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

If only...

[sl3xd]

If only there was a theme that used the OS native widgets, without the ugly 'classic' icons...

Re:If only...

[evbergen]

Sadly, there isn't even any such thing as OS native widgets on Unix. Every toolkit has its own, and every application gets to choose its own toolkit.

We need an X protocol that works at widget level instead of pixel level. It'd be great if we could design /that/, together with a good widget definition language, and to stop reinventing the OS in huge toolkits that even provide timers and I/O and mistreat X as a dumb framebuffer backend.

Client-side rendering, high-level application frameworks, *yuck*. Provide your high-level GUI stuff through an IPC channel and get out of the way. Let me have my own main loop back. Thank you.

Link prefetching

[Rhubarb Crumble]

check this out: Link prefetching

seems to mean that if you're reading page 1 of a multi-page article, page 2 will be loaded in the background. nice!

Re:Link prefetching

[Rhubarb Crumble]

And if your reading a page with links you dont want to click, lets say to a picture of a man stretching his balloon knot open, then they'll be cached for you and swallow up more and more system resources. nice!

That's a fair point - there is potential for abusem since the web page decides which "hints" to issue. Hopefully it'll eventually have an "enable prefetching for these sites"-type access control, similarly to the way it's done with cookies. Or a limit on the amount of data to prefetch.

Re:Link prefetching

[Steveftoth]

What about a button to manually prefetch links on pages that you like? Not all pages should have their pages prefetched. For the advanced users, for the normal people it should be auto -on - or off.

Re:Link prefetching

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

How is this worse than just embedding the image into the webpage, possibly with height=0 width=0? When you go to a webpage you already pretty much give it carte blanche to download what it likes; this doesn't seem very different.

Re:Link prefetching

[Ed Avis]

The style of web browsing I use is to load all the links I want to read in new windows by clicking on them with the middle button. Then they can be loading in the background while I read the first part of the article. It forms a kind of queue of pages to read, so when I've finished reading the first page I just close that window and go on to the next (which is ready instantly). The result is up to a hundred browser windows open at once - but I know that I'm not the only person who browses like this. Of course, it helps to have a browser which can open lots of windows without thrashing and slowing the machine to a crawl (like Dillo) or one that has tabbed browsing.

This style of following links can also work well with offline browsing and a proxy server designed for offline use like WWWOFFLE. If you go online briefly and click on all the links you want to load, the proxy remembers to download them. Then a few minutes later you can go online again and all the pages will be loaded ASAP. Once they've loaded you can disconnect again and continue browsing. This makes the most sense for people whose internet access is metered (hmm, I wonder if something like this could work for palmtops).

But what I'd really like to see in a browser is an explicit 'to read' queue. When you click on a link with the middle button, it doesn't immediately open in a new window or tab but instead is added to the queue and starts downloading in the background. On the browser's toolbar there is a 'next page' button which goes to the next URL you have marked for reading.

Automatic prefetching of all links from a page, la wget -r, would be crazy for many heavily-linked sites. But you could have heuristics for it or specify particular sites where the link following should be more aggressive.

Re:Link prefetching

[thegoldenear]

Mozilla focuses upon being standards compliant, rather than making Netscape and Microsoft's mistake of defining their own techniques outside of the W3C. (I think there's also some degree of themselves informing the W3C when its sensible to). so, is prefetch not a part of a W3C HTML specification?

Re:Link prefetching

[Erik Fish]

Well if there's an enable/disable for prefetching it's sure to be accessable via the best Mozilla plug-in ever!

Type ahead find is great

[fault0]

Type ahead find is great. Been using it since Moz 1.2 alpha. The neat thing is that you can type a search phrase, and you can search again with ctrl-G. My only suggestion would be to have type ahead and find searches appear in a history combobox in the find window.

Re:Type-ahead Find

[Anonymous Cowrad]

Typeahead rocks my socks, but the Mozilla team didn't invent it. Internet Explorer for the Mac has had this for quite some time.

A trivial point, maybe, and I certainly agree that Mozilla is innovative, but they weren't first in this case.

Mac OS X Users should ignore Mozilla

[toupsie]

Of course, lets heap praise on the Mozilla developers for their hard work. Without it, we would not have the best browser for Mac OS X, Chimera. Mozilla is a full of bloat that Mac OS X users don't need. We already have iChat, Address Book, Mail and iSync built into our beloved UNIX operating system. So a lot of Mozilla's functionality is not needed -- newsgroups are nice but we have better alternatives. Chimera is what Mac OS X users really need. Its blazingly fast, supports standards and gives Microsoft Internet Explorer something to aspire too. Poor Omniweb never knew what hit them.

Get the latest nightly build here!

