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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.
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.
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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.
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).
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.