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."

Comments

Link Pre-fetching is a baaad idea...

[Bonker]

Remember all those offline browsers and 'modem accelerators' that sucked up your modem bandwidth by downloading contantly, spidering every link on every page you visited?

While the Mozilla project is an incredible piece of work, I have to question this feature. It appears that they've designed it so that a page designer or webmaster decides what is appropriate for prefetching or not. Still, if used inappropriately, this feature could lead to more information being transmitted across the internet that is either discarded or unwanted. In a worst-case scenario, an inexperienced web designer might routinely run into his bandwidth cap or unintentionally force users who have bandwidth caps to exhaust their allowance.

If you can only download 3GB per month over your cable modem, do you really want the designer of a page deciding that your browser needs to spend time downloading ads or useless images?

For some people, this could be really useful. For others, it could be a real pain. Team-Moz, if you have any consideration at all, please adjust the default configuration of Mozilla so that this feature is turned OFF.

Question about typeaheadfind

[Mr_Silver]

Type Ahead Find is currently part of the default install. To turn it off, use:

user_pref ("accessibility.typeaheadfind", false);

Or, to remove it completely, find all files in your installation subdirectories that match *typeaheadfind*, and delete those files.

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?

If it's already there, for gods sake, why on earth do they insist on giving you these contrived instructions on how to deactivate it?

If the aim of Mozilla is to get a sizeable userbase and encourage developers to avoid writing for IE only then the first thing they should do is make it easy for the common computer user to do this sort of stuff without having to resort to editing text files.

Once they have to do that, then you lose and IE will continue to reign.

Re:Link prefetching

[j7953]

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.

No, that would be a very bad idea. Just right now in the navigation menu of the Slashdot page I'm viewing ("Post Comment"), there are 17 navigation links, plus the category links, etc. You cannot tell me that you'll be following all of those 17 links. Web sites (and probably ISPs as well) would not like such a feature due to the increased bandwidth costs they'd have to account for.

Also note that e.g. this page has a "log out" link that I really do not want to be automatically prefetched for obvious reasons. Granted, it contains a query-string so Mozilla would not prefetch it anyway, but I imagine there will also be web sites that have log out links without query strings in the URL. And there are lots of other actions that might be associated with following a link (think prefetched one-click-shopping).

The HTTP standard (RFC2616) states that "In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered 'safe'", and if there are side effects, "the user did not request the side-effects, so therefore cannot be held accountable for them", but I wouldn't trust on web site administrators knowing this.

Security danger

[Henry V .009]

I noticed pre-caching when I read the release notes last night. In my opinion it is a major security danger.

A lot of police investigations go by the browser cache to see where you have browsed. Now you are giving control over to the cache to someone else.

It would be simple to put a link in the page source to some kiddie porn or other illegal information. You would never see the link on the page and would have no way of knowing what had been inserted in your browser cache until the police inform you of how long you are going to be in jail. Sure, it is possible that the police won't use the browser cache as proof of guilt (don't bet on it), but that requires a lot of trust. And if they want to be technical about it, it is technically illegal to possess that information, no matter how it was acquired.

And the gain isn't at all proportional to the risk. No pre-caching is done except on sites specifically engineered for it. That means next to none.

Re:Link prefetching

[SethJohnson]

Ed,

If you're using Mozilla, or the recently-released Phoenix (highly recommended), you can also accomplish your browsing style by right-clicking the links and selecting "open in new tab". The other page will open a new tab within your existing window. When you're done reading the current page, you can click on the tab for the other page without having to juggle windows.

What's nice about Phoenix in this respect is the default behavior is to have the new tab open in the background. I complimented the design team for this on their discussion board and some guy came back and said you can also set this up in Mozilla via the prefreences. It's supposed to be controlled by the checkbox 'Load links in the background'. You can also set middle or right-click to open these tabs in the preferences.

Seth