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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."
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If only there was a theme that used the OS native widgets, without the ugly 'classic' icons...
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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.
--
pants ahoy
seems to mean that if you're reading page 1 of a multi-page article, page 2 will be loaded in the background. nice!
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...
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
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!
If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business. -Thackeray, William
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...
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
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.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
One question I have though - does it support GTK 1.2, or 2.0 (including the anti-aliasing fonts feature)?
Karma: Shagadelic (mostly affected by those tight knickers - yeah baby, yeah!)
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.
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Get the latest nightly build here!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
May we never see th
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
Since Phoenix (my default browser, as Mozilla is a hog) is built from the Mozilla tree, its latest nightly also has the GTK look. Time to rpm -e galeon.
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If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
So what happens when the greedy web master decides to add "rel=prefetch" to his tags for banners?
Joseph?
In fact, the bugzilla item which typeahead find sprang from was named "implement typeahead find (like Emacs isearch)".
and only if explicitly specified, and if nothing else is going on (i.e. if you have an active download, prefetch is disbabled).
everyone forgot about Xt which works beautifully, and decided to make their own widget sets. this is really annoying when trying to embed Xt stuff into applications that use gtk or qt.
Xt was (is) just a toolkit framework on top of X, it does not change or modify the X protocol. Not only that, but Xt is a mediocre attempt at a toolkit, compared to modern standards: programming with Xt is not easy or intuitive and the on-screen widgets are not up to it.
Xt is not the answer, but a unified toolkit would be nice. I don't think it will happen though, not in this lifetime.
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.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
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.
The binary of Mozilla that you have supports antialiasing right now.
.ttf's in the directory "~/.fonts".
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
Still digging, but it won't even start? Sheesh.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Alright alright, if you really want to disable it, the way to do it is described here. Requires some prefs.js entry though.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
programming with Xt is not easy or intuitive and the on-screen widgets are not up to it.
No joke. To program directly with Xt is to hate your life. But I think you miss the point. Toolkits written *on top of* Xt, like Athena, OLIT, and Motif, are able to interoperate much better than say Qt and Gtk+. You can embed Athena widgets in a Motif app, or vice versa. It is not so easy with non-Xt toolkits. It helps if you think of Xt more like GDK than GTK+, like a sub-toolkit. Nobody writes apps completely with GDK, but *lots* of apps use it indirectly.
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.
Maybe delaying a release and all new features for a short time to fix existing bugs would be worth it. My $.02.
> > Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
> WTF?
The war Bugzilla vs Slashdot sadly had this unfortunate outcome. We will have to live with it. But I'm sure you'll find a way to circumvent the problem. But then again, you're circumventing Bugzilla's access protection and you'll surely be a DMCA case.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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:
o okmarks.html");
user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\userdude\\Application Data\\Mozilla\\Profiles\\default\\wx4vqyna.slt\\b
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
Campaign for Liberty
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!!!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.
I'm running most recent OS X (10.2.1) and this version of Mozilla is taking up 8% RAM (of 512 MB)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
That's been outstanding for most of a year now, which is inexcusable for a major bug that causes data loss and crashes. The Mozilla team still has way too many "don't do that" items in the release notes.
Unless this thing gets cleaned up, it's never going to get market share. Adding additional features of very marginal utility won't help. Could AOL use Mozilla as their standard browser? No way. It's got to just work.
It sounds good in theory, but once you use you realize that pages have far more links than you thought. A typical page can have 20 or 50 links, only 2-4 of which you would be interested in prefetching. Just look around on this page for a good example. It ends up furiously downloading pages, movies etc for as much as your connection can bear, and it's not good for anyone.
The Mozilla approach could actually work. If any designers ever decide to use it.
Maybe I'm missing the standard for it (I'm not on the bleeding edge of things), but I was looking at the HTML 4.01 link rel types and can't find "preload". Fortunately, according to the FAQ, "next" will do just fine.
This is a not nit-pick, but with all the touting of how 100% standards compliant Mozilla is, I'm wondering what the philosophy is on extending the standard, if "preload" isn't in some later HTML standard that I don't yet know about us.
This now concludes our broadcast day.
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.
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.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Leech seems to install properly only if you run it as root. (It wanted my to have write access to /usr/local/mozilla/chrome dir.)
It doesn't work as a user. Weird.
Sounds like a really old bug. When Moz-Mail crashed, it used to corrupt its mail index files. The trick to getting at your mail again was just deleting the corrupt index. It would reindex them the next time it started. Nowadays, when it sees a corrupt index file, it rebuilds the index automatically.
How long ago did you have this problem? To my knowledge, it's been fine for over a year.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html# edef-LINK
The link tag has been around for some time. It is used to describe releationships between documents. It was desinged by the w3c with extensibility in mind. The w3c leaves it up to the user agent to determine how to handle link data.
--Asa
There also appears to be a View Selection Source option now. So I can highlight a section of a document and view just that HTML source -- very handy for development.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Is there any way to import Chimera bookmarks (XML) into Mozilla (HTML)? I did the obvious (Import bookmarks from mozilla and selected my bookmarks.xml file from the Chimera path) but that didn't work...
TIA
Eric
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.)
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.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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
Oct 17, 2002:
First goatse.cx link modded informative.
I was referring to the styling information, not the words on the page. Unfortunately, if a page makes heavy use of CSS for formatting and layout, it can still be very hard to read without it. You could just read the plain text by scrolling around the window lots, but then you could just read the HTML source if you wanted. That's not really the point. IE gets it right: it shows me what I want to see. Moz doesn't. That's an indisputable point to IE, I'm afraid. There is simply no good reason for Moz to be anal about whether it renders using a stylesheet or not, at least not without giving the user an opportunity to override it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.