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Mozilla 1.2 Beta Released

nberardi writes "Mozilla 1.2 Beta is out. Typeahead now works on Mac and Java now works on Jaguar. On Linux, the classic theme now picks up GTK native theme. See the release notes for more info."

26 of 448 comments (clear)

  1. pinstripe theme by Anonymous+Cowrad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Note that if you're using the pinstripe theme, you've got to use the one made for nightlies.

    I don't know why.

    First thing I noticed.

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    pants ahoy
  2. GTK.... by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mozilla's binaries still depend on gtk 1.x, however when compiling from source you can tell it to use gtk2. I don't know how stable that is, though...

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  3. Re:If only... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Help yourself. Unpack the classic theme (classic.jar is a zip archive) and replace the icons with your own.

  4. And Blizzard Represents.... by unixmaster · · Score: 5, Informative

    XFT support on Linux! Now we can get cool anti-aliased fonts on Linux!

    You must compile from source with --enable-xft and need fontconfig & xft2 package from www.fontconfig.org and of course freetype2 from www.freetype.org

    Great thnx to Chris Blizzard for this!

    Oh btw now HTML for controls & scrollbars use your native GTK theme widgets when classic theme is chosen.

    --
    Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
  5. Probably a little redundant... by MacOS_Rules · · Score: 5, Informative

    Moz 1.2 works like a champ on my iMac under Jaguar. 1.1 was a little sluggish, but 1.2 seems to have corrected that and then some. Startup times are now nearly as fast as IE 5.2.2, and Moz is and hopefully will continue to be much less crash prone than IE. This is in and of itself amazing, considering it is 1.2 BETA.

    Great job to all who work on this effort. It is much appreciated by many in the computing field.
    Cheers!

    --
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  6. Fast releases by koh · · Score: 4, Informative

    moz development has been considered sluggish by many a few months ago... now that they have the infrastructure right, they do release early and often. Nice :)

    Too bad I'm still stuck to 1.0.1-r1 on my gentoo distro... ;)

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    1. Re:Fast releases by rizzo · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why are you stuck to 1.0.1-r1? Just unmask 1.1 and you'll get 1.1. You can copy the 1.1 ebuild and make a 1.2a ebuild. As soon as 1.2b source is released I'll be submitting a 1.2b ebuild.

      You just need to unmask it by commenting out any mozilla lines in /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask. The gentoo people mask apps to create an aura of stability.

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      "More organs means more human." - Zim

  7. Re:Link prefetching by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... provided the page is written for link prefetching explicitly. It doesn't mean you can go to a site like Google News and it will start loading the various articles in the background.

    Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages. This combined with a customizable maximum bandwidth restriction for the prefetching would be nice.

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  8. Type-ahead Find by RPoet · · Score: 5, Informative

    1.2 is really worth installing just for the Type-Ahead Find feature. It's one of those "how did I ever manage without it" features, and a punch in the stomach of anyone who says free software isn't innovating. This feature almost obsoletes the use of a mouse while surfing (well, almost). You see a link you want to follow, called "Click here". So you type "cl", and that link is marked. Now press enter to follow it. So simple, yet so efficient.

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  9. Beware of GTK themes by Psiren · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some of the themes I tried with GTK and Mozilla this morning crashed Mozilla on startup. Others were okay. I guess there are still a few bugs to work out there.

  10. Re:If only... by unixmaster · · Score: 5, Informative

    It does actually , uses GTK on Linux and native widgets on Mac/Windows when classic theme is selected.

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    Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
  11. Re:Hooray! by Lussarn · · Score: 4, Informative

    I saw the link prefetching feature and thought oh no, there goes our server bandwith. But after reading the FAQ it seems that it's the author of the page that selects what's prefetched and whats not.

    Nice feature.

  12. And Emacs had it forever by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    In fact, the bugzilla item which typeahead find sprang from was named "implement typeahead find (like Emacs isearch)".

  13. It only prefetches _one_ item... by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    and only if explicitly specified, and if nothing else is going on (i.e. if you have an active download, prefetch is disbabled).

  14. Re:Link prefetching by JanneM · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://leech.mozdev.org/

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  15. UI Not needed by tweakt · · Score: 4, Informative
    Whilst it's great that stuff like this is being implemented, is anyone actually working on making a point and click interface to active/deactivate functionality rather than having to get users to resort to deleting or editing files?
    1. This is a BETA release. (remember Mozilla is not intended for end users)
    2. It's nothing you'd ever need to turn off unless it was causing major problems (ie: crashes).
  16. You could do this before and without too much work by GoofyBoy · · Score: 4, Informative



    Here are the instructions

    I have it working with Mandrake 9 and Mozilla 1.0.

    --
    The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
  17. NO NEED TO RECOMPILE by Lendrick · · Score: 5, Informative

    The binary of Mozilla that you have supports antialiasing right now.

    Go here and follow the instructions near the top of the page. Provided you have a recent version of FreeType2 on your system and some TrueType fonts for it to find (you have to uncomment a line or two in your unix.js file and tell it where to look), you'll be using antialiased fonts in no time. It looks great, and I wish they'd do it by default. One other thing--you may want to set unhinted to "false", as fonts appear to render better that way. Experiment with your system, though.

