DHTML Bug Found in Mozilla 1.2

joyoflinux writes "The people at Mozilla have announced that Mozilla 1.2 contained a bug that caused sites that use DHTML to fail (more on the front page). They have pulled 1.2 from the releases page, pending a 1.2.1 release."

Comments

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think that IE 6 SP1 will fix Mozilla.

Interesting

[fucksl4shd0t]

Interesting that every couple of months when Mozilla has a bug or exploit or something people talk all kinds of trash, but forget about other competitors (IE) that have new exploits almost daily.

All in all, bug for bug, line by line, even accounting for the massive differences in complexity (mozilla is by far a more complex project that IE ever wanted to be), I'd have to say that Mozilla has less show-stopping bugs and fewer exploits than IE.

Re:Interesting

[whereiswaldo]

I'd have to say that Mozilla has less show-stopping bugs and fewer exploits than IE.

Until I hear different, that's my impression, too. But personally, I think the Phoenix project based on Mozilla has a lot of promise. It is a blazingly fast browser and is quick to startup, too. Amazing!

At least this bug today wasn't a security-related bug, like *cough* IE *cough* Outlook *cough* windows *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* goddamn! *cough* *cough* Microsoft
feck
*cough* *cough* *cough* must... hit.. submit...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to go out of your way to defend Mozilla. Heck, I use Mozilla too (actually phoenix), but I don't see the need to try and defend every bug that pops up. We all know that IE has a worse track record.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Interesting

[fucksl4shd0t]

heh, didn't go out of my way, I was wondering if the earlier you post the higher your moderation can go. And I was a little peeved at all the trolls talking about Windows.

Consider this, though. Retarded means (based on the italian root, or latin, whatever) "slower". So, to describe someone as Retarded means you're probably describing them in relation to yourself. Since the average windows user is "slower" than the average slashdot reader, it's safe to say that Windows lusers are retarded in a slashdot forum.

Re:Interesting

[Com2Kid]

LOL! hilarious troll, even if you just uncreativly exchanged the regular positionings of MS and Mozilla in your sentences. :P

Re:Interesting

[pranalukas]

So is it like when there's a buffer overflow on Pine, Wu-FTPD, Sendmail, Webmin, BIND, openSSL,..... should I name more?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a nasty cough, maybe you should go see a doctor.

Re:Interesting

[whereiswaldo]

No need. Every piece of software known to man has at least one security flaw. The differenced I see are the frequency of flaws found and timeliness of updates. Microsoft loses there. Ask the analysts if you don't believe me. (eg.)

But I'll just let you read this article.

Open your eyes, man.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

And while I'm in the waiting room, I'll read this.

Re:Interesting

[pranalukas]

OK, maybe you're right about the fact that MSIE has more security flaws than other browsers. That's also because more people are using it and more people found bugs.

Still, Mozilla and Netscape will never be first class browser with large user base. Don't even think about commercializing Mozilla when it can't open certain DHTML sites. I've tried 1.2.1 (just now) on both Windows and my Debian.

They still have the same problems. The DHTML functionality hasn't been fixed. Bug #182253, "document.write() eats initial characters in 1.2".It explains why so many sites with DHTML menus are being hit by the current bug. The sites are using document.write() to create them.

Also, there is a new bug that was just recently discovered. Progressive JPEG rendering in Mozilla hasn't been functioning properly since release 1.2.1. As an example, this image will open properly in MSIE, Netscape 6 and 7, Opera, however it won't open properly in Mozilla.

So, what steps do you think that Mozilla developers to squash all these bugs?

Re:Interesting

[whereiswaldo]

OK, maybe you're right about the fact that MSIE has more security flaws than other browsers. That's also because more people are using it and more people found bugs.

I see your point, but it's not exactly that simple. A good example I can point out is the Apache webserver. It got hit hard with the Code Red virus just like IIS did. Only it wasn't susceptible like IIS was.

Still, Mozilla and Netscape will never be first class browser with large user base.

How can you say that? Linux stared out as a tiny OS which only supported IDE hard drives. Now look at it. OSS projects can mature at a rapid pace, especially those which are fueled by many people. How many people work on IE? How many on Mozilla? Is there much of a difference? (I don't know)

Don't even think about commercializing Mozilla when it can't open certain DHTML sites.

FYI: AOL's Netscape is based on Mozilla. I'd say it's been commercialized. Don't worry, the bug will be fixed shortly, most likely.

Progressive JPEG rendering

That's a minor bug, IMO.

Keep tabs on mozilla.org in the next week and see how things happen.

Re:Interesting

[tg_schlacht]

At least this bug today wasn't a security-related bug, like *cough* IE *cough* Outlook *cough* windows *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* goddamn! *cough* *cough* Microsoft
feck
*cough* *cough* *cough* must... hit..
submit...

Hey whereiswaldo, I think you need to get a new keyboard. Yours appears to have developed a serious cough.

Re:Interesting

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"example, this image [coolsweetgirls.com] will open properly in MSIE, Netscape 6 and 7, Opera, however it won't open properly in Mozilla.
"
Worked fine for me (Mozilla 1.2 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126).

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

> I've tried 1.2.1 (just now) on both Windows and
> my Debian.

How's that possible since it hasn't been
released as of 5:37 AM EST ? (and your message
was posted before this time) ?

You are a liar and/or methinks, i just got trolled..

Re:Interesting

[mackstann]

It is a blazingly fast browser and is quick to startup, too. Amazing!

were you compensated for this post?

i honestly dont see the 'blazing' speed of phoenix, i tried it on my p233, and on my duron 1.3ghz, and neither time did it feel very much faster than mozilla. i did notice a huge speed boost from 1.0->1.1 on the p233.

the startup time i can believe though, but i leave my browser open all the time, doesnt everyone? ;)

Re:Interesting

[vvikram]

your comment made perfect sense and i agreed fully until i read...

(mozilla is by far a more complex project that IE ever wanted to be)

huh ? IE and the OS are one and the same dude!! you been under a rock or what ?

*shakes head* :)

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Mozilla, and Phoenix. I've been downloading nightlies and building my own from CVS. Everyone keeps going on about how much 'faster' Phoenix is. Quite frankly, the only place I've seen Phoenix be faster is in the startup. After all, it uses the Mozilla rendering engine (You build both from the same CVS tree) so I don't see how it can be any faster at all. I think this whole "phoenix is faster!!!" crap is just people fooling themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I use Mozilla and like it. I just don't see how Phoenix is any faster, and doesn't have the mail and news client.

Re:Interesting

[marauder404]

I missed that day on Slashdot, but I just read that BBC piece, and that article doesn't support your argument. Your argument is that IE has more security flaws than other browsers. While that may or may not be true, the BBC article simply states that IE should be avoided because it's the most targeted: "The easiest way to avoid parasite programs, he says, is to stop using Internet Explorer because it is targeted by many of the adware and spyware companies." This advice is akin to saying that one shouldn't buy a Honda because they are targeted by thieves -- it's not saying that Hondas are easier to steal than other cars. Likewise, the article doesn't say that IE is more vulnerable than other browsers but merely that it's more targeted. IE is definitely more vulnerable than other browsers, but the article doesn't argue it for you.

Neither does that other article. I actually read the whole whitepaper and the article isn't about how Unix is better than Windows (in fact, right in the abstract of the paper, it says that Windows provides much better throughput and slightly better performance than Unix!). Rather, it describes the process by which Hotmail was migrated from Unix to Windows. There are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms and it discusses them well. It describes in good detail how it went about converting the platform and the challenges as they were presented and resolved. It criticizes Windows where appropriate, but it doesn't say that Unix is the better OS as the Slashdot headline and blurb suggest.

I was ok with your post up until you referencing the other articles because they make no sense.

Re:Interesting

[Lumpy]

Every piece of software known to man has at least one security flaw.

Really?

Ok where is my security flaw....

#include

int z;

while (z==0)
{
printf("Bite me!\n");
}

I see no security flaws. nor any way for someone to buffer overflow it to gain root access.

anyone that says that everything has security flaws is the same people saying all the other silly statements that are un-true.

Yes there IS software that is secure... 100% secure like my example above.

Re:Interesting

[gallir]

... This advice is akin to saying that one shouldn't buy a Honda because they are targeted by thieves -- it's not saying that Hondas are easier to steal than other cars....

Most of the thieves are so lazy that they avoid hard targets.

Re:Interesting

[Blkdeath]

Yes there IS software that is secure... 100% secure like my example above.

I believe your parent posters' example was a tad short-sighted (it's the typical cliche people use when referring to software, mostly to Microsoft vs. OSS I've found).

In reality, as the complexity of an application increases, so does the potential for overflows and security vulnerabilities. It's a simple proportionality based on several factors, including (but not limited to);

1. Human (programmer) error
2. Unaccounted program (user) input (see #1)
3. Vulnerabilities present in included libraries (reference; recent mod_ssl exploit)
4. Lax security configuration (user error)
5. Poor implementation strategy (SUID apps; 'nuff said)

etc. ad nauseum. Incidentally, you forgot to initialize integer 'z' before you used it. Sorry, but that's a potential exploit. ;)

The long and short of it is, programmers need to pay much more attention to the code they produce. Large-scale applications should be heavily modular, and more auditing should take place (did you check that buffer before allocating it? Did you free all your buffers before you ended your routine?)

Re:Interesting

[Blkdeath]

You're not actually blind enough to think that linux is "first class with a large user base" are you? Linux still is a "tiny OS".

You're not actually silly enough to think the end-(l)user base is the only market that defines an OS's userbase, are you? Why is Microsoft so afraid of our "tiny OS"?

Re:Interesting

[crusher-1]

Woah dude, did you swallow a "bug"?

Re:Interesting

[i_luv_linux]

Why did you waste your time on reading the whitepaper. Didn't you realize that anything Slashdot reports something against Microsoft which sounds totally unreasonable, always turns out to be wrong. In Slashdot I didn't see one single news that sounds incorrect about Microsoft which turns out to be true. Not a single one. All such news are always bogus and for amusement. That's why I think that average Linux guru is probably not any smarter than average Joe who uses Windows.

Re:Interesting

[ColdGrits]

There is no security flaw primarily because your code is fataly flawed in terms of syntax and won't even compile.

Kinda tricky to exploiut security flaws in something that won't even compile, let alone run.

Re:Interesting

[Lokist]

Good point man...

The worst bugs and exploits are the ones never found... Or admitted that they exist.

The danger is in whats not found...

Re:Interesting

[Bunji X]

I think that was taken into consideration. :)

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

actually no it isn't ... the include statement is broken by your web-browser... view source and you see it.

so it is correct and does compile (I tried it) and runs.

as for the statement above you'rs that Z isint initalized.... it is... All variables when int'd are automatically set to Zero.

no bugs found...... NEXT!

Re:Interesting

[hkmwbz]

First, I know that you are just trolling, but some poor bastard might read your drivel and actually take it seriously.

"Still, Mozilla and Netscape will never be first class browser with large user base."

It sounds like "first class browser" means "the most widely used browser" to you. That says a lot about you, because everyone knows that MSIE dominates the market because it is distributed with the most widely used operating system in the world. Most people just don't care and can't be bothered to download another browser, even if it is superior, when they already have one.

"So,what steps do you think that Mozilla developers to squashall these bugs?"

When will Microsoft fix security holes, crap CSS, PNG alpha transparency etc. in MSIE?

Re:Interesting

[asa]

" Interesting that every couple of months when Mozilla has a bug or exploit or something"

This isn't an exploit or even a crash or dataloss bug. This is just a visual glitch that you'll get on some pages with DHTML. The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days when the 1.2.1 release out so the high-visibility links were commented out for the time being.

--Asa

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Every piece of software known to man has at least one security flaw.

Yep, there's a bug in your logical reasoning software: hasty generalization.

Re:Interesting

[Inf0phreak]

Which compiler are YOU talking about?! ANSI C does not require that you initialize variables. However, it also does not require the compiler to automatically initialize variables for you. z could contain any junk data that was in memory at the position the system decided to put it there, because it won't get automatically initialized. I guess this comes from using a particular compiler for too long that does not adhere to the C standard. Auto-initialzing might be nice, but relying on it is foolish, and IMO should result in a compiler error.

Re:Interesting

[whereiswaldo]

Yes there IS software that is secure... 100% secure like my example above.

I believe your parent posters' example was a tad short-sighted (it's the typical cliche people use when referring to software, mostly to Microsoft vs. OSS I've found).

I'll ignore the fact that the parent poster didn't offer a non-trivial example of a 100% secure piece of software.

Let me ask this: do you know of a piece of software that is 100% secure? Can you prove beyond any doubt that it is secure? While there may be software that has no security flaws, I doubt it could ever be identified because there is no way to prove it.

So allow me to rephrase my comment then: every piece of software known to man should be treated like it has security flaws, because we can never prove otherwise.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but the Linux guru is quite a bit "smarter" than the average Joe who uses Windows. Had you said average Linux user vs average Windows user, I think you would be spot on. In a guru vs guru battle, it would be damn close I think but the edge would go to the Linux freak most likely.

Re:Interesting

[asa]

Don't even think about commercializing Mozilla when it can't open certain DHTML sites. I've tried 1.2.1 (just now) on both Windows and my Debian.

Actually, if you're thinking about commercializing Mozilla then our milestone model is probably just the thing you're looking for.

We push nightly builds to thousands of testers every day, hundreds of thousands of users test and thousands of users report problems against Alpha and Beta Milesotne releases and then we ship a final milestone to even more users/testers.

In some cases a new problem is discovered in that Final Milestone a fix is landed on the milestone branch. Someone interested in commercializing Mozilla has a well tested and well patched code branch from which to build a commercial product.

That this bug was discovered in Mozilla is precisely the reason that organizations would want to use Mozilla technologies in commercial products. We keep making it better and when we move on to the next release cycle any commercial (or non-commercial) organization is free to pull the code, listen to Mozilla Milestone feedback and bug reports and continue making it better themselves.

