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.

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).

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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.