Moz versus IE

[0x0d0a]

With the two rapid releases of Phoenix and Mozilla, with Netscape (the browser) being pushed by AOL, and with Chimera popular on the Mac, IE may have more users, but aside from being more stable and configurable, Moz is now steadily heading for a 1-1 user:browser ratio. Hopefully, this will result in an extremely customized browsing experience.

What about windows?

[jmertic]

When will native widgets find thier way to the Windows versions?. Currently, I moved to Phoenix 0.3 because the Mozilla interface seems to lag on my hardware ( P2-366, 160MB ).

Link Prefetching = Waste of Bandwidth

[SuperMario666]

Great feature, but if its use becomes widespread, look for more of your favorite sites to buckle and fold under financial pressure from the increased consumption of bandwidth.

1.2 beta still has bugs that was meant for 1.0.1

[News for nerds]

Look this Bugzilla Bug 70812 [meta] mozilla stops accepting keyboard input...
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70812

Its Target Milestone is 1.0.1, but nothing has changed in 1.2 beta. What a mess.

Typeahed adds more - like VI in my browser!

[SuperKendall]

I really like the typeahead find. The great thing is that not only can it apply to links (just by typing) but it can also apply to text across the page just by typing "/" before you type what you are looking for, with Accell-G going to the next match.

Re:Xt

[dollargonzo]

no one is asking you to use the Xt widgets. you can make them as pretty or as ugly as you want. but embedding other Xt stuff is much easier. there is no reason why gtk widgets can't be built on top of Xt, besides the fact that they use gdk.

Re:Link prefetching abuse?

[sporty]

It's something mozilla is missing, blocking based off of filters. It'd be nice if I can say, fine, take everything on this server except .swf files.

Mozilla's feature flood

[Jugalator]

I really have to say that I find the recent development of Mozilla very inspiring as it brings completely new, unique features to the users. First came integrated popup and advertisement blocking. A simple but effective feature. Then came Type Ahead. Then came link prefetching. Now, in what time span?

I don't know about you, but at least my opinion is that the browser software has suffered from some serious stagnation during the past years. Since Internet Explorer 4.0 and its CSS and "DHTML" (mostly Javascript+CSS) support, I haven't seen much development in the browsers at all. Opera was innovative with mouse gestures, but I think the browser that truly turns this stagnation of browser features that's often limited to things like "slightly better CSS support", etc is Mozilla. I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?

IMHO, the changes in Mozilla from a late version such as 1.0 are surely larger (at least more useful) than the changes since Internet Explorer 4.0. Each new version is right now bringing lots of new features. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts for sure. :-)

Re:Mozilla's feature flood

[IamTheRealMike]

I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?

All of those things. I think type ahead find was written by an open source contributor (of course the module owners helped out, as with most Moz features). Mozilla is very very easy to hack on, as it's very componentized and large parts of it are just text files (xml/js/css). And finally they've been doing stuff like code review, super review, commit for a while so they are pretty slick about it.

Some problems

[macdaddy]

I've got to admit, I am have some problems with Mozilla 1.1 (final release). Recently the problems have led to instability. I was trying to buy a generator on eBay the other day. I had a search going and I opened windows to tabs as I found auctions that interested me. Mozilla kept dumping me. My box is a G4/500MP with 512 RAM running OS X 10.2.1. I've had window focus problems where I click in a Mozilla window text box but my focus is still on another window. I have to switch apps and back to regain control. The javascript driven menus on my PacketShaper 4545 web GUI still don't work. This one is really annoying. And the web GUI to the PacketShaper renders very slowly. Overall I'm pleased with Mozilla. It just needs some honing to fix some of the current problems.

Maybe delaying a release and all new features for a short time to fix existing bugs would be worth it. My $.02.

Re:Some problems

[LetterJ]

There's a general Mozilla issue with Ebay as far as I'm concerned. I don't know what it is, but Ebay will bring down my installations of Mozilla 1.2 EVERY time.

Doesn't work with Windows Proxy servers

[oliverthered]

Well, this is almost true,
please vote for this bug (99 votes so-far, lets make it 100)

so that me and anyone else who uses microsoft proxy server 2 or any NTLM authenticating proxy can use mozilla. (this is probably a few million people, and a lot of corporations)

This bug has been there since 2000-01-11, and won't make 1.2, hopefully it'll make 1.3 alpha 1!!!

Re:Doesn't work with Windows Proxy servers

[Monkey]

"Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."

Now why would they bother doing this? I can't see what they have to gain by making it harder to reach bugzilla. Besides, all you have to do is paste the link in another browser window and it works fine.

Re:Doesn't work with Windows Proxy servers

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Now why would they bother doing this?
Because every time someone posts any Mozilla related story to Slashdot they get, well, slashdotted. Considering it's a DB driven site, it doens't take all that much to drive the server to it's knees and make it unusable. So for a day or so, they can't use a basic productivity tool. Yeah, you can just copy n paste, but this minor increase in effort probably eliminates all the casual clickthroughs.