The alternative is doing all this development and testing work yourself or relying on closed source code where you can't continue making it better yourselves if you do find something wrong. If I was building a commercial app that required HTML rendering then I'd definitely investigate using one of the Mozilla code branches for my products.

--Asa

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice work.

Re:Interesting

[xeno-cat]

If Mozilla had the user base that IE had All the browser bugs and exploits would be found and patched.

Kind Regards

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

While the Mozilla team does seem better at announcing and getting a fix out quicker, which one is currently easier to patch? One of the reasons often cited for Microsoft patches is they're released to often or admins are too lazy to keep them patched, or a combination of the two. That being said, patching Windows systems is really easy. Either auto-update or visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com. It's something grandma can do. Now, what does it take to patch the Mozilla browser? Really, I have no idea. I'm not much of a Mozilla power user, but I have used it on Slackware, Debian, and RedHat with some regularity. Still, whenever a release has issues they say to get the next release. Am I missing a patches section somewhere? It's not under downloads. Of course with some distributions it's not difficult to grab a new release via rpm or apt-get. But with grandma Windows user do you expect her to get new releases every week? Maybe Mozilla will pull it off someday, but I will recommend IE for computer-illiterate people I know.

Re:Interesting

[atam]

How can you say that? Linux stared out as a tiny OS which only supported IDE hard drives. Now look at it. OSS projects can mature at a rapid pace, especially those which are fueled by many people. How many people work on IE? How many on Mozilla? Is there much of a difference? (I don't know)

A lot of people forgot that IE also started off as an also-ran (maybe they were too young and joined the internet too late to observe that). People at that time joked and ignored IE when comparing it to the then de facto standard Netscape. But then MS, thru innovations as well as dirty tactics while Netscape showed little improvement, the IE became the new king. I can't see why Mozilla could not repeat this history to dethrone IE.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Until something else becomes the de facto standard, and it's the most targetted.

Re:Interesting

[mr.slashdot]

Take a look at http://needlesearch.mozdev.org for some realy interesting projects that make Mozilla-related browsers realy cool! If you want to make this in IE you must have visual c++ knowledge instead of XUL.

Re:Interesting

[Eccles]

The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days

Note that if you're running an older version, the "please download a newer version" screen will come up with a download button. Selecting that will download 1.2. I only found out about the 1.2.1 problem because I went to the download page instead.

Re:Interesting

[commbat]

no main() function.

Re:Interesting

[Cainam]

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

Re:Interesting

[ColdGrits]

Hey, oh anonymous one too scared to stand by your own statement, who said anything about the include line, hmm? howeverr, I shall be sore to let the Mozilla developers know that you consider my browser (Mozilla at the moment) to be broken, I'm sure they will value the input of someone too scared to stand by their own statement.

As others have pointed out, there is no main() block, ergo the code will not compile into an executable as it stands. Ergo your claim to have achieved this is, in fact, nothing short of a lie.

Also, as others have rightly pointe out, you are talking from betwixt your buttocks when you claim that C compilers will always initialise unassigned variables to zero - there is absolutely no guarantee that this will happen as it is NOT a requirement of any accepted standard.

Som, that's a syntactically flawed "program" with scope for a bug based upon a rather majorly flawed assumption.

You were saying?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Variables declared at file scope are initialized to zero by default, though if the poster intended to use such poor coding style they should have said so.

The poster is also mistaken about a browser bug. wget proves the filename really is missing, probably because the poster didn't encode angle brackets around it and then neglected to preview. I'd be appalled if the Mozilla team would reject valid feedback just because it's anonymous.

Re:Interesting

[whereiswaldo]

Yep, there's a bug in your logical reasoning software: hasty generalization [nizkor.org].

Hasty generalization? That sounds like a hasty assumption on your part.

Show me a non-trivial program which you can PROVE contains no security holes. If you link in any libraries, you'll need to PROVE that they don't contain security holes, too.

And since I anticipate that you cannot prove that any piece of software does not have any security flaws, then it is safe to say that all software should be treated as if it might contain security flaws, since chances are it does, and since we cannot PROVE otherwise.

I look forward to shooting holes in your following argument...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you but will make this observation. Earthquakes tend to follow a reciprocal relationship of intensity to frequency. That is, if an area has 1 earthquake with richter magnitude of 1.2 it tends to have 10 of magnitude 1.1 (I believe this is the relationship, geologists correct me if I am wrong - the principle remains the same). This also means if a different area has 5 earthquakes of 1.2 it has approximately 50 of 1.1.

I hypothesize (I have no proof), the same could be said for bugs in software. IE having more security bugs would give me the feeling that the total number of bugs is higher.

I have created DHTML for both IE and mozilla. Mozilla is slightly easier to create for (it follows the standards better), though IE is miles easier for me than Netscape 4.x.

Re:Interesting

[Felinoid]

I avoid technical "expertise" from populare news media. Thow I'd trust BBC or MS NBC over FOX or CNN when it comes to computers.
Still when it comes to computers and medical science or any techniocal expertise rely on media that knows more about computers than "HTML is hard" and "Internet Explorer is my operating system"

Frankly when ever someone says "Hackers target Microsoft products" tune em out.
Hackers don't target populare they target accessable sytstems they don't like.

Example: Mac Virus targeting only the Atari ST using a single brand of Mac emulation.
The virus would check to be sure it's an Atari ST before infecting the system.
The Atari ST had a very small userbase and only a few of them ever bothered with Mac emulation.
The reason is simple. The Atari ST plus Mac Emulation was far cheapter. For a while the Mac fanatics were furreous.

A virus will more likely be writen for a buggy platform that is only used by 10 people while pissing off the general public than a secure platform that us used by 10,000 people.

It's not important how many bugs Windows or IE has it's how many Microsoft passes over or compleatly ignores.

Say Z Os has 12 bugs a day where as T os has only 1 a month but Z os fixes all 12 bugs and T os leaves the 1 a month alone.

Crackers will favor Z os over T os for a target. After a year T os has 12 bugs and so dose Z..
After two years T has 24 but Z still has only 12.
If Z ever figures out why they keep making bugs maybe they'll have less but untill that day comes they'll have 12 bugs to crush.

T however knows how to avoid bugs.. they only slip up once a month.. they're only human. But if they just ignore the bugs then it won't matter how few bugs they produce. It piles up.

And in the long run Z os could had 1,000 new bugs an hour vs only 1 bug in T os for 50 years....
If T os never fixed that one bug and Z os fixes everything then it'll be T os the crackers will attack.

No matter how many users they have.

BTW.. Obveously the articals made sense to the other guy or he wouldn't have responded...
But I'll it for him to defend them they could be piles of dog poo for all I know.
Just heard "It makes no sense" to often applied to the obveous by people who would demand the unreasonable.

Some hackers do target Linux and Netscape so realisticly no platform is safe.
The whole idea of just chaning web browsers makes you safe is itself a good sign that the BBC artical is lacking in tech expertise.

It's a mixure of old Microsoft fud and Linux Zeloty.
A real FUDmaister wouldn't bring up the switch angle that's more Linux Zeloty.

A sereous tech story wouldn't even start suggesting that popularity had anything to do with it and wouldn't suggest that switching to something else would be good just on the face of it.

Switch to a browser that is consistantly reliable or if you can't get one that has a fast bugfix responce and update often.
With web browsers you can just as easly keep track of dangerous websites and IE you can switch off dangerous features so I recomend doing that.

I like Mozilla BTW.. fast bug fix and a lack of annimositys are more effective protections than obscurity...

You know what security by obscurity brings you..

Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Seehund]

They retract a release because of this?

I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[fucksl4shd0t]

uhhhhhh.... links to bugzilla from slashdot are disabled. :)

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at least they're goin for quality... not like some other browsers (i.e. IE)

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Seehund]

Crud. Well, copy and paste then. :)

If someone can't be bothered to do that, that bug is preventing pasting of more than 4000 bytes from other apps into Mozilla. 4kB ain't much, for example pasting spam mails into SpamCop forms usually won't work, most spammers aren't too considerate about the size of their spam... :-P

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[tunah]

So a bug that renders some (albeit poorly designed) websites unusable is far less important than having to copy text a page at a time?

I send a fair amount of email, and have never had the need to copy that much text, anything much bigger should really be an attachment. As for other purposes, care to give some examples?

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[fucksl4shd0t]

That could be a limitation caused by the cross-platform nature of the application. In wxWindows, a textbox widget can only store about 4000 bytes, but a richtext widget can store a lot more. Problem is, richtext isn't available for GNU/Linux, it's only for windows. I'd like to see it dealt with too, though, just because that's an irritating bug to have.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Seehund]

The bug I linked to was just an example of a highly disruptive bug. Examples? See my Spamcop example above, or let's say you want to copy-n-paste part of an article into a Slashdot post, or use Mozilla's Composer and paste text/code into that, or paste something into a Bugzilla(!) form, and so on and so forth.

In comparison to that, how many sites actually fail to display at all because of this DHTML bug?

My point was that I don't see the need to retract releases unless they contain harmful bugs.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[h3]

links to bugzilla from slashdot are disabled.

* Middle-click (on *nix): defaults to opening link in a new window I believe, so no referrer sent, no bugzilla block. Non-*nix: right-click, open link in new window

* Since presumably people most people reading Mozilla stories will be using Mozilla - open the link in a new tab. Again, no referrer, no block.

For the longest time, I didn't understand what people were talking about with this blocking business, until I realized I had been circumventing via one of the two methods above as part of my usual browsing behavior.

Both ways also have the advantage of not losing your place in the Slashdot discussion- just close the window/tab and you're back to where you were without reload/re-renders, etc.

FWIW, it bugs me when people *don't* link. Copy-paste is slightly more work, and sucks when Slashdot injects spaces into links.

-h3

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[fucksl4shd0t]

actually, hte first thing I did was go back to the link and open in a new tab, and it was still blocked. Thing is, the referrer still gets sent because it's still valid, doesn't matter if you're opening a new window or not. I wonder how it is that you've been circumventing this stuff with Mozilla, when quite clearly for me for the last year I've been using it (starting with 0.9.8) the referrer is still being sent.

I'll run some tests and see what happens though, I'm interested in nailing this down.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Ambassador Kosh]

One of the things that is strange about this is I just tried this same thing from a bunch of KDE apps and they all worked just fine pasting into mozilla. I pasted up to ~ 20 megs of text without problems. I did this with mozilla 1.2, kde 3.1 cvs packages, under debian sid.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Thenomain]

You could always down your favorite platform's nightly build. Or wait a few days, if the uncertainty of a bleeding edge isn't for you.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[LX.onesizebigger]

With those two statements combined, it's a good thing that link is so short!

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Luke-Jr]

I use Mozilla for GNU/Linux... I don't even think I have wxWindows installed, so how could it be using it? I thought Mozilla was using GTK+ anyway... I was just able to put over 4000 characters in this textbox (as a test; I deleted it after) and had no problem...

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[/ASCII]

Is it too much to ask for you to read the link? They've known the reason for the bug for well over a year. The problem only arises when pasting from GTK-based apps. Basically, because their GTK-clipboard implementation sucks they would have to rewrite it to squash the bug.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Luke-Jr]

Rightclick on the link, Copy Link Location, click new tab button, middle-click in the Location bar. Simple enough.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[beebware]

This can't be true as I've posted over 50k into a Windows IE textbox widget before (only to have Spamcop reject it because it only allows spams up to 50k to be submited)

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[hkmwbz]

One could argue that if you need to handle pieces of text that large, you should go for a dedicated application. While Mozilla is far more than a browser, it is not a text editor or text handler as such.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[asa]

They retract a release because of this?

I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this [mozilla.org] bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.

You're right that this isn't a serious security hole or even a crash or dataloss bug. But it is something that we'd like to fix and make available quickly. The 1.2 release is still available if you want it. Just go to FTP and download. We're very close to putting out something with a fix for this DHTML problem and figured it was better to save folks the extra download by asking them to wait a day or two for the fixed version. The easy way to do that was to pull the high-proifile links to that build until we had a better build to put in its place.

--Asa

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Dave2 Wickham]

Off-topic, I know, but you can middle-click to open in a new tab in Windows.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[fucksl4shd0t]

wxWindows is a class library, that's all. It uses GTK on Unix platforms (or Motif, but that version's not maintained anymore) and winAPI on Windows. I don't know what it uses on the two mac flavors, but the idea is that you write code with the library, and it just compiles on the different platforms without any trouble. The comparison had more to do with the GTK limitation, and another poster pointed out that the problem *is* in GTK, in fact. So the similarity between the two projects, wxWindows and Mozilla, is just in the fact that they both use GTK on UNIX platforms.

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[Snover]

Yeah, this is a pretty bad bug: "Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled." ;)

Seriously though. Linux still is in need of a standard clipboard format. The fact that there is any interoperability as far as copy/paste goes from program to program seems impressive to me.
Then again, I've been sitting in a broom closet for a year, so maybe there IS a standard in Linux for clipboards now. Until I know for sure, though, I'll stick to my good ole' spring-loaded wood-and-metal clipboards. :)

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[h3]

Aaah, mea culpa.

It appears that the "don't send referrer" behavior is something that Galeon, my primary browser, does. I just tried in Mozilla proper and I was blocked.

It never occurred to me that this particular behavior would be Galeon-specific. My apologies.

-h3

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[GrahamIX]

Are you a freebie or pay user of Spamcop? I'm a pay user and I forward spams as attachments to my spamcop reporting address. This avoids the whole copy paste issue and works very nicely. Its also the easiest way of reporting spam sent to my AOL address.

If you're not a pay user, maybe you should support the Spamcop team by joining? :)

Of course, that's just avoiding the issue rather than fixing it, but...

Re:Some bugs are more buggy than others?

