Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed

asa writes "Mozilla 1.2 has just been released. New to this version are features like Type Ahead Find, basic toolbar customization (text/icons/both), support for GTK themes on Linux, multiple tabs as startpage, Link Prefetching, "filter after the fact" and filter logging in Mail, Palm sync for Mozilla addressbook on MS Windows, and more. This is the latest stable release from mozilla.org, and all users of Mozilla 1.0, Mozilla 1.0.1, Mozilla 1.1 or any of the alpha/beta/release candidates are encouraged to upgrade to this release. You can get builds and more info at the Mozilla releases page and you can find daily Mozilla news and discussion at mozillaZine.org."

Comments

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[IamTheRealMike]

Er, yes. I find Moz to be plenty fast enough, and I use a truckload of extensions which don't quite work in Pheonix yet.

I don't really see what all the fuss is about, I'm using XFT builds for Redhat 8 that Blizzard puts out and they're snappy and look great. I did try Phoenix when I was on Windows, but found it to be no faster than Mozilla but with fewer features. I might try it again in a bit, but Moz is just fine for me.

I'm waiting on Galeon 2 myself, at least then it'll integrate well with gnome.

New flash player, too

[darCness]

In case you weren't aware, a new Flash player for GNU/Linux
has been released too. It's recommended that you upgrade to this version if you're
going to use Mozilla 1.2. Unfortunately, audio seems
to be broken (at least for me under Mandrake GNU/Linux 8.1).

I've filed a bug report with Macromedia about this. Keep
it in mind if you upgrade.

Re:shame there aren't more users

[G-funk]

Mozilla now is like ie 3/4 at the time... A far better product to use (standard compliance not withstanding), but as stable as a 2 legged stool.

I love mozilla, I use 1.0 all the time under linux at work, but it just can't cut the mustard when it comes to windows. It was a sad moment when I had to return the little "e" to my quicklaunch bar after a few weeks of bittersweet mozilla pain.

Prefetch paranoia

[codexus]

Is that prefetch thing such a good idea?

For example, it will prefetch a document from another host that the one you're browsing. In the FAQ they say that they don't see that as a security risk. But I really don't like the idea that I could be tricked into prefetching stuff I don't want by a simple HTML tag (goatse, copyrighted material and other illegal stuff).

Yes it can be disabled but not from the GUI preferences, so many people won't even notice it.

Well I'm probably just being paranoid. :)

Re:Why do they all go to GTK/GNOME?

[Shillo]

In the case of Mozilla, they needed a lightweight windowing system abstraction (on top of which they built their own set of widgets), and gdk was the right choice. GDK is a layer underneath Gtk, and it provides a lightweight portability system sitting directly on Xlib. Qt (AFAIK) has something similar, but Qt's portability layer is canvas-like (again AFAIK), which isn't so convenient if all you want is simplified drawing primitives.

OO.O is benefitting from Ximian work, and that naturally involves GNOME.

Sun/HP/the rest of the CDE people wanted something that can easily replace Motif in all the places where Motif appears. Since this means a lot of legacy pure-C apps, Gtk seemed a natural choice, too.

So in each case, it was a different issue, rather than a single, obviously decisive feature.

As for the technical differences, yes, Gtk and Qt are different, but not as much as the advocates of either like to think (personally I prefer Gtk/GNOME, but the only strong technical reasons I can name are bonobo-activation, atk and gstreamer systems, which I consider uber-cool, but not absolutely essential).

--

Re:shame there aren't more users

[Plutor]

I'm not entirely sure where you got this impression of Mozilla. I started using it around M8 or so, and at that point I would have agreed. But ever since it hit 1.0 (and even arguably before that), it has been as stable as MSIE. I have used Mozilla exclusively for my web browsing needs for the past couple years, and I could not be more happy with it. Cheers to asa and the rest of the Mozilla crew for making a high-quality product I'm extremely happy with!

I can't remember the last time Mozilla crashed on me.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[axxackall]

Mozilla is a good, stable browser with lot's of plugins available. It you have a fast computer it's probably a better choice than Phoenix.

Phoenix doesn't build whatever I've tried. So I use Mozilla. Mostly.

I've stopped using Mozilla mail client, once Evolution evolved finally to what it is now - Outlook killer for Linux users.

I am not interesting in plugins, but, very rarely, when there is no way arount to get to the site rather than through stupid flash - I use Opera. On the same platform with the same plugin binaries Opera works. Mozilla doesn't. I mean Mozilla doesn't work with plugins out of the box - the best is it shows the flash (somehow, in ery bad quality), but any mouse click on it sends Mozilla to the crash.

Basically, the only way to call Mozilla 1.x stable is when you don't use it for anything else besides HTML browsing. Everything else (mail, calendar, custom built XUL forms) will crash Mozilla sooner or later. With HTML it's oppositely different - it shows more than 20 tabs in 3-5 windows for weeks on my testing Linux box without crashing. And if it's getting slower - I just restart (close-open-load) some of tabs. Opera is far bellow such stability level. With HTML.

Everything above is true for Linux. On Windows, I use Mozilla with plugins without such problems - it's stable. And when I name plugins, I mean Flash and Java. So, the problem with plugins is the problem with Linux binary plugin code, not with Mozilla. Perhaps, both Macromedia and Sun have no interest in Linux platform, but have very strong interest to keep their source code closed.

P.S. But why Opera (by the way, also distributed in binary code) works with same binary plugins better than Mozilla?