Re:NO NEED TO RECOMPILE

[unixmaster]

Normal anti-aliasing & xft2 anti-aliasing are not the same. Xft2 can anti-alias without using XRender extension of X windowing system and Xft2 is far more easy to customize compared to Xft1. :)

Not a good idea

[spitzak]

This is a very very bad idea. You seriously underestimate the enormous complexity of the communication to a "toolkit". Also there is a little thing called "innovation" where people invent new methods of GUI interaction. This would be stopped by such a design, or would force people to write a parallel toolkit anyway (as many (most?) Windows applications are forced to).

If you don't believe GUI innovation happens, imagine if X had an enforced toolkit. It would be Athena, in black and white, with this 1-bit color so written into it that it would be impossible to remove, and everybody would marvel at the fact that you could set it to inverse video and all applications would agree. And defenders would claim that the fact that only the middle mouse button makes the scrollbars move was a *feature*. And any intelligent people would be laughing X off the planet!

Meanwhile, despite it's problems and pretty stupid design even for when it was invented, X is able to replicate interfaces designed 15 or more years after it was invented. This is because of the one intelligent decision they made, which was to keep the GUI widgets out of it!

Now X has problems. There really should be high-level graphics, at least similar to PostScript. Though also complex, it is far less complex than toolkit interfaces, and perhaps more importantly the set of graphics calls needed has been pretty stable for about 20 years. It may even make sense to add calls to "draw a nice raised box" or "clear this to the flat background color" which would do about 99% of what people want "themes" to do.

Also there is a bit of "toolkit" inside X: the "window manager" (even though a seperate process, but the communication protocols are there, and I know for a fact that it takes more code to communicate with the window manager than it would take to draw the window borders and handle moving and raising the windows myself). This also needs to be removed.

But I am serious that putting any kind of "toolkit" interface into the system in a very very bad idea.

It'd be nice if they DOCUMNENTED it...

[Lendrick]

Last I heard, the general Mozilla project attitutde about documenting the preferences was that if you don't know what they are, you shouldn't mess with them. As a highly techincal user, I myself would beg to differ. Failing to document all of these options in one place is a cop-out, and their excuse is pure arrogance.

If I'm wrong about this, and there is complete documentation on all the prefs files, I'd love to know about it.

Re:Prefetching & Standards Complience

[asa]

100% standards compliance means not doing anything forbidden by the standards body specifications and supporting the recommendations of the standards body. If an extension doesn't violate the specification then it is in compliance. The LINK element was specifically designed with room for clients to extend and interpret.

--Asa

How do I save installed XUL stuff?

[Dirtside]

I installed XUL Planet's Preferences Toolbar on Mozilla, but the next time I installed a new version, it was gone and I had to reinstall it. I know that you can install plugins into your ~/.mozilla directory so that upgrading the browser doesn't require reinstalling the plugins, but is it possible to do this for chrome-like things (like the aforementioned Preferences Toolbar)? I've highly customized the toolbar, as well, and I don't even know where that configuration gets saved. Thanks.

Re:CSS is still messed up :-(

[asa]

they still stubbornly refuse to use CSS stylesheets that aren't served with a mime type of text/css ... I still can't see the information on a vast number of web sites out there

You visit sites that include the "information" in stylesheets? That's completely lame. The whole purpose of CSS is to separate the information from the style. If they're including the content in their style sheets then they're doing a lot more wrong than just serving the incorrect mime type.

--Asa

Re:NO NEED TO RECOMPILE

[Dirtside]

I followed those instructions and got it to work -- looks great.

However, my question is, why does this have to be in the unix.js file? Every time I install a new version of Mozilla, it's going to get overwritten. Isn't there some way to set these prefs in my ~/.mozilla dir so that they don't get overwritten when I install new versions? I tried putting a unix.js file in there, but it didn't help.

i still miss image management...

[ovrclokd]

am i the only mozilla user left who thought that pre-download image management - "ask me before downloading an image" in preferences/images - was one of mozilla's best features? no web bugs, no third-party banner ads, total control... it got axed as the "fix" to bug 110112, because of crashes on multiple confirmation dialogues, and despite repeated pleas (vote for bug 146513!), it's still on the wontfix list.

i'm still running 1.0.1 build 20080808, since that's the last build that still had image confirmation, and so far none of the nifty new features, appealing as they are, have been worth giving it up. anybody want to start a write-in campaign? :)

(i know, "send code" - but i'm a networking geek, not a Real Programmer. i don't have enough coding clue to even understand the code involved, let alone to try to make changes.)