[I. M. Bur]

I wonder if a working URL exists, which is 4KB+... And since this is slashdot, I guess there will be at least three of them by tommorow morning :)

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Anonymous Coward]

hardly...
Have you seen the latest IE exploits? I'd much rather just have a page not work.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny though that this will be patched a helluva lot faster than most any Microsoft patches are released after the bugs are discovered.

Re:lalaa

[IamNotWitchboy]

from the mozilla FAQ: "Mozilla 1.0 is a fully functional technology demo for those interested in seeing what can be done with Mozilla technology, and those who want to create Mozilla-based products and packages. The intended target audience is the development community. " so, it's not really a product. but a great 'demo' imho. if you want to use the 'commercial' suite, use netscape.

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[kingkade]

That will fix it

Perhaps a lobotomy will fix you...

Re:I'm sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

amazingly, i actually got the 5th ...
is it possible to be more lame?
umm...don't forget check the "anonymously"
la la la

No, but "Add/Remove Programs" will.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all.

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[pranalukas]

I know MSIE have exploits. Can't you just click the "Windows Update" button from the Start Menu, and when a new window prompts you for security verification, check the box "Always trust content from Microsoft Corporation" before you click the OK button, and then reboot. That should solve it.

With Linux/BSD/whatever, especially on Gentoo you need to recompile it from some source, and thus it reduces productivity.

Yeehaa for Windows!

Re:A brand new business-model?

[IamNotWitchboy]

that thing was funny once.

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[pranalukas]

Perhaps a lobotomy will fix you...

That's your assumption, I'm not responsible for your assumption. Mozilla should be fixed from bugs like this. Admit it! There's an error in Mozilla that needs to be fixed! Rather than redownloading it again and again and having to recompile it on your system (some nerds do this), just install Windows and click "Windows Update".

It's *that* easy!

What?!?!

[trotski]

A bug in mozilla??? No way, you've got to be jokeing!!!

Seriously though, although Mozilla has it's faults, (this being a prime example). It is still the cutting edge of browser technology. I mean, theres one feature that wins over every person I've recommended Mozilla to: the ability to stop pop ups from apearing. ALthough Mozilla is still rough around the edges, it is still my browser of choice.

Re:What?!?!

[rolfwind]

Don't forget tabbed browsing, opera has it too. It's far more convenient to have one window open with x tabs, than each one taking up it's own window. I've seen nothing really remarkable (or innovative since those folks just love flinging that term around) from MS in terms of improved functionality since probably IE4.

Re:What?!?!

[J. Random Software]

I don't get it. Why give every app have a half-assed window manager with its own quirky UI rather than making the system window manager usable?

Re:What?!?!

[Puu]

"Steal"? Good Heavens, what has this world come to?

Shopping malls and department stores typically sprout ads thru the PA system. If I go there listening to my portable CD player, am I stealing? After all, I'm blocking the ads (deliberately indeed -- I loathe them).

I choose what I listen, and I damn well choose what I browse. I have never asked for or agreed to pop-ups, so I do with them what I please.

Jesus...

Re:What?!?!

[Puu]

[I don't know why the above ended up here; I thought I was commenting on the AC who suggested that blocking pop-ups is "stealing". Ah well.]

Re:What?!?!

[greenrd]

Short answer: because Mozilla.org isn't in the business of making window managers.

Long answer (a completely uneducated guess): because XFree86 is a hard-to-extend system?

Re:What?!?!

[rseuhs]

I don't get it. Why give every app have a half-assed window manager with its own quirky UI rather than making the system window manager usable?

Because Mozilla lets me open pages into the background. Whenever I open a page into a new browser-window it appears on top of my existing windows (which sucks).

Also I can close tabs with the middle mouse button, which I can't do with any windowmanager I am aware of.

Re:What?!?!

[robian]

Did you try it?

I was sceptical until I downloaded Mozilla and started using it.

I can't work without this feature any more. At the moment I have nine tabs opened across three desktops in four windows.

Also take in consideration the other applications that are running and imagine ALT-TABBING through all those windows to get what you want at any particular moment.

Getting used to tabs however, takes a bit of time. So until you appreciate tabs, enjoy the pop-up control, which is king among killer features.

Re:What?!?!

[Blkdeath]

I don't get it. Why give every app have a half-assed window manager with its own quirky UI rather than making the system window manager usable?

Remember that Mozilla is in use across many OSs, each with their own quirks when it comes to window managers. It makes Mozilla more streamlined across all of them; configuring the same profile across Linux, FreeBSD, Win'98, Win2k, WinXP, OS/2, etc. I get the exact same UI. Besides that; tabs are way more convenient than new windows. New windows = more clutter on your desktop and taskbar (very important for those of us who perpetually have a dozen or two windows open), more clutter on your desktop itself ('How many layers deep is Mozilla window eighteen of thirty?'), and having short summaries of each tab right in front of my face is extremely convenient. It's not replicating a window manager's functionality because it's only one window.

To summarize (and support) what others here have been saying; you don't know how nice tabbed browsing is until you've tried it. I used to be skeptical myself until I started using it, now I hate browsing without it.

(For fun; use tabbed browsing, disable pop-ups and most of the annoying JavaScript functionality and use Mozilla exclusively for a month or two, then use IE. If you don't want to claw your eyes out within the first ten minutes, I'll mail you $20 of your country's currency)

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats true and it is actually very useful but...
The latest exploit can be replaced with the old one and you are vulnerable all over again. If thats not enough for a callback I don't know what is. They're leavin the users hangin (once again).

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[IamNotWitchboy]

The developers of mozilla already acknowledged this as a major bug. Big enough to pull a release. Now zealots will try to convinve devs that they are wrong? ^_^

and in a MS product it would have been called a minor rendering problem or something equally undescriptive.

go figure. Closed source zealots are always ready to jump at the announce of a "major" oss bug -_-

Mozilla Bugs...

[trotski]

Finding Bugs like this is proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser. With open source and lots of people contributing, bugs are found and elliminated quickly.

Microsoft IE on the other hand, bugs take time to find and even more time to repair due to the slow reaction of a large organization. This is probably why we hear so much about Mozilla bugs, they're far easier to uncover than bugs in IE or other browser.

PErsonally, I think Mozilla users should concider this a Good Thing, it means that your browser of choice is getting better!

Re:Mozilla Bugs...

[tshak]

Then why is Mozilla, after all these years, STILL inferior to Opera? Opera has a very small group of developers, and especially before Moz 1.x was faster, more stable, and rendered properly. Now, after many years, Moz has almost caught up, but we'll just have to see wwith Opera 7.

Re:Mozilla Bugs...

[xchino]

Your reasoning is flawed. Mozilla is in no way inferior to Opera. Mozilla has tons more features and options than Opera, giving it a MUCH larger resource footprint, and less room for error than with Mozilla. Also, Opera has a much smaller user base, which means less testing and bug reporting. Not to mention that Opera is COMMERCIAL and costs money, unless you like seeing ads everywhere. Even IE is free, without adware. I personally like Opera, but if anything it is inferior to Mozilla.

Re:Mozilla Bugs...

[tshak]

Also, Opera has a much smaller user base, which means less testing and bug reporting.

Yeah, I mean, they're only available on almost every possible OS for almost every possible platform. Seriously, you make like all of those features, and that's your opinion. I personally measure Opera's superiority by it's small footprint, fast rendering, and usability (Moz generally copies Opera after a few months. eg: mouse gestures). Yes, Opera is Commercial, and that's why it's so successfull. OSS has done some incredible things (Perl being one of my favorites), but I've still found that commercial software is generally a notch or two above OSS, and Opera is no exception.

Re:Mozilla Bugs...

[xchino]

If you're looking for a small footprint the Pheonix project is smaller, faster, and more feature rich than Opera. And the effect of Opera being cross platform if negligible, considering that Mozilla is too.

Re:Mozilla Bugs...

[Kanasta]

world's best browser? More like a good browser in a world of crappy browsers.

There are so many usability problems. Why don't many dialogs remember their size and positions? Why can't I answer Yes/No dialogs with the keyboard, but have to reach for my mouse? Think of the effort adding an extra & to markers...

Too bad OS developers are too cool for fixing small things like this. That's the problem. When there are so many developers, everyone thinks someone else will get around to doing it. Plus nobody can force you to fix things if you don't feel like it.

Until these and many other problems are solved, the average user isn't going to care about security flaws. If they did IE wouldn't have 90% of the market, would they?

bugzilla link

[J. Random Software]

I'm guessing it's bug 182500 (or at least the bugs referred to there). Something about document.write() dropping leading characters.

IMHO documents that completely rely on ECMAScript are inherently broken anyway.

Re:bugzilla link

[Querty]

"IMHO documents that completely rely on ECMAScript are inherently broken anyway."

IMHO you are right, but:

What happens when you provide an alternative navigation if the browser doesn't support or use ECMAScript?

That's right, your code is fooled into using the DHTML version because everything seems just hunky dorey. It's really hard to test every step of the way if you're not producing some ECMAScript error.

Re:bugzilla link

[dagg]

I think it's that particular bug that is effecting my service provider's admin page. After upgrading to 1.2 of Mozilla... I had to start using IE just to admin my site.

I agree with them taking down Mozilla 1.2 until they fix it. If this bug causes wide-spread enough problems (wide-spread enough that I've already encountered it!), then nobody else should download it until it is fixed.

--
This still works on Mozilla 1.2 :-)

Re:bugzilla link

[J. Random Software]

I'd argue that thinking the script version probably worked isn't a good enough reason to make the reliable version unavailable.

Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[Anonymous Coward]

The world in an OSS zealot's View:

IE bugs: "What a crappy browser!"

Mozilla bugs: "This is proof Mozilla rules!"

Re:Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[fucksl4shd0t]

Speaking as an OSS zealot myself, I have to agree with the basic logic of your statement. It would be better for us, I think, if we just handled the bugs better than MS (not hard, just fix 'em quickly and move on) and demonstrated our superior capabilities constructively, rather than generating FUD that would make MS' collective dick hard.

Re:Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[IamNotWitchboy]

it's not really the presence or absence of bugs in the software. We all know that every softwarehas bugs.

it's rather the way these bugs are treated and fixed. With a MS product, some bugs are not acknowledged until they have a fix, sometime months after the first discovery.

with an open source model, bugs are public and are generally much quicker to be patched.

Re:Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[nagora]

It would be better for us, I think, if we just handled the bugs better than MS

Pulling the release is handling the bugs better than MS!

TWW

Re:Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[Anonymous Coward]

what "superior capabilities"? bloody hell *rolls eyes*

Re:Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[Swaffs]

Talk about narrowminded posting. Spoken like a true AC.

The "crappy browser" comments and the "Mozilla rules" comments are both very appropriate.

The reason is that this Mozilla bug, one that is not a vulnerability, crash or dataloss bug, but merely a rendering bug, made the front page of Slashdot.

Any IE bug short of a root hole simply isn't news, and won't make the front page of Slashdot. I've never even heard of a crash bug, nevermind a rendering bug, on Slashdot. And that's not because they don't exist, as anyone who's visited a site using valid CSS would know, but its simply because its not news, its par for the course.

So now what does that tell you about each browser? IE has had more vulnerabilities than Mozilla has had major rendering bugs recently. Don't even bother trying to compare the number of bugs of equal severity in each browser.

And of course, the original poster wasn't commenting on which browser was better, but that Mozilla's people are better, given the reaction they had to a minor bug as opposed to what would occur (nothing) if such a bug were found in IE.

Re:Talk about spin and hyposcrisy.

[blair1q]

Bull.

I've submitted one bug to Mozilla, and had to change the submission three times and recategorize the bug twice just to get those lamers to put it where it now sits, ignored, in a queue of bugs.

I have no faith that it will ever be fixed (it's been about 6 months, and I still get mail like "if you want this bug fixed you should put it in the right category").

Mozilla is an immature product being produced by puerile people. Its features are weak and its reliability is low. As much as I despise Microsoft, it has produced the best browser ever since AOL took over Netscape. Mozilla itself isn't even close. Phoenix was better than Mozilla, but still not as good as MSIE. Netscape, especially the execrable java versions, is unrunnable at modern network speeds.

Mozilla is no proof that the open source development model is superior to corporate engineering. Perfectly the opposite. Given the weaknesses of IE, Mozilla should by now be kicking its ass. It doesn't. The reason is the fractious, undirected, and weak talents of the developers and the model they work under. QED.

--Blair

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[eloki]

They would never admit this was a bug.

Sure it is.

If this were an IE bug, you'd never hear the end of it.

It's bad that this bug wasn't caught before the release - you'd think someone would have tried out a few DHTML sites, though I don't know the details. But at least it's not a security flaw, which we can be thankful for. That's what the last couple of IE bugs have been.

but HOW?

[FuegoFuerte]

What I'd like to know (and this is NOT meant as a flame any way, I love mozilla), is HOW exactly do big bugs like this get into final releases? I mean, the 1.2 release was more than a month behind what was scheduled on the roadmap, and yet it still ends up with this in it? Is it just the number of people who don't bother with nightlies or reporting bugs? I would think there would be enough people using the nightlies to find fairly significant bugs like this. Perhaps the fine mozilla people need to add a "gamma" release after "alpha" and "beta" but before "final"? Have the gamma and final be seperated by one week, and ONLY incorporate bugfixes which don't affect major parts of the code? I don't quite know what the answer is, but it seems something should be done. All in all though, great browser.

Re:but HOW?

[Anonymous Coward]

First a disclaimer: I'm the network admin so I'm only peripherally involved in the software projects at my workplace.

That being said - usually last minute bugs creep in as a result of: a patch added at the last minute or a result of several changes elsewhere. They don't always get detected because they can be difficult to test for (as an example, say there's a bug in your menu system such that if you go to "help: about", then "edit: cut", then "edit: paste" file saves won't work. That's not likely to be caught because that's an odd combination...until you've got somebody checking to see if they need an upgrade in the middle of typing a document.

