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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."
Just out of interest, does anyone know what kind of bandwidth charges you face doing something like this? I mean, OpenOffice, Mozilla, RedHat ISOs, - there must be massive bandwidth charges associated with distributing this kind of stuff, isn't there? Does anyone know what these guys pay per Gb, and what their monthly bills are like?
She can't stand Mozilla. She understands very well why she should avoid IE. But she only uses Mozilla when she absolutely has to, for example to check for interoperability after completing a web page that she wrote while using mostly using IE.
Why? Because she experiences so many bugs with it. The bugs make Mozilla unusable to her. She's not a software developer. She's a regular user of the sort that applications like this are targeting.
She understands very well that her machine can get hacked if she uses IE. But crashes and usability problems happen to her several times a day when she uses Mozilla. The risk of getting hacked seems somewhat theoretical and remote. The crashes and loss of data (for example, forum postings being composed in web forms) are frequent and completely intolerable.
Today I sent her a link to that BBC article that said you shouldn't use IE because of the security holes that are used by spyware and adware. I had observed her using IE a lot lately and wanted her to really understand why she should avoid it. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate how she would react.
She was completely distraught. I looked over at her sitting at her computer this evening and she had tears running down her face, quietly crying. The reason was that she didn't know how she was going to be able to browse the web anymore, because I had just told her in quite a loud way (using the BBC article) why she shouldn't use IE, but she also finds Mozilla completely useless.
I had put her in a bind. She didn't see a way out.
The way I consoled her and resolved the bind was to tell her to go ahead and use IE. She doesn't have much data on her drive that would be a problem if someone stole it, and if she gets hacked I'll reformat the drive and reinstall Win2k.
Meanwhile I told her I would download the new mozilla and test it for her. I was pleasantly surprised to find 1.2 released tonight - I hadn't wanted to give her a beta. So I got it downloaded before the rush.
My fear, though, is that her bugs are not fixed. There are just a few bugs that give her repeated trouble. Tonight she had a repeated crash, one time when she had sixteen windows open while researching medical journal literature, and she had hard time finding her pages again.
Talkback kept popping up and made her really upset because it made it so she couldn't just relaunch Mozilla. I knew that the talkback logs would help the developers get the bugs fixed, but if my wife was to use Mozilla at all I had to show her how to disable talkback.
I'd like to make the polite suggestion that the Mozilla developers focus somewhat less on flashy features and somewhat more strongly on stability and basic usability.
I've got lots of bugs in both reliability and usability on the Linux mozilla I use on my Mac, but I have a greater tolerance for it because I'm a developer, and I'm committed to making open source work. My wife, on the other hand, uses Mozilla because I plead with her to do so. It would be nice if Mozilla didn't make her life miserable.
I convinced her recently to make a serious try at switching from windows to Linux. That's a big step - I've been trying to do that for several years. She hasn't tried it yet because I'm going to have to spend some time configuring a system with the right setup to be able to accomplish all the tasks she wants while also being very usable and reliable. I'm going to really spend some time trying to make her transition as comfortable as possible.
While she was upset tonight she told me that the reason she said she would try Linux was to make me shut up about IE vs. Mozilla, and it hadn't worked - I kept pushing her to use open source tools, and they are unusable for her.
Bonita did file one actual bug report with bugzilla. That's the last she'll ever do, because she found the whole process extremely confusing. I think the big problem is that if you try to file a bug, and don't have a bugzilla account, after your account is created, you're presented with the expert interface and not the simplified one.
I think it would be helpful if there was a dead-simple bug report form that just had a couple lists for the platform and version, and one free-form text input field where the reporter could describe their problem. Then the person who fields the bug reports could translate this into a proper bugzilla report. Don't present people who aren't developers with the bugzilla query page - like Bonita, that will be the last report you ever get from a regular user.
It would also be very helpful if the very first page of the talkback wizard presented the option of disabling it and making it just go away. Having to click through several pages before being allowed to quit talkback is really frightening for someone who just lost all their windows and just wants to launch it again so they can find the pages that just disappeared from their screen.
Read more of what I have to say about the importance of quality in Free Software.
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I'm not saying proprietary is baad, mmkay, in fact I'm posting this via Opera 6.1. However, from the usual /. point of view, Opera 7 beta is just another Wintel program and not worth the exposure.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.