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

pinstripe theme

[Anonymous Cowrad]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Link prefetching

[Jugalator]

... 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.

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

[trollercoaster]

Cool, this could lead to preslashdoting.

Re:Link prefetching

[JanneM]

http://leech.mozdev.org/

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

[Iamthefallen]

I still cherish the days with modem when I could see the goatse.cx pic load before my eyes and go away before it was done, now with DSL it's instant, and you think this is good?!

:)

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

[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.

Re:Link prefetching

[mpsmps]

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.

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

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:If only...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

And Blizzard Represents....

[unixmaster]

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.

Probably a little redundant...

[MacOS_Rules]

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!

Type-ahead Find

[RPoet]

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.

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.

Re:If only...

[unixmaster]

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

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.

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.

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.

And Emacs had it forever

[Per Abrahamsen]

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

It only prefetches _one_ item...

[Per Abrahamsen]

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

NO NEED TO RECOMPILE

[Lendrick]

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".

Re:If only...

[ichimunki]

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.

Re:Fast releases

[rizzo]

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.

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. :-)

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.

Some Tricks To Make Upgrading Easier

[Milican]

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