Re:but HOW?

[Mike Schiraldi]

Mozilla is an experimental browser. It's not even meant for end users -- that's right, the intent is that end user browsers (Netscape, Galeon, etc) will be built from Mozilla.

It's got bugs. If you want to sacrifice new features in exchange for fewer bugs, download the latest Mozilla 1.0.x release.

Re:but HOW?

[caillon]

Long story short, a patch got checked in on the trunk before we branched, it caused problems, we noticed it and asked that it got backed out on both the trunk and the 1.2 branch. It got backed out OK on the trunk, but somehow it didn't get fully backed out on the branch...

From the bug: "It looks like the 1.2-branch backout was done incorrectly. The 9 was not changed to an 8."

Re:but HOW?

[IronyChef]

...so perhaps a better SCM system is called for?

Re:but HOW?

[Timesprout]

Without wishing to troll why is it available to the public at large than and used as a main browser by so many subscribers to this site ?

More seriously though I think this bug demonstrates that the differences between open and closed source development may not be as great as some would suggest. This is one of those embarassing situations where the release has highly visible bugs discovered by the end users/client after release. High visibility stuff like this does nothing to engender end user confidence and may in fact be more "damaging" than a less visible but more serious security issue.

That said mozilla is still a cool browser and I look forward to many more stable releases.

Re:but HOW?

[caillon]

No. The patch was a 1 liner. patch -R would have either reverted it completely or not at all. I would imagine that the file in question was hand edited. The eHTMLTag_userdefined portion was removed but the 9 was not changed back to an 8.

FWIW, the patch was:

RCS file: /cvsroot/mozilla/htmlparser/src/nsElementTable.cpp ,v
retrieving revision 3.140
diff -r3.140 nsElementTable.cpp
102c102
< TagList gHeadKids={8,{eHTMLTag_base,eHTMLTag_bgsound,eHTML Tag_link,eHTMLTag_meta,eHTMLTag_script,eHTMLTag_st yle,eHTMLTag_title,eHTMLTag_noembed}};
---
> TagList gHeadKids={9,{eHTMLTag_base,eHTMLTag_bgsound,eHTML Tag_link,eHTMLTag_meta,eHTMLTag_script,eHTMLTag_st yle,eHTMLTag_title,eHTMLTag_noembed,eHTMLTag_userd efined}};

Re:but HOW?

[RAMMS EIN]

``HOW exactly do big bugs like this get into final releases?''
Because they are not big bugs. There are very few sites who use this functionality (few sites use DHTML - and for good reason, because it is a compatibility nightmare). The fewer sites use a feature, the less the chance bugs in it will be discovered. Although this bug looks fairly stupid to me, I can perfectly understand how it got in a release. Large and complex projects are bound to have glitches like this, it happens.

Re:but HOW?

[juhaz]

Without wishing to troll why is it available to the public at large than and used as a main browser by so many subscribers to this site ?.

It is available to the public so that people who WANT knowingly run it may do so and help squash bugs early so that they don't show up in those actual "end user" browsers. Mozilla.org pages quite clearly state that Mozilla.org provides binaries for testing and feedback.

And what comes to subscribers of this site... well, most of them are not exactly your everyday end-users, and they do know that Mozilla is one damn cool piece of software, even if it is in theory only for testing. Besides, many of us probably DO use those other, mozilla-derived browsers. I prefer Galeon, Phoenix seems to be getting much users lately... and so on.

Of course, there's also that not much alternatives have emerged... some people want the full-blown "communication suite" - projects like Phoenix and Galeon are browser only, only Mozilla based I've ever heard of is Netscape, but their releases are so few and far between that there are almost always some neat things that moz has that aren't yet updated into ns.

Re:but HOW?

[DrXym]

Bugs like this get into final releases, because Mozilla releases are branched straight off the trunk and while they are reasonably tested, they do not receive anything like the amount of testing that a stable Netscape release gets. In other words, from time to time, a milestone release is going to contain a bug that might have been caught with more time and QA. Presumably in this case, Mozilla 1.3 is far enough away and the regression serious enough that they decided to pull 1.2 and release a fixed version.

Therefore the choice as always is use Mozilla if you want new features but run the risk of more bugs, or Netscape if you want ultra stable but with commercial stuff added. Of course the more eyeballs testing betas and nightlies, the more likely bugs like this won't happen in future.

Re:but HOW?

[Czernobog]

True, I never bother with nightlies.
What pisses me off though is that every time I want to submit a bug/crash with the talkback thingy, all my attempts fail.
And no, I don't have a firewall or weird/custom proxy settings (my ISP's settings, that is).

Re:but HOW?

[tshak]

What I'd like to know (and this is NOT meant as a flame any way, I love mozilla), is HOW exactly do big bugs like this get into final releases?

Because you see with OSS there's way more eyeballs looking at the code.... oh, nevermind.

Re:but HOW?

[Lucas Membrane]

Why in the world is there a constant 8 or 9 in the code? We knew back in 1975 that this was evil. The only constants allowed in production code were zero, one, two, and one-half. All other constants were considered obscure by nature and had to be given explanatory names, eg NumberOfBitsPerByte, NumberOfPlayersInABaseballLineup. How can a big project not be fubarted with this kind of coding? Is this project written by young guys with enormous mental capacity who rely on their ability to remember the arcana of code values without fail? If so, expect problems later.

Re:but HOW?

[Briareos]

Why in the world is there a constant 8 or 9 in the code?

Maybe because it's the number of items in the array that's the only other member of the TagList, and defining a constant for this would be pretty senseless?

(The patch added a member to gHeadKids' array, so the counter had to be bumped up by one. If they removed that extra member, but forgot to reduce it by one that would probably give you a nasty random pointer at the end of the list...)

np: Populous - Ext. Rhodes Bank

Re:but HOW?

[treat]

Maybe because it's the number of items in the array that's the only other member of the TagList, and defining a constant for this would be pretty senseless?

This sounds like a problem that would never have occurred if this software were written in Java.

(Of course, imagine the pain if Mozilla were 10 time slower)

Re:but HOW?

[kscguru]

And honestly, this "experimental" browser does better than anything else I've used (for Windows, for free...). Tabbed browsing, stability, better popup control, with quicklaunch it sometimes loads FASTER than IE, and I actually trust the security...

Been happily using Mozilla since 0.9.7, now on 1.1. I'll gladly send TalkBack reports or whatever else back just because this browser WORKS. I'd happily beta-test, but I need a working browser for school and can't afford to deal with serious bugs or spend time installing/reverting.

I'll use whatever browser works best for me. And right now the best is this "experimental, under development" browser. Kudos to the Mozilla team - this browser is a masterpiece.

Re:but HOW?

[Lucas Membrane]

it's the number of items in the array that's the only other member of the TagList, and defining a constant for this would be pretty senseless.

Senseless? Preventing a serious bug in released code is senseless? Actually, you are probably right about 'senseless', but it is only senseless in the context, and the context that the programmers created is not propitious for rock-solid code

Any acerbic advocate of any favorite advanced programming language, no doubt even the programming language actually used to create this bug, could write a long and vitriolic article about how this bug should not and probably would not occur if the programmers had used the standards of good practice normally practiced with the favorite advanced language or enforced by its typical compiler.

It is something of a hint that the Mozilla code is not up to industrial strength when this occurs to showstop a release. Of course, I'm not saying that any of the competitors do any better, but if you want to do better, you have to do it better.

Re:but HOW?

[jonadab]

> why is it available to the public at large then

For testing purposes. Testing is highly parallelisable.

> and used as a main browser by so many subscribers to this site

Because this parallelised-testing model, with everyone having nearly
complete access to the bug database, has been so effective that
bleeding-edge nightly releases of Mozilla these days are usually
more stable than the final/gamma end-user releases of most other
browsers.

Try Netscape for a while: you'll find that most of the bugs are in
the commercial extensions (AIM and such); the open-source parts that
were tested in Mozilla first are more solid. This isn't because
more bugs were _introduced_ in the commercial extensions (plenty
of bugs were introduced in the open code too), but because there
were fewer testers, so fewer of the bugs were found and fixed.

Mozilla 1.0.1 is the most rock-solid browser I've ever seen. Yes,
it _can_ be made to crash, but it happens far less often than in
other browsers and usually involves esoteric conditions such as
printing client-side-dynamic content (e.g., plugins or pages with
a lot of active scripting).

I was hoping 1.2 would surpass it in stability (1.1 did not), but
it looks like we're waiting for at least 1.2.1 for that.

Re:but HOW?

[sholden]

Maybe because it's the number of items in the array that's the only other member of the TagList, and defining a constant for this would be pretty senseless?

Computers are far better at counting things than people.

It is pure madness to not write the code so that the compiler knows the number of items in the array, and stores them away in a conveniant macro.

After all for a standard array it's as simple as

WhateverType array[] = {INIT_LIST};
#define array_SIZE sizeof(array)/sizeof(*array)

Of course if you need access to the length outside the compilation unit with the definition, then make it an extern const int instead of a macro, or if it's C++ make it a const int anyway...

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[trotski]

IT does? Coulda fooled me, maybe I'm an idiot (quite likely actually) but I just spent a while looking throught all of the IE options (I use win2k, I don't know which version of IE that would give me) and I wasn't able to find anything to turn pop ups off... tell you what, let me know how to do it, and perhaps I'll stop using mozilla. And no RTFM bullshit either, after all... I am lazy.

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Anonymous Coward]

Either you're a very convincing troll or extremely stupid.

I'll take my Gentoo any day over Microsoft's "Give me root access to your computer" EULAs any day. And I would take it even if all I could use was a command line and type monologues for fun.

Tabbed browsing bites.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? I like to maximize my monitor area. I like getting rid off as many menus, sliders, borders, etc. All tabbed browsing does is put more non-page crap on the screen. Gimme full screen windows, each on their separate page. I have a big monitor, I want to use it!

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Anonymous Coward]

umm...
Its not a security problem!
jeez

My 2 cents

[jchawk]

I use mozilla all the time, and I'd be more interested in them fixing the bug in mozilla that causes it close when doing searches on ebay.

I constantly have to open another browser, in order to use ebay.

Anyone else have this problem?

Re:My 2 cents

[Luxury P. Yacht]

Yep! Happened all the time when I used v1.1. It was a well known bug. It looks like it might be fixed in v1.2- I've pounded on eBay with no problems so far. Have you tried v1.2 yet?

Re:My 2 cents

[Anonymous Coward]

nope I havent had that problem at all... under linux and Windows 2000 (if you're using XP... i have to ask.... WHY???)

your system might have a old or wierd release.

So what?

[Mourgos]

So what if Mozilla makes ONE buggy release? It'll get corrected, cause it's open source.
M$ always makes buggy releases and never gets them corrected. I don't see a post on slashdot about the newest IE exploit/bug/etc.

I hope windows don't crash when I hit the submit button.

arrrrggghhhh

[vsync64]

This really isn't fair. From the end of my most recent log entry:

I'm extremely upset. 8 hours ago I downloaded Mozilla 1.2b for Win32 for Joie's parents' computer. It looks like they released 1.2 while I was downloading 1.2b. This isn't the first time a fresh download of mine has been obsoleted, but never this quickly.

So today I downloaded 1.2. This is quite upsetting.

Anyway, in order to save Bugzilla the crush, I'm pasting the bug report (#182500) here. It seems that the main issues are broken user-defined XML tags, broken document.write(), and checkins to the 1.2 branch missing in the release.

This is a meta-bug whose dependencies will be problems caused by the incorrect backout described in bug 167493 comment 21. Some of these bugs have been reported as Windows-only, but I've also been able to reproduce them on a gcc 3.2.1 Linux build with -O2.

------- Additional Comment #1 From David Baron 2002-11-28 07:38 -------
I've corrected the backout on the 1.2 branch (although I admit I only tested the change on the trunk, but I did the backout by backing out the backout with cvs up -j -j and then backing out the original checkin the same way). It remains to be seen what (if anything) we'll do with the 1.2 release.

------- Additional Comment #2 From Malcolm Rowe 2002-11-28 08:26 -------
We may have to do something with the 1.2 branch anyway. Some of the checkins to the 1.2 branch disappeared from the 1.2 release - see bug 182506.

------- Additional Comment #3 From David Baron 2002-11-28 09:07 -------
I think I've gone through all the Browser bugs filed between the 1.2 release and now (mostly by just skimming bug summaries), and added all the relevant dependencies. However, bug 182317 and bug 182433 are probably also dependencies of this bug, but I didn't add them since I'm not sure.

------- Additional Comment #4 From Phil Schwartau 2002-11-28 13:21 -------
Note I've added this bug as a dependency:

bug 182253, "document.write() eats initial characters in 1.2"

It explains why so many sites with DHTML menus are being hit by the current bug. The sites are using document.write() to create them -

------- Additional Comment #5 From Dawn Endico 2002-11-29 16:50 -------
I removed links to 1.2 from the releases page and the home page, and announced the release of 1.2.1 when we have a correct tag and new builds. Since this happened on a 4 day holiday weekend the new release may not happen till Monday.

------- Additional Comment #6 From Bryan 2002-11-29 17:28 -------
Hi,
Yes I did see it happen in that relase but somebody beated me to the punch. Are you giong to remove it form the ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/realses page or you going to keep it there for people to download and test this problem. IF you can e-mail me wiht that info that will be great I will like to see still on there for the people who want to take risks like me.

------- Additional Comment #7 From Asa Dotzler 2002-11-29 20:10 -------
We're not talking about a security exploit or even major dataloss here. I see no need to re-write history. The 1.2 release will stay where it is.

This bug is likely to see some traffic. I'm taking this oportunity to ask all of you folks that read about this bug at mozillazine or slashdot or wherever to not comment. Unless you're actually working on this problem your comments will only get in the way. Thanks.