    I've gotten this to work with the latest Mozilla and an otherwise fresh install of Redhat 8, plus a few .ttf's in the directory "~/.fonts".

  18. Re:If only... by ichimunki · · Score: 5, Informative

    Personally, I'm anxious for the day it uses gtk-2.0 instead of gtk-1.4. I tried it with gtk2 and couldn't do any cutting/pasting (known bug, already in Bugzilla, I believe). Other than that it was great-- they're very close. Even better: once it is stable on gtk2, then Galeon 2 is ready to go. Either way, hats off to all Mozilla coders, Mozilla is a great browser and gets better all the time.

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  19. Re:Link Pre-fetching is a baaad idea... by srmalloy · · Score: 4, Informative
    Read the specs, please. It doesn't prefetch ALL links, only those explicitly set as such in the web page. Which, as far as I know, accounts for exactly zero web pages in existence today.

    However, it only takes a minimal amount of underhandedness to start screwing people over. Banner ads are everywhere, and a large percentage of them are implemented by having a site drop in a block of code that references a CGI script on a server run by the company managing the distribution of banner ads. If the company running the banner distribution server decides that having their advertising clients' linked pages load faster is a valuable feature, all they would have to do is add the prefetch code to the output of their CGI script -- both Mozilla and IE will happily process a META tag in the body of an HTML document, even though by the specification, a META tag should occur only inside the HEAD tag block. So the user's network connection bandwidth would get usurped to prefetch the advertiser's web page, even if the user has no intention of clicking on the banner ad.
  20. Re:Link prefetching abuse? by roca · · Score: 4, Informative

    The greedy web master doesn't get a cent, because Mozilla doesn't send a referrer for prefetches.

    BTW your greedy web master can already just include a hidden IFRAME with SRC pointing to the click-through, which WILL send a referrer, so Mozilla's prefetching adds no new danger here.

  21. Re:Link prefetching by mpsmps · · Score: 5, Informative

    Embedding an invisible image has a variety of problems.

    1. Relying on obscure side-effects leads to bad code. For example, one could imagine a highly-optimized browser-rendering engine may choose not to read the bits of the image because they won't be visible. It's much better to have an XHTML tag that explicitly expresses the desired semantics and leave it to the presentation tool to properly figure out how to present.

    2. Languages, standards, and practices evolve. For example, if my webages are XML interpreted by XSL stylesheets, do I really want to start embedding browser hints in my XML pages (or have my XSL stylesheet assume a browser is the client)?

    3. How does the browser know not to start prefetching the image before it has loaded the main page? The prefetching FAQ says that prefetching uses an idle test to avoid doing harm. Embedded images can't readily be optimized by an idle test.

  22. Some Tricks To Make Upgrading Easier by Milican · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can share bookmarks amoung all your installs of Mozilla, Phoenix, and probably other Gecko browsers (untested). All you do is add the following command to your prefs.js file:

    user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\userdude\\Application Data\\Mozilla\\Profiles\\default\\wx4vqyna.slt\\bo okmarks.html");

    In addition, you can share plugins by adding the following line to your environment. Her is an example of what I did on my Windows box:

    MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH = "C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Share\Plugin" (in Environment Variables on Win2k)

    Really helps so you don't have to redo plugins all the time and you can share one bookmark file for all!

    JOhn

  23. Re:If only... by uhoreg · · Score: 4, Informative

    It only uses GTK/etc. to *draw* the widgets. It doesn't use actual GTK/etc. widgets.

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    To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.

  24. There's no "right" app for OS X users. by kitzilla · · Score: 4, Informative

    I agree that Chimera ("Navigator," officially) is a terrific Mozilla browser for OS X, but we have a lot of choices these days.

    Chimera is still pretty sparse on features. I use the nightlies, and run into a fair number of buggy builds. But it's quick, and sure looks like an OS X app. I use it far more than anything else.

    KevinG, the guy who did the Pinstripe skin for Mozilla, was nice enough to compile Phoenix 0.3 for OS X. It's just an experiment, not part of the regular project. But damn if it doesn't work, and it has some very cool features. Even *more* OS X choices:

    http://www.kmgerich.com/misc.html

    This OS X build introduced me to Phoenix, which is now running on my Linux box. Kevin's page says his OS X build requires Jaguar, but I'm using it with 10.1.5 just fine.

    Mozilla 1.2b feels very stable on OS X. It's not as fast as Chimera, nor is it as consistent with the Mac human interface standards. But it doesn't suck, and some users like working from within a suite. I know plenty of OS X guys who are more comfortable with Mozilla's mail than Mail.app. It's a matter of preference.

    To me, Netscape 7.0 is heavy and gaudy. It has a spellcheck app, however, and isn't a bad choice for those who rely on the Netscape/Mozilla suite for email.

    As for Omniweb, it's a great browser. A few more features than Chimera in its current state of development, though don't think it renders as well. Speed is a toss-up.

    Every OS X user's needs are different. It's a great time to explore the platform, however. There's a browser for everyone. Run whatever you prefer, and support the community which surrounds it.

    Thanks to all the developers who make my online experience more enjoyable. Your work isn't taken for granted.

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  25. Use / to find non-linked text by mbrubeck · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you just start typing "moz...", typeahead will only find text that's part of a link. If you type "/moz..." instead, it will find any text. (Apologies if you already knew this.)