Slashdot Mirror
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.
Really? IE6 has mouse gestures, tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking?
Sounds to me like Mozilla is already more feature complete than IE... little conveniences like type-ahead find really don't compare to the three I mentioned above...
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
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!
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
Each quarterly cycle has an alpha, a beta and a final release. We recently released 1.1final, and 1.2alpha is the first release in the next cycle.
If you are looking for "major improvements worthy of a version jump", you need to compare 1.1final and 1.2final (for example.) Comparing 1.1final and 1.2alpha is not correct, because not all the 1.2 features are in yet.
I had Win2K swap trouble too, but new versions appear to be a lot better.
Gerv
I rather like the 'Pinball' skin. If you're dissatisfied with Moz's appearance, I reccomend downloading it here:
http://themes.mozdev.org/skins/pinball.html
That said, Moz can be quite the memory hog, especially on graphically intense pages. One of the big mistakes I see that can aggrivate this is the practice of tiling single-pixel graphics over a huge area. I'm not familiar with the gecko code, but I'm guessing that rather than rendering the tiled image once and keeping a handle for the resulting bitmap, Moz renders the image over and over again as it tiles and keeps a handle for each tile.
PHPBB sites are particularly bad about this, since the 'Sub Silver' theme uses several images that are about 5 pixels wide x 30 pixels tall. 150 pixels total. If you have to cover an area that is 1000 pixels wide, you need 200 repetitions of that 5 pixel wide image. If you repeat that area 25 times, and keep seperate instances of the image for each tile, you end up keeping the image in memory 5000 times.
Anyone more familiar with Gecko willing to comment on the actual mechanism of how it handles tiled images like this?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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?
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
I liked pinball but the backwards and forwards buttons seemed flaky because they wouldn't work unless you hit them correctly. I then found the orbit theme here and like it better.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
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
You misunderstand: what Mozilla allows you to do is block *unrequested* pop-up windows. Other, requested pop-ups work just fine.
Mozilla *thinks* the popups are unrequested, but, as part of the application, the behavour is desired.
At times, the onLoad event of the document object opens one or more new windows as part of the application.
Among other things, this is what the pop-up blocker blocks. 99.9% of the time, this is exactly what I want. But for this particular application, I really *do* want (need) one or more new windows to be opened on a document onLoad event.
I have not found a way to enable or disable Mozilla's behavior in this regard on a per-site basis.
After make the earlier post, I realized that what I need, for pop-up blocking, is the same as already offered with cookie and image management.
Mozilla lets me block or allow cookies and images on a per-site basis. I'd like the same level of granularity for pop-up blocking.
Is this possible? Does anyone else have this need?
Software Wars
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...
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.
How about that goddamned modal dialog window that pops up when it can't load an unreachable embedded element.
Please don't whine about how it's not nice to alias whatever.doubleclick.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. I know it's a kludge, but it's my hosts file. I don't want any traffic to go to those domains, whether it's from Mozilla or any other application.
Bug 28586 has been open for over two years and has 115 votes against it. (Moz team, please just swallow your pride and deal with the fact that your users just might not use their machines the way you do.)
(And the fact that hosts-based blocking is a kludge doesn't change the fact that modal dialogs for "document contains no data" or "ain't no host there" are just plain evil. The domain serving an image might be Slashdotted, for instance.)
Until I switch to Mozilla for everything, I still need my hosts-based blocking for the crap my proxy doesn't catch.
Of course, if I keep having to click on its goddamn modal dialogs instead of just seeing "X"s or broken image icons when a site's images are Slashdotted or blocked by my hosts file or firewall, I'll never use Mozilla as a web browser, let alone switch other parts of my life over to it. Pity. Apart from this bug, it looked pretty cool. But with this bug, it's unusable.
This has to go into the main builds.
(Disclaimer: if this made it into the 1.1 release, I confess I never bothered checking. Anyone knwo if it made it into 1.2? I can apply the patch and build the damn binaries myself if I have to, but most Joe Sixpack users can't.)
use the quickloader. IE has it's stuff loaded already, why not level the playing field?
It's been a long time.
I've been slightly annoyed by this behavior, though you can work around it pretty easily. Mozilla to the last tab you were in so I just usually open a new tab (hit Ctrl-T) and then do the link. An annoying extra step I'll concur but I think if that is the only thing holding you back work around it. Mozilla has too much OSS goodness to let something so small ruin it for you. :-)
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
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.
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.
Im seriously beginning to wonder just what kind of "end user" enhancements will be released with IE 7.0.
Easy. An all-new and improved EULA that gives Billg and the RIAA total control over your computer. After all, if you won't agree to such a reasonable thing, you're an Evil Terrorist Content Pirate(tm).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Maybe if you read your own link (bugzilla bug 28568, copy link and paste in address bar) you would notice that this is fixed in 1.2a, but you have to use a hidden pref to enable it:
user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true)
So next time, try READING instead of posting a useless flame about your favorite bug.
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.