[Emphasis mine.]

Re:arrrrggghhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't comment! Hide the Truth! Isn't this Mozilla, not Internet Explorer??

Re:arrrrggghhhh

[FrozedSolid]

It's funny. I always try to download a version behind when the release is younger than a week old. I don't encourage others to do it, since then it defeats the whole purpose of others getting killed by the bugs for me but usually, i notice that a lot of new release software ends up with some major bug. It's not really mozilla's fault, accidents happen, everyone knows that bug-free software is pretty much an impossible utopian ideal. But waiting generally works. Especially with critical stuff. I remember I almost upgraded to the latest kernel, the one that had the reiserfs bug that corrupted filesystems. Man was I happy I waited...

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[fucksl4shd0t]

Maybe using the Mozilla ActiveX control will do it, I don't know.

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is the mozilla activex control? It sounds like an attempt to turn IE into a real browser, but there are limits to how shiny you can make shit by polishing it.

Re:Mozilla bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to Opera?

Someone please explain why...

[Blaede]

...when I do an image search on Google, I get less results when using Mozilla as opposed to using IE5 (using the same exact search terms)? I'm not trying to start something, just something I noticed and wondered if I had a setting wrong on Mozilla or something.

Re:Someone please explain why...

[DgMeat]

You have most likely the Google safesearch on. A search for "nude" (totally randomly chosen ) generated 13,500 hits with the safesearch on, 135,000 with safesearch off. Turn it on on http://www.google.com/preferences

Re:Someone please explain why...

[Anonymous Coward]

check your preferences. You can specify how many you want returned.

Re:Someone please explain why...

[Russellkhan]

I had never noticed any difference at all (I've mostly stopped using IE since downloaing Mozilla), but I just ran a test search thinking it was kinda crazy that Google would give any sort of different results from different browsers.

The results for search terms chosen randomly, first two words that came to my mind "fire plane" (terms entered without quotes):

IE 5.5:
1,180 images found
URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=fire+plane&ie=UT F-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search

Mozilla 1.2:
2090 images found
URL: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=lang_en&i e=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&q=fire+plane&btnG=Google +Search

So, just to take the comparison a bit further I copied & pasted the URL from IE into Mozilla, where it retruned 2090 results again. Then I copied the URL from Mozilla (the one generated by searching Google with Mozilla, not the one I had just plugged into it from IE) and pasted it into IE which got 2090 images again.

That's all I've got, maybe there's enough info there for someone smarter than me to figure out wtf is causing the different results here, but I have no clue.

Re:Someone please explain why...

[matthewp]

You've got 'safe search', which excludes 'unsuitable' results, enabled on IE and disabled on Mozilla. I believe Google sets a cookie, which explains why the same URL returns different results on each browser.

The 'Mozilla' URL you quoted explicitly turns 'safe search' off ('&safe=off'), so you get all the results when you paste it into IE.

Google offers a preferences page, which allows you to decide whether you want to use 'safe search' and various other options by default.

Re:Someone please explain why...

[Russellkhan]

Ahh, of course. I guess my prefs cookie for IE has run out in the time since I started using Mozilla as my default browser.

1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[oddityfds]

I think the basic problem is that 1.0.1 and 1.1 works so well that few people bothered to test the 1.2 alpha and beta. Hence serious bugs showing up in the release.

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[fucksl4shd0t]

I'll second that. I'm running 1.1 with no problems, and I wasn't at all interested in 1.2. I decided to wait at least until 1.6 or higher, unless something really kick-ass got added before then.

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[Querty]

That's actually not entirely true.

One of the websites I helped build is broken in 1.2 (just noticed it yesterday). This was working fine in 1.2b, as well as in a homebuilt CVS version somewhere in the cycle leading up to 1.2.

I think a "Release Candidate" should have been put out, which when tested for a while should have become 1.2 final without any further changes.

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[Anonymous Coward]

1.2 has Bayesian spam-filters, every slashdotter's wet dream. Isn't that worth the upgrade?

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[oddityfds]

One of the websites I helped build is broken in 1.2 (just noticed it yesterday). This was working fine in 1.2b, as well as in a homebuilt CVS version somewhere in the cycle leading up to 1.2.

I see... Mod parent up and mod parent.parent down.

I think a "Release Candidate" should have been put out, which when tested for a while should have become 1.2 final without any further changes.

If 1.2 had been called 1.2rc1 and had been released as 1.2, it would still have had this bug. :-)

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not sure that's entirely true. My theory is that, for all the Moz team's usually excellent efforts, 1.2b was awful and they should have released a 1.2c (if only, as others have suggested, as a "release candidate"). I downloaded 1.2b myself, intending to test out some fixes in the XSLT stuff I'd been waiting for. Unfortunately, it failed to render even basic pages properly several times in a typical browsing session, and I uninstalled it and reverted to 1.1 within an hour.

Still more unfortunately, I didn't have any useful concrete information to send them, and even if I had, I don't have anything set-up to use Bugzilla. It would be really helpful if there were a "report bug" menu option in test releases of Moz that did all of that for you, rather than expecting Joe Average User to (a) know Bugzilla exists and (b) take the time to use it. Just MHO, of course. (If there is one and I've just never found it, someone please supply a link!)

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[Wakkow]

I think a "Release Candidate" should have been put out, which when tested for a while should have become 1.2 final without any further changes.

That's what the nightly builds are for.

Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!

[Dave2 Wickham]

If you're going to troll, at least do some research... That's in Moz 1.3.

Don't click on Parent : GOATSE.CX LINK MOD DOWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

SEE SUBJECT

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[fucksl4shd0t]

It was really a proof of concept, but check out their embedding page. Let me see if I can digu up a link....

Here

Patching Mozilla 1.2 instead of full download?

[Anonymous Bullard]

It's only a surface wound. Really, I'm alright, I just need a bandaid...

Re:Patching Mozilla 1.2 instead of full download?

[beebware]

Now this is one of the advantages IE has over Mozilla. A problem/bug is discovered in IE and Microsoft release a little (around 500k) patch for it: a problem/bug in Mozilla and you've got to redownload the entire thing again (several Mb).

Re:Don't click on Parent : GOATSE.CX LINK MOD DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Eejit. That link wasn't even offensive. Just plain ordinary pr0n with a pretty girl. It was a (Score: -1, failed troll, offtopic).

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[Spy Hunter]

If this were an IE bug, you'd never hear the end of it.

No, if this were an IE bug, sites would have been designed around it in the first place and no one would ever notice except for the web designers.

Re:A brand new business-model?

[Anonymous Coward]

and the recursion see recursion definition is still funny? man, that joke is old and it wants to retire

So somebody found a bug shortly before release

[friday2k]

and in other news: this is what IBM, Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, etc. etc. find through testing every day. They find some, they miss some. Somebody found one in Mozilla. Why is this news?

Re:So somebody found a bug shortly before release

[khuber]

This is news because it was severe enough to back out of the release.

It's like an automotive recall or toy choking hazard:
DHTML could explode and make you go blind if you keep using Mozilla 1.2. Several Tripod users and viewers of garish movie promo sites have already sustained serious mental frustration. We are working with local authorities to prevent riots.

-Kevin

Re:So somebody found a bug shortly before release

[Anonymous Coward]

A bug in IE is expected... So its not real news... A bug in mozilla that requires a non beta release to be pulled IS news...

Its kind of like finding out that IE6.02 ended up with code from before IE5.0. Backing out of an IE install is almost impossible. With Mozilla its easy to go to a previous version till the fixed is released....[so in this analogy, waiting till IE6.03]

Pardon?

[Shade, The]

This was a pretty major(ish) bug (though not security related, like the majority of IE's) that they found in a major release. In short, the Mozilla crew, programming gurus though they may be, screwed up.

They don't make excuses. They've pulled the browser and are working on an update. Please don't make excuses for them.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have a copy of IE6 and Windows 9x/Millenium?

If you do, try hitting this page:

http://jmorton.ezrez.com/downloads/st.php

See the problem? No matter how much memory you have, it uses it all. Pretty simply page - 100 elements. As far as I know, this affects every version of IE running under Windows 9x. Pretty major bug if you ask me, but Microsoft refuses to fix it:)

Re:Pardon?

[Mnemia]

That page isn't too kind to Mozilla either; it increased Moz's memory usage from 26M to 100M using 1.2beta on Linux. But no crashes, and no real slowdown because I have more than enough memory for that.

Re:Pardon?

[marauder404]

My IE 6.0 on Windows XP grew by 21 MB while trying to process that page. It took a few seconds, but got it done. On Opera 7.0, it grew from 40 MB. It did get it done faster, but it took up twice as much memory. Maybe you're having problems, but with this silly example of a "simple page" and with non-universally reproducible results, I don't think you have a case. Besides, that page isn't even HTML compliant.

Re:Pardon?

[gotw]

Indeed, this bug means that it's impossible to moderate using win 9x and IE. (Let's see the smart arse replies to that one)

Re:Pardon?

[Blkdeath]

See the problem? No matter how much memory you have, it uses it all. Pretty simply page - 100 elements. As far as I know, this affects every version of IE running under Windows 9x. Pretty major bug if you ask me, but Microsoft refuses to fix it:)

I have to say, wow. Phoenix got bit by this page, too. Regular memory usage of around 30-40MB (quite large for a 'scaled down Mozilla', but I digress) jumped significantly;

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
26035 blackdea 14 0 85464 81M 12564 S 7.0 32.4 2:10 phoenix-bin

Mind sending me that PHP file? :)

Re:lalaa

[jeti]

Mozilla is 100% fine as a browser for end users.
I guess this is a kind of disclainmer saying:
Don't expect any official support.

Re:Mozilla bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not open source. End of story.

Why?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Why is a bug in IE news?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't talk shit. Minor IE bugs don't get front page news. The "hey, since bit of code I've been sent... I think I'll run it without telling anyone" IE bugs do.

Heh...

[Cl1mh4224rd]

[...] just install Windows and click "Windows Update".

...and wait two months for the fix to be posted. ...or two months after you've already been slammed by the "feature".

Meanwhile, Mozilla users need only wait a couple weeks, if that, for their fix. :)

Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser

The points about spin have already been covered, so can I ask how many banking sites you have tried to use recently?

Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).

Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows. The Mozilla-on-remote-X bug is so longstanding that there is now a lobbying campaign to get it fixed...

So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet, or if it worked over a network.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[marmoset]

Try the "Test Styles" bookmarklet from this page. It's really slick -- it lets you dynamically make changes in the stylesheet on the page you are viewing. You have to temporarily toggle off popup blocking for it to work, since it pops up a new window for typing in the changes.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Spirilis]

Mozilla-on-remote-X? I use that frequently (well, X11 Forwarding on SSH) to view web pages from my P166 laptop, running mozilla on my Athlon 900 nearby. Works like a charm.
I do recall some sites locking up with it, like any sites with fast animated GIFs...

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

There is a particular issue with the flash plugin over X. I don't like flash, but since it is on so many sites now, often on the first page, the result of this bug is to make quite a lot of the Internet inaccessible.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Blkdeath]

Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).

Mind sharing a URL? I've got a minimum font size of 13 configured (my eyes, well, suck. :/ ) and I haven't had many problems. ATI's site used to be horrendous in that regard (I swear they were using 2pt fonts!) but now the web is readable.

BTW - a lot of the sites that won't work with Mozilla are in such a state due to retarded webmasters who do browser-checks. For whatever reason, Sprint Canada has decided that "Netscape 7 is not supported", whereas Netscape Communicator is. Wait - scratch that. I seem to be able to browse their entire site using Phoenix and Mozilla 1.2. Ok, so they've fixed themselves.

If you don't like the fact that a site doesn't work in a standards-compliant browser like Mozilla, complain to the webmaster not Slashdot.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

Mind sharing a URL?

I don't know... isn't that dangerous nowadays? Oh, OK, since it's you: www.interieur.gouv.fr. The page as is comes out minute, the 'printable' version is no better, but the text only one (which still has images, err...) seems to work OK. I had another one the other day where Mozilla printed it as light grey on white, and konqueror printed it with the side bars on top of the text.

Webmaster, not slashdot

Sure, but when people keep saying that Mozilla is the world's greatest browser, I think that the fact it doesn't work with a lot of sites (even if it is the webmasters' fault) is relevant.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Blkdeath]

www.interieur.gouv.fr [interieur.gouv.fr]. The page as is comes out minute, the 'printable' version is no better, but the text only one (which still has images, err...) seems to work OK.

Looks good to me (except that I can't understand French). You might want to try that 'minimum font size' setting (you'll find it in Edit -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts -> Minimum font size. Mine's set to 12, not 13 as I'd thought, and the page you referenced and all of its sub-pages look fine.

Sure, but when people keep saying that Mozilla is the world's greatest browser, I think that the fact it doesn't work with a lot of sites (even if it is the webmasters' fault) is relevant.

Relevant, yes. Mozilla's fault, not in the slightest. If sites want to block by browser version, only allow Internet Explorer, or give different pages according to browser version that's their problem and one they should be made aware of. If your local mechanic only serviced GM cars - would you write angry letters about Ford, or would you complain to him and proceed to take your business elsewhere?

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[asa]

There is a particular issue with the flash plugin over X. I don't like flash, but since it is on so many sites now, often on the first page, the result of this bug is to make quite a lot of the Internet inaccessible.
Get the Flash 6 plugin. Macromedia has fixed the hang and crash over x-remote and not only that but the problem with it blocking or being blocked by an audio device has been fixed.

--Asa

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[rabidcow]

Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).

Did you try the little box at the bottom of the fonts section of the preferences labelled "minimum font size"? I would, but you don't give any references, so you're not really helping at all.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks fine to me too.

In fact, holding ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel adjusts font size for me. So if I /were/ Stewart Little, I could get it down to 4 pt font easily. But by default it's no smaller than any other page I browse at.

