways to control them. But more productive, IMO, would be for the mozilla developers to tackle the problem of exposing customizability to the end-user in friendlier ways. They can't duck this issue forever.
There's definitely a philophy in some folks that "less is more", pick one way and live with it.
This philosophy seems to dominate the discussions I've heard, at least on the side of the core developers. One hears this in GNOME circles as well. It's been taken too far and now hinders usability.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Except, of course, for those who use Webwasher (or anything else that kills referrer strings).
Yes, "lisp" is powerful, but emacs' lisp engine does not implement lexical scoping. Quite frankly, this is a serious flaw of "elisp" (as well as other early lisp implementations) which the folks who subsequently set the standards for Scheme and Common Lisp obviously realized.
... might want to check out the article for details if this sort of thing interests you.
Vim itself has powerful scripting capabilities, as evidenced by all the goodies you can find on www.vim.org. They have attempted to build a language independent model, kind of like GIMP allows users to script in Scheme, Python and whatever else. An interesting article appeared in a recent Linux Journal or Linux Magazine issue that compared the VIM and the GIMP's attempts at providing a language independent scripting framework. Their conclusion was that the GIMP is more successful on this front