-Scott

Phoenix 0.4
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021029 Phoenix/0.4

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

The reference is here. I must admit I'm touched by all these offers of help: I only mentioned it to make a general point...

(Pause to look for little box)

Well, I set it to 10pt, and what I got is nearer 7pt, but it is a lot more readable than the last version, and it does fill up the page (the mini version was less than 4" across. Why?) Thanks for the various suggestions.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Also use CTRL+ and CTRL- to push the font up or down while browsing. Very handy.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[WhiteKnight07]

Edit -> Prefrences -> Aperance -> Fonts -> Minimum Font Size

Should take care of the problem with that French site.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[JourneymanMereel]

I really don't see any problems... the only text that is hard to see (I won't say read, 'cause I can't read any of it :) is the text they put in images... hardly Mozilla's fault. And even though the font was easily big enough to be seen, hitting ^+ made it bigger (except for the stuff in images, of course).

I even went so far as to load the page in IE and didn't notice any difference.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[gid]

Interestingly enough, I don't have a minimum font size set, and I can read everything on the page just fine. Although some of the fonts are rather small. I'm using the MS Arial truetype font w/ antialiasing.

Just in case your curious I took a quick screenshot.

Fonts always used to sucking in mozilla until I started using Arial, if you don't have arial installed, I'd seriously try to investigate how to do it with your distribution. If you can't figure out how, just reply to this with your distrubution and I'll try to help you out.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

The problem was with printed output. The screen rendering is OK.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[rabidcow]

The reference is here [interieur.gouv.fr]. I must admit I'm touched by all these offers of help: I only mentioned it to make a general point...

Heh, that's what happens when you get modded up, people offer to help in order to destroy each of your examples until you're left with a swiss-cheese argument. :)

In any case, I get the same results as gid: no minimum font size, all's fine. Strange.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

I'd be delighted to have my argument reduced to swiss cheese if it meant my customers could live with my choice of browser. I'm alraedy resigned to using W2K TS to offer clients a WP that doesn't randomly throw away half their CV, as has happened twice this week with Star Office .doc filters, but I really don't want to have to run IE as well :-(

As mentioned in several other postings, it wasn't the screen rendering but the printing that caused the problem, and setting the minimum font size to 10pt gets me 7pt or so text on paper, which is bizarre but quite acceptable.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[JourneymanMereel]

Doh, I must have missed that detail somehow. I rarely print pages, but they few times I've tried from IE I couldn't quite get it to work the way I wanted it to (I was tring to do some from a self-generated HTML page in a VB app by embeding IE in it and it wasn't a pleasent expierence).

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Swaffs]

I've only tried two banking sites recently with Mozilla, my credit union's and the one for my Mastercard, both of which have always worked fine with Mozilla. Maybe you need to find a bank that supports you.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Edit->Preferences, then set 'minimum font size' to something reasonable. I didn't know how to do that and it took me less than 30 seconds to figure out. If it took you 30 minutes, then you should consider moving to Lancaster, PA and learning to build barns.

Re:Great browser for half the Internet

[melonman]

I was useful for a time, now I'm a disposable commidity.

Yes, except that

1. My bank did work with Mozilla, and then one day they redid their system and it didn't any more, so for how long will the new bank site work for, and
2. That argument doesn't really wash with my walk-in customers, they are more likely to find another cybercafe than another bank

This perennial /. solution of 'take your business elsewhere' just isn't viable for a lot of people a lot of the time.

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[KewlPC]

Is it just me, or have there have been an awful lot of "Just switch to Windows so you can use Windows Update! It's so easy to upgrade!" and "Upgrading Windows is easy! You just have to download the latest service pack!" posts lately? Methinks Microsoft is planting people (again).

Nevermind that Mozilla took a whopping 3 minutes to install once I had downloaded it, and required nothing more from me than to make a new directory and unpack the tarball. I kept waiting for the part where it would be hard to install (all the Windows fanboys keep telling me installing anything on Linux is next to impossible), but it never came. Too bad about the DHTML bug, though.

Composer & scripting issues.

[Anonymous Coward]

As Mozilla issues go, this has got to be one of the more annoying ones, but apparently nobody wants to actively work on it. "Composer" is actually not a bad WYSIWYG html editor at all - it has alot of potential. But as long as it strips / corrupts PHP and other scripting code, it will never be very useful to anyone doing anything beyond the most trivial of web pages.

The Mozilla-dev folks need to wake up and realize that just about any web designer these days is using some degree of scripting.. Composer needs to at the very least ignore (and not corrupt) scripting blocks. Composer is quite an excellent html editor generally, but as long as it continues to act brain-damaged in regards to any unknown blocks it encounters, it is not going to be truly useful for anybody other than your Great Aunt Emma working on her Geocities homepage.

Right now, if you need PHP and still want to do your page design in Composer, you have only two options: (1) Every time you tweak the page in Composer, insert all your PHP by hand, or (2) Put your own "#PHPBlock1" tags in the html and have a script replace it with the neccessary PHP code later. Having to do either is annoying. Composer simply shouldn't mangle PHP blocks at all.

I'm pretty sure there's another outstanding bug regarding the fact that Composer cannot save 'fragments' - if you're merely designing a table or template to be generated via PHP, there is no way to have Mozilla save it as a fragment, without header tags etc. A bit of a nitpick, but really, how much effort would it take to code in a "Save as fragment" option?

Mozilla is quite an impressive accomplishment for open source, I really do think Mozilla smokes IE hands down these days.. but these Composer bugs should have been fixed long ago - not enough people care about this aspect of Mozilla. A little bit of work here could go a long ways towards undercutting commercial HTML editors in a big way.

Re:Composer & scripting issues.

[DrXym]

Personally I believe that bug is of extremely low importance. Any designer worth their salt wouldn't be using the HTML editor in Mozilla anyway since it doesn't support the kind of precision professional design - it is for end users. If you want something for PHP/ASP then you should a proper text editor with highlighting which doesn't molest or digest/regurgitate what you type before saving.

Re:Composer & scripting issues.

[Reziac]

Better yet, dig up the source for old AOLpress (still my HTML editor of choice) and update it to include current stuff. It knows enough to ignore elements it doesn't recognise, such as scripting or newer HTML structures.

Re:Composer & scripting issues.

[Paul Burney]

Right now, if you need PHP and still want to do your page design in Composer, you have only two options: (1) Every time you tweak the page in Composer, insert all your PHP by hand, or (2) Put your own "#PHPBlock1" tags in the html and have a script replace it with the neccessary PHP code later. Having to do either is annoying. Composer simply shouldn't mangle PHP blocks at all.

Actually, for PHP at least, there is a much easier workaround. Just code like this:

<script language="php"> echo 'Hello World!'; </script>

That format has been supported since at least PHP 3 and perhapes even PHP/FI. Annoying for just echoing a variable, but OK for larger scripts.

Re:Composer & scripting issues.

[Anonymous Coward]

And by your logic, Mozilla should never have been made in the first place, since other browsers already existed and worked. This is about what Mozilla could be, not what it currently is.

Composer is not a bad editor at all, and there is certainly no reason (other than the non-existant scripting support) that it can't support 'precision professional design'. It's simply a matter of people writing the code. I mean shit I don't want to edit my PHP in Composer - I just want Composer to tag it as 'php' and leave it alone.

Re:Composer & scripting issues.

[DrXym]

You're not listening. The Mozilla editor chews up the original HTML and parses it into a DOM and then spits out the DOM reconstituted as text. PHP markup is invalid content and will be parsed out. Any PHP designer worth their salt would stick with an HTML text editor that did not do this. A proper editor for professional server side content might do stuff such as highlighting or folding, but the text you type is the text that is saved. It would never run it through a DOM parser except for validation purposes.

The editor, XML/HTML parser and HTML/XML to text converters would all have to be radically reworked to support nonstandard markup.

Perhaps you would be better served by asking the PHP people to produce XML compliant markup because I don't see this bug being fixed any time soon, if ever. If you really want to see it fixed, then tag the bug helpwanted, or better yet supply a patch yourself.

Re:Composer & scripting issues.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a point.

<% ... %>

is of course an abomination, but XML processing instruction syntax

<?php ... ?>

most clearly expresses what's going on, it's valid HTML and supported by the DOM, yet Mozilla's parser just discards it.

<script type="php">

is a semi-reasonable workaround.

Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have Been

[cedars]

To follow links in this message you will need to copy and then paste them in the HTML bar since Bugzilla won't let /.ers through directly.

Usually I'm delighted to hear when Mozilla releases a new browser as, up until recently, Mozilla was my browser of choice. But when I heard about the Mozilla 1.2 release I was just disappointed.

The Mozilla team had been alerted to major bugs which only recently appeared in the browser like this one and some of these (the latter link also has the comment in which a few poeple suggest Mozilla 1.2 should be unreleased) and yet still the team proceeded with this release. I'm not pretending that it's everyone's experience, but certainly as far as my own experience, Mozilla 1.2 is the first Mozilla browser to step further backwards than forwards - and I know I'm not the only one who thinks that. IMHO, it's a shame that such a great browser which was really beginning to show its potential had to make such a disappointing release. And for all that, I have to wonder what were the critical changes that led to all the aforementioned bugs (the implementation of type ahead searching!?!).

It's too late for me, I've stopped using Mozilla on my Mac (still using the Gecko-based Chimera though) and have halted upgrades of it on my PC, so I guess all there is to say is better luck next time and hopefully we'll be fortunate enough to never see a release as bad as this one ever again.

move along, nothing to see...

[Hudjakov]

Again the fix is on the way even before I noticed the bug.
I just love open source software.

Re:Mozilla bugs

[21mhz]

Maybe, this is the time for you to stop posting again and again about Microsoft ads on Slashdot? It was funny only for the first time. I'm tired of trolls like you in pursuit of easy karma. My moderation will be appropriate, whether you have seen the fucking ad or not.

Regression Tests

[Carnage4Life]

Any professional software development project has regression test suites that are meant to ensure that thinks like patches or checkins do not break previously working functionality. It's one thing for a patch to break some esoteric edge case such as your go to "help: about", then "edit: cut", then "edit: paste" file saves won't work and another for a core scenario to stop working. The former is something that is too expensive to test for and probably will be missed while the latter is something that should be caught.

However, without more details as to what kinds of DHTML is broken by Mozilla one cannot tell if this is an obvious scenario that should have been regression tested (does

window.open()

work?) or an edge case.

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it does not. Neither does 5.x. More precisely they do not permit you to disable popups without disabling javascript completely. Don't know about 6.x as it is not installed on any of our 1200+ nt4 and w2k boxes (compatability problems with several internal IIS sites; go figure).

Btw, Mozilla use in this org is growing. Reasons I hear include:

1. ability to disable popups without the 3rd party app required to do so on IE 5.50,
2. *major* speed increase compared to IE,
3. doesn't hang nearly as often as IE (never on me vs 4+ times daily for IE),
4. tabbed browsing,
5. miscellany others (themes, "more netscape-like", "more opera-like", more control via preferences, etc)

Worth noting that many try it at home first because of reason #1 then also install and use it at work primarily because of reasone #2. Or so they tell me.

Re:Pardon? ... Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

See the problem? No matter how much memory you have, it uses it all. Pretty simply page - 100 elements.

Scuse me? While I don't stand on defense of MS or IE, nor I haven't tried to open it with IE/Win9x, I can see the page is not simple.

The page has 100 drop-down menus, each of them has 1000 entries! ... and the whole page is 2+ MB of html. Phoenix eat up quite some of CPU time (and RAM) on my machine. This is caused, I guess, by the render-as-you-download feature both of gecko and IE6 ...

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[SpiderErrol]

$ apt-get upgrade
Mozilla upgraded. What's the problem?

If you really wanted you could add it to the menus and call it "Linux Update".

I use apt-get for RPMs http://freshrpms.net/apt/

Using a basic RedHat installation, you can use up2date as soon as RedHat provide the next version. Or just download and rpm -Uvh the RPMs directly from mozilla.

Maybe more difficult if you have trouble using a keyboard, but you get the option to use NutScrape, Opera, Lynx, or many other browsers if you prefer.

https/cookie problems

[hughk]

Mozilla's most serious bug is a show stopper for eCommerce and that is it sometimes refuses to allow access to cookies under https.

An important reason to use Mozilla is security. An important concern for anyone trying eCommerce on the web is security. eCommerce web sites often use cookies and they should use https.

The bug is reported in Bugzilla but it appears that some people can circumvent this with script preferences. Regrettably I can't. See also the slashdot thread from the original 1.2 announcement here.

I have kept my 1.1 installation under Linux and still have IE under Win 2K.

Re:https/cookie problems

[jon787]

Its common to use javascript to detect if cookies are enabled. If you disable the ability of javascript to do cookies it can falsely report that they are disabled. Luckily most sites don't really use javascript to read/write cookies, they only use it to check if they are enabled.

Re:https/cookie problems

[hughk]

Regrettably in this case, access by scripts is enabled (as recommended), but it still doesn't work.

SP1?

[famazza]

Maybe they should start releasing SPs!

Re:Thats why

[Anonymous Coward]

kde==lemonparty.org.

That is all.

great!

[abase]

I'm glad I'm not the only who found a bug on a couple of sites that use DHTML. Other than that 1.2 seemed to be very nice to use. -Pat

Switched (for good)

[p_trinli]

On an on-topic note, I'm surprised that: A) this is considered a serious bug--who actually uses DHTML? and B) they're "recalling" the release, as it were. Tainted Mozilla meat.

Slightly off-topic, I finally switched for good to Mozilla, from IE. Even up until 1.1 final, there were at least five nagging bugs that made me use IE instead. I've been using 1.2 final for a few days now, and it's been rock solid. Getting popup windows in IE was driving me nuts.

Even more off-topic, I should probably try to switch to Linux for good, at least for work. I can't see Linux playing DVDs well (a la WinDVD) or having a wide selection of games any time soon.

Re:Switched (for good)

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux plays DVD's fine. Players like Xine (especially its excellent DVDNAV plugin) have support for all DVD features.

Re:Switched (for good)

[p_trinli]

Thanks for the info. I'd read that there might be trouble playing "encrypted" DVD. But I guess this isn't the case anymore?

Re:Switched (for good)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you install libdvdcss. While it's of questionable legality in the US, it's available from a gazillion sources because outside of the US there's nothing to stop a person from enjoying something he bought and that belongs to him.

Re:Switched (for good)

[juhaz]

Been working for a long time now.

And now that MPlayer supports (all the other major codecs are already there) Sorenson, and from what I can conclude about the latest news in the page, next release will probably do WMW8/9 as well, there aren't many video or audio files that Linux box couldn't play.

Games are still a valid point, wish that too would get better...

Re:Switched (for good)

[p_trinli]

Does she look anything like Nicole Kidman in Birthday Girl?

Re:Switched (for good)

[p_trinli]

Just curious, do you beat and then jizz, or the other way around? I find that beating and THEN jizzing works best. Jizzing first makes the beatee to slippery to receive a good pounding.

Re:Switched (for good)

[demon]

I can't see Linux playing DVDs well (a la WinDVD)

And why not? Xine is about to hit v1.0 (and now includes the dvdnav plugin in the mainline source - all you need is libdvdcss dropped in, and you even get DVD menus!), Mplayer is loved by many, and vlc works well too, from what I've heard. And hey, for games on Linux, there's always WineX - yeah, it doesn't work for every game, but a lot of them do work.

even more bad news

[Anonymous Coward]

now that the ill eagle kingdumb, has gone into "partnership" with yOUR US fuderal gov't., & the head billybuksucker over at the EU .conmission has defected (been bought by) fuddles, IT's LIEkly that the hobbyist dogooders et AL, will be deleted out of existence buy legislation. that's whoreabull. bugs? y'all need to be looking out for borgish alIEns firing terabyte sized litigatory spewsalvos, which are known to be fattoll.

yikes!@#$% go ahead & make lite of/ignore the hobbyist dogooders, if you will, but don't come crying to US when there's only one channel.

despite all this impending doom&gloom(tm), you can only imagine how excited we are at being listed as one of the "Top 10 Companies of 2002"(tm) , on the kingdumb's search thingy. good gnus is hard to hide sometimes.

wake up J..

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Puu]

Didn't Microsoft just inform us to not trust their content? There was a /. story a few days back...

Getting the updates from CVS

[caillon]

cvs up -r MOZILLA_1_2_BRANCH mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla/
gmake -f client.mk

Of course, that source is apt to change and is not necessarily the final 1.2.1 release, blah blah blah...

domestic terrorism

[Anonymous Coward]

not only are we going to need browsers that aren't hooked into fud.controll, what about the great state of MA?

will they be forced to secede from the perfect union, buy order of the softwar gangsters of the felonious evile kingdumb? stay tuned......

Why this bug is considered "serious"

[caillon]

I'm surprised that: A) this is considered a serious bug--who actually uses DHTML? and B) they're "recalling" the release, as it were. Tainted Mozilla meat.

Is it not enough reason that this is a bug? We should stop release for all bugs! But seriously....

A big reason is that DHTML is pretty much just a way of saying the W3C DOM and a few DOM Level 0 (no spec) APIs. This bug effectively cripples our standards support and I would definitely call that serious.

On top of that, with every release, there is a chance that some embeddor will want to base their product off of it. Embeddors generally like DHTML, and this would be a show stopper for them.

Re:Why this bug is considered "serious"

[p_trinli]

Thanks for the clarification.

OSS Bug Jumping vs Commercial

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really sad to see advocates of Windows/Microsoft jumping on every bug in OSS. Surely, we [OSS developers, users, lovers] criticize the downsides of commercial, closed-source software - but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we".
Surely we are all human and we make mistakes - commercial programmers do and those who do it in their spare time. I don't like closed-source either, but that is, because I can't go edit the source if theres something strange going on and maybe aid the developer hunting that down.

OSS is about something totally different, that is, _contribution_, fun and a good feeling to help others.
Most of us aren't elitists who cry "foul", when someone is actually using Windows, be it to play a game or use Excel (imho the only good programm of MS). But we don't hesitate to explain users when they are expiriencing the typical down-sides how this would be totally different with Linux/....

I have contributed to mplayer (that DVD-key-caching-patch) and it's a wonderful feeling to know that you made the life of other users as well better and easier. A friend of mine did the "devfs" support - and it's a great feeling knowing all you around the world enjoy this.

Re:OSS Bug Jumping vs Commercial

[Izeickl]

"It's really sad to see advocates of Windows/Microsoft jumping on every bug in OSS. Surely, we [OSS developers, users, lovers] criticize the downsides of commercial, closed-source software - but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we"."

Erm, is there another Slashdot site out there I dont know about?? I dont feel the need to post links to prove my point, one just has to go through Slashdot archives to prove otherwise to your argument.

Re:OSS Bug Jumping vs Commercial

[Alomex]

but we don't go party, if there is a bug announced and say "ha ha, you aren't any better than we".

Hello? For years when IE was still in its infancy, every bug was celebrated and shown as "proof of incompetency" on Microsoft's part.

Even now every time a severe bug is found in Microsoft /.ers celebrate like a bunch of immature teenagers, fogetting that OSS is not going to succeed because how bad the competition is, but because how good a given OSS is.

Troll much?

[NineNine]

this is considered a serious bug--who actually uses DHTML?

I'll give your troll a C. I'm sorry, but this is just too ridiculous to even be considered close to anything resembling intelligent thought. If you're going to troll, try to at least use some fact next time. But, the effort was there (more than a one line troll), which is why you didn't fail altogether. Work on your trolls and please try again.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[NineNine]

Call me nuts, but I'd rather have an actual working product that *may* have a security bug that happens if you happen to go to one of three web pages on the entire Net. DHTML working is very, very basic. No, actually, in this day and age, DHTML is essential. That's like releasing Apache and saying "ooops, sorry, serving web pages through port 80 isn't working. Minor bug. We'll re-release." You can't have a security problem until you at least have a working product.

Well if your going to say Mozilla's bad because of

[Anonymous Coward]

one bug for something thats always use incorrectly. The most I've seen DHTML used for is those stupid adds that move across your screen or those menus that automatically hide when your mouse isn't over them. Now watch how fast this will be fixed compared to a bug in MS Explorer its a blink of your eye, a twirl of your magic wand, a snap of your fingures, well your get the picture.

Idea

[mindstrm]

Can't you just hit a couple keys and flip to a user-specified stylesheet to undo bad formatting?

Oh wait! That's Opera.

Seriously useful feature that, for de-uglifying sites. Some sites get a bit harder to navigate (because the layout gets weird).. but it brings in an nice common denominator.

Re:Idea

[melonman]

Oh wait! That's Opera.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I really like Opera, especially when I look at my server memory usage. I just wish it didn't have such a freaky interface. Most of my customers won't touch it.

Re:Idea

[MattCohn.com]

Really then. Freaky? I'm assuming you meen the MDI layout. One which I can't get enough of. But alas, that is an option you can turn off. In fact, you can even distribute your own EXE to your 'customers' with your own links, icons, title, settings, and more over at the Opera Composer. If you wanna check it out, log in with 'Someone@someone.com' password 'someone'. VERY nice that composer.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[rseuhs]

Well if it were a minor bug, they wouldn't have pulled the release.

But I was using Moz1.2 since release without noticing any problems, so it's not the end of the world.

You can't have a security problem until you at least have a working product.

Moz1.0 and Moz1.1 are working products and they work great.

If you have such a thin skin about bugs, don't adopt early, use Moz1.1 for the next weeks until you go to Moz1.2. It's tested, stable and much more secure than any version of IE, what is your problem?

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[NineNine]

My problem in the parent post said, "well, at least it's not a security bug", as if security is more important than basic functionality. That's like saying, "Our computer product is *very* secure. It in no way, shape or form connects to any other electronic device of any kind." It's pretty silly.

Ook!

[thinkninja]

"Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled." Mozilla even blocks the /. effect!

Aww Crap!

[daveirl]

I've only got 56k and left it downloading Moz 1.2 last night when I went to sleep and now I wake up to see this! Damn!

Ah well. The joys of living in a country where broadband isn't available

Maybe One Day!

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[jacoplane]

It doesn't block popups. Which is why i use the proxomitron software with ie6. Mozilla is simply slower on WinXP than ie, which is why i use it. Also, I hate the way mozilla doesn't take the themes i apply to windows.

Arrrgh

[Czernobog]

I just finished downloading the damn thing.
And it worked fine throughout its 5 minute usage history.

Re:Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have B

[caillon]

"The Mozilla team had been alerted to major bugs which only recently appeared in the browser"

Sorry. Just because you filed a bug and posted a comment on another does not mean the Mozilla team was alerted. If there is a showstopper bug, filing it in Bugzilla does not guarantee it will get noticed if everyone is busy with final preparations for a release, and trying to get ready for the impending alpha. Don't forget that the people involved with Mozilla get tons of email from bugs, review requests, etc. as well as have real lives in which they eat turkey and go Christmas shopping. Bugs sometimes slip through the cracks. Hop on to IRC next time and make sure that one of the drivers, or even a developer or QA person knows about your bug if you think it is an absolute showstopper.

It definitely sucks that this bug was in a release. But things happen. Hopefully it won't again.

Mozilla as AOL/TW corporate initiative...?

[nazgul000]

Caveat: I use Mozilla as my primary browser. That said, I'd like to make this observation:

It seems to me that we spend a lot of time on Slashdot talking about Mozilla as a premiere project of the open source community. However, my impression is that Mozilla is largely still an internal project of Netscape (and by extension of AOL Time Warner). This impression is based on, among other things, the very large number of @netscape.com email addresses that pervade Bugzilla, the mozilla.org web site, etc. I can't believe that Netscape's engineers restrict themselves to working solely on their release branch of the Mozilla codebase during working hours.

I don't think it at all diminishes the magnitude of the Mozilla project's achievement to say that it has made progress largely under the aegis of AOL/TW. But we should at least be honest that Mozilla is furthering the agenda of a very large corporation that is just as rapacious and profit-motivated as Microsoft.

Anyone have any hard data about the investment that AOL has made in Mozilla development?

Re:Mozilla as AOL/TW corporate initiative...?

[caillon]

Without a doubt, Netscape has been the largest single contributor to the Mozilla project. Of course, they want to see Mozilla (and their Netscape branded derivative in particular) succeed. But Netscape does not control the project. Sure, they have their influences with what their developers work on, but there's nothing wrong with that. Outside contributors have their influence of what they work on too.

You said "Mozilla is furthering the agenda of a very large corporation" which I would agree with. Mozilla furthers the agenda of several other companies as well: OEone, ActiveState, IBM, etc... But Mozilla could not do that alone. If Mozilla has played a part in furthering Netscape's agenda, Netscape has played an even bigger part in furthering Mozilla's agenda. The staff and drivers of mozilla.org try hard to ensure that happens.

This may not be the best example (there are many others that would suit better) but I was reading bug 7 0 7 4 6 at the time, and figured I would post a few comments from it:

------- Additional Comment #13 From Blake Ross 2001-03-20 14:35 -------

By the way, having sat on these changes for over two weeks (and enduring
multiple merge conflicts), I'm not particularly interested in waiting until
someone finds the time to fix the other commercial cases. These changes are
going to break Alphanumerica and MozDev products also, as well as potentially
any other xul-based app out there, and while I'm certainly willing to help,
they're not waiting until every commercial vendor's branch is ready (such is
pre-1.0 development).

------- Additional Comment #17 From David Hyatt 2001-03-20 16:21 -------

Blake, I feel your pain, but I work for Netscape, and therefore can't approve a
patch that will bust up the commercial tree.

Are there any volunteers to convert the rest of commercial (outside of AIM)? I
would do it myself, but this kind of bug just kills my hands.

------- Additional Comment #18 From Mike Shaver 2001-03-20 17:05 -------

Hyatt: acting as module owner, you certainly _can_ permit a change that will
break a closed source base, especially after the developer (Blake) has gone to
such reasonable lengths to get someone to fix said closed source base. There
are lots of other source trees, as Blake points out, that will break because of
this (in the short term), and he's offered to help with the ones whose authors
are not actively preventing them from providing such assistance (as is
Netscape/AOL, in this case). We held off until 0.8.1 to minimize the pain of
this checkin, and the time has come to bear what pain remains.

If you don't feel that your employer will let you fulfill your
Mozilla-module-owner responsibilities, please let us know, because that's the
kind of problem that we have to solve quickly.

------- Additional Comment #19 From Brendan Eich 2001-03-20 17:42 -------

Module owners whose employers pay them to keep commercial add-ons working along
with their Mozilla modules have to wear two hats: one for their employer, one
for Mozilla. If there's a conflict, Mozilla wins, or we need a new module owner
(at least _pro tem_). Life's rough. Let's get these changes landed.

It sounds like all but Mac builds have been tested in any case. True?

/be

Re:Mozilla as AOL/TW corporate initiative...?

[G00F]

Netscape as other free software they control, is a wild they have against MS. Netscape being one of the biggest.

Re:Mozilla as AOL/TW corporate initiative...?

[cobar]

While a considerable bit of the Mozilla effort is directed by Netscape (which operates as its own department for the most part), part of the reason for that is that many of the biggest contributors from outside Netscape were hired to work as full-time contributors. That's probably a good thing in the long run since those people will have more time to code and get to take advantage of the AOL's resources. Quite a few of them work afterhours on Mozilla, for which I doubt they are paid. And really there's only 1 real branch of Mozilla - the development version eventually stabilizes into a release, and the Netscape commercial release is not significantly divergent from the Mozilla release it is based on.

Mozilla is easily the most complex open source application bar none. That discourages casual contributors from getting into the core code without a significant time investment. Additionally, it wasn't until Mozilla 0.81 or so that Mozilla started becoming really useable, thereby making it a more interesting target for contributors. There are definitely barriers to outsider participation, but they do get overcome by persistent enough people. The same situation exists with Open Office, where the an even larger majority of code comes from Sun, however they've stated that the community is invaluable in providing QA and bug reports.

As for AOL's agenda, what does it matter. Thus far, they've supported Mozilla's goal of making the web standards compliant and provided an excellent browser. If they ever deviate from that plan, the code is there for interested parties to work with. I doubt that the community could provide anywhere near the kind of manpower commitment that AOL has funded for the last 5 years. Be thankful that their goals jive with the geek populations'.

Re:Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have B

[Anonymous Coward]

the thing that bites my arse is the fact that that they are more interested in adding "features" than fixing things...

It's a fricking browser.... I dont need it to start performing Non Linear Video editing and ripping my CD's to mp3's Mozilla needs a freeze put on it for a 6 month period... nothing but bugfixes... if you submit a feature you will be beaten and publically humiliated.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[MarcQuadra]

Security IS basic functionality. I'd rather NOT have a new feature if it opens me up to identity theft, fraud, or privacy invasion. My privacy is far more important to me than superfluous features. It's not right to program for functionality and then apply security as an afterthought, proper software development is an act of balancing between functionality, security, usability, and portability. I can't imagine paying as much as Microsoft demands and expecting less than excellent security.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[eloki]

My problem in the parent post said, "well, at least it's not a security bug", as if security is more important than basic functionality.

Well, it seems a number of people have used it without problems, otherwise this would have been commented repeatedly by people in the original /. story regarding Moz 1.2 being released. From the sounds of it, it's not like DHTML is completely broken on all sites. I agree it's a very bad bug, and as the other poster said, they did pull it from the releases page after all, which means they think so too.

I appreciate what you're saying about functionality being required first, of course :) Mind you, security flaws are a more insidious thing. If you use Mozilla and some functionality fails, that's bad, but at least it's usually quite clear something's wrong... you can just not use the software (go back to previous version, etc).

Security flaws, however, mean that in the normal course of program use, someone can take advantage of it, quite possibly without you even knowing about it. Is it better that your car not start, or that it seems OK but the brakes don't work and you don't find out till you go over a hill? In that sense security flaws are worse because people will have a false sense of confidence.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[NineNine]

Last I checked, DHTML isn't "superfluous". It's about as essential as you can get on the web these days. And as far as your security paranoia, that's a problem you should get some serious help with. Either that, or stick to the good porn sites that don't try to use all of the latest tricks to manipulate your browser. Either way, you *can* be helped. Really.

proper software development is an act of balancing between functionality, security, usability, and portability. I can't imagine paying as much as Microsoft demands and expecting less than excellent security

Portability is useful if you don't have any kind of cohesive IT strategy at all in your function. My company is pretty well set. We don't switch hardware/platforms on a weekly basis. As far as functionality, I agree. I couldn't imagine paying $50 or more for an unusable OS such as Red Hat, or spend a few days downloading something as bad.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[MarcQuadra]

NineNine, your constant use of excessive sarcasm is disturbing; Linux has FAR BETTER connectivity AND security than the pay-for alternatives. Mozilla runs on a multitude of platforms (from one maintainable and concurrent codebase!), it is fast, small for it's feature set and very stable (my 1.2beta has been running without close for over a week of heavy use).

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[NineNine]

Well, the only thing is that the security flaws we've seen in IE have been relatively minor. They've usually been tough to reproduce, and very rarely, if ever actually used. I don't remember seeing any truly dire ones that would overshadow the usability of the app, in my opinion.

Re:Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have B

[joyoflinux]

Mozilla 1.2 is not the stable branch. Use the 1.0 or even 1.1 if you want more stability.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[MarcQuadra]

Right, DHTML is broken, so the release was pulled immediately and we're back to Moz1.2b which does not have the bug. Someone will fix it in a few hours or maybe days and there will be a re-release. This is how OSS works, you can live on the cutting edge but you have to expect to get hurt sometimes. I think it's better than wasting away with the same features for OVER A FULL YEAR with IE6.
Tell me, did you roll out IE6 within two days of release? Nobody in their right mind rolls out a release before it's seen a few weeks of action in the wild. Smart administrators don't feel the sting of this sort of problem because they aren't rolling out this morning's kernel/browser/office suite to the users until they hear that it works well.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[NineNine]

I really couldn't give a flying shit about cutting edge. I just want something that works so I can get on with the interesting parts of my life. I don't want to spend hours and hours every day downloading the new Mozilla with new patches, new features, blah, blah blah. Instead IE works, and I use it to get other things done. If a browser is anything more than a background app to anyone other than the developers, then it's not doing it's job well.

Way to go Mozilla team!

[Lokist]

We've discovered a bug in Mozilla 1.2 that can cause DHTML on some sites to fail. We plan to release Mozilla 1.2.1 with a fix shortly
This is what I like to see! This is why Open Source is a very good thing... They discovered there was a bug.... They officially announced that they will be releasing a patch soon... If I can make an educated guess I probably would say a patch would be out by Monday or Tuesday...

The point I am trying to make...Companies or groups of developers that are not obsessed on how much money they make with there code are more likely to take pride in what they do and patch exploits or bugs really quickly...

It has been proven hasn't it?

Re:lalaa

[Bunji X]

Why would anyone want to use the "commercial suite", when the technology demo has more features and is more stable, in my experience?

Re:no matter

[spike hay]

I have a problem with Moz on Win2k. I have been using 1.2b for quite a while. When 1.2 came out, I immediately switched to it. However, my chatzilla and news/mail and everything was non-functional. I reinstalled 1.2b, but to no avail.

The Internet is Mozilla's playing field.

[Lokist]

Just another quick comment...

Tell me what you would rather have... A company that hired its own Quality Assurance team and kept all bugs they found quiet...Or a mass audience from all over the world testing the software and reporting what they find?

With that being said... There really isn't any other way for the Mozilla team to let there mass audience "or shall we say...testers" know that they found a bug and that it will be patched soon?

And would you people stop comparing Mozilla to IE... IE has its own set of troubles... Let it fail on its own...

Re:The Internet is Mozilla's playing field.

[Misch]

There really isn't any other way for the Mozilla team to let there mass audience "or shall we say...testers" know that they found a bug and that it will be patched soon?

There is. We call it Bugzilla. Every time someone submits a comment on a bug I've submitted, I get an e-mail. This usually involves either someone elaborating on my submitted bug, or marking it a duplicate (it happens!), or discussion from the Mozilla development team on the bug, or even just a re-assignment of the person responsible for the bug.

FUD

[bogie]

"Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows."

Haven't had those problems since the M release days.

"So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet"

Oh so it doesn't work on HALF of the Internet? Umm Ok. Funny for me it work on the vast majority of the Internet. In fact only sites that have any problems are sites that refuse to code to standards. Of course if the webmasters there don't respond to my email to fix there site then screw em, I'll take my business elsewhere thank you. These are the same banks that will no doubt embrace Palladium with glee.

I've switched to Phoenix full time on both windows and linux and while only a moron says things are perfect, I say things are pretty dam good and I'm very happy with my browsing experience.

In fact since you "claim" to be a linux user what exactly do you use on linux since Mozilla is such crap?

But then again half of your posts are defending Microsoft against us irrational Linux users. I could see now and then pointing out some linux zealots, but really looking at your posts the majority of recent ones ALL defend Microsoft. So how do you explain that? Most linux and opensource users are slightly less militant then the /. ones, but even they don't constantly go out of their way to defend MS which you seem to do. Is there something you want to confess?

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[MarcQuadra]

Once a month I type "emerge mozilla" before I go to bed. In the morning I have the latest stable release of Mozilla. I use it for all of my web browsing, FTP, online banking, email, contacts, and HTML composition. It never crashes, it's faster than IE was, it has tabbed browsing and beautiful themes, and I have access to a database of all the known bugs at my fingertips if I so desire. I am not stuck to Microsoft; my preferences, email, and bookmarks are uniform across four OS platforms so I'm not permanantly tied to one particular OS or CPU vendor. The difference is that my browser doesn't JUST work, it works WELL and I ENJOY my online experience so much that I am PROUD to be one of the few people enlightened to Mozilla, that's right, I'm PROUD of my choice of browser because it's that good and that much better than everyone else's.

Aargh... and I just installed 1.2...

[jonadab]

# We plan to release Mozilla 1.2.1 with a fix shortly.

Aargh. I just got 1.2 installed and the prefbar all set up, and now I'll have to install and customise the prefs toolbar again when I install 1.2.1. Bummer.

There are a lot more bugs than that

[Sivar]

I use Mozilla in Windows 2000 and Gentoo Linux. I haven't had any major problems with the Linux release (though the announced DHTML bug is in both), but the Windows release has been buggy as hell. This in contrast to 1.1 which was only somewhat buggy.

- It forgets the previous pages visited every so often,

- Every 10th or so time I visit a page, it announces "The entry point @113WINAPAITSP@@% was not found in [some DLL file]",

- It randomely decides to ignore the mouse wheel, the keyboard, or the mouse altogether, but recovers if I switch to another window and use that device,

- It places some banner ads in the middle of a page. For example, on the StorageReview.com, the bottom banner is often smack dab in the middle of the last message in any given forum thread,

- It reports all downloaded images, be they 200 bytes or 5MB, as "1K" in the download manager,

- It decides that some files are text files, whether they are or not, and insists on displaying them in the browser rather than downloading them. RAR archives and PNG images do not look good in a web browser window. This bug has been present in many versions and is ignored Bugzilla, with claims that it is the website telling Mozilla what MIME type the file is. Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.

Bitch, bitch, moan, moan. The Mozilla team is still doing an excellent job making the world's most powerful browser suite. I do, however, hope they run releases through a bit more QA before the next release.

Re:There are a lot more bugs than that

[kilonad]

Amen! It also takes *forever* to pop open a download window. And the download manager itself is incredibly buggy too, sometimes forgetting that you downloaded something. (I'd love to see a feature where it remembers the original location that you downloaded it from and dumps that in a log, but I digress) When you close a window, it can take a few seconds to show the window beneath it (I still prefer windows to tabs most of the time), although opening a window has become a little bit quicker. One of the 1.2 nightlies I was using didn't have the problem with the slow windows, though the download problem has been there for as long as I can remember. And this is on a 1.2GHz Athlon with 768MB RAM, so speed and memory aren't issues.

That having been said, I've tried Phoenix. It's nice, it's fast, and when I open a bunch of windows and browse for a while, and then close the browser, it instantly reboots my computer without any warning. It doesn't do mail (anyone recommend a good mail client for windows?) and it doesn't coexist peacefully with Mozilla on the same machine. Ok, that's enough of a rant for now.

Re:There are a lot more bugs than that

[JourneymanMereel]

- It decides that some files are text files, whether they are or not, and insists on displaying them in the browser rather than downloading them. RAR archives and PNG images do not look good in a web browser window. This bug has been present in many versions and is ignored Bugzilla, with claims that it is the website telling Mozilla what MIME type the file is. Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.

This "feature" of Internet Explorer is actually a huge pain in the butt. I remember a while back we were talking about giving people the ability to view the source before loading it in their browser if a Bugzilla Attachment had a <script> tag in it (can't find a bug reference, but I did come accross the first bug I ever fixed while looking... oh the nostalgia :). We were talking about just providing a link that would output the attachment as text/plain instead of text/html. Simple, except IE detected that it was still HTML code so it thought it was smarter than us and rendered the page anyway. I don't remember what we ended up doing about this, but it was an issue.

This "feature" you mention is probably also the main cause for the problems you're now expierencing. After all, why should I bother to properly configure my webserver when Microsoft's software can just use some horrible fuzzy match on the file to determine what it is?

Re:There are a lot more bugs than that

[spacefrog]

Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.

That is because IE is intentionally broken since a lot of web servers are not configured correctly.

Try outputing an XML MIME type in your HTTP headers and watch IE totally ignore it if the file extension is not .XML, IE will treat it like HTML. I run into this all the time and can demo it all day long....

Re:There are a lot more bugs than that

[Sivar]

Regardless, usually the IE method works out. Try downloading the Linux version of DivX from Divx.com, for example. They apparently have something misconfigured. Good luck. :)

Re:There are a lot more bugs than that

[demon]

You running it on Windows? I have Mozilla 1.2 and Phoenix Debian packages on my system, and they happily coexist side-by-side. And it doesn't reboot my system. It's fast, it's smaller (by a lot), and it renders far eastern languages just as well as Mozilla. (ok, ok, not that I can read 'em - but it looks cool.)

That's not just an IE bug.

[Reziac]

[looking] That's not an IE bug per se. I *think* that's yet another manifestation of a core Mosaic bug, which is in ALL versions of Netscape AND IExplorer (ie. anything based on Mosaic code), but manifests more or less depending on the exact version, and the OS under it. (Mozilla sometimes exhibits the same bug, which makes me suspect it uses the same core Mosaic code.) IE5.5 or 6.0 on Win9* is one of the more-affected combinations, along with NS3.04 (on Win16 or Win32) and NS4.6x.

The Bug: Certain elements, when displayed *inside table cells*, cause a resource leak. Tons of links that display *a lot of text as part of the link* are the most common culprit, but flash *placeholders* and sometimes dropdown boxes also do it.

That's why with very long comment pages, sometimes you'll find you can't moderate -- the dropdown boxes are the final straw.

Win9* with an IE version *prior* to IE5.5 will usually recover resources once you leave the triggering page, but IE5.5 and later cripple resource recovery, exacerbating the problem.

I've been tracking this bug for about 5 years now. In my observation, its various manifestations cause nearly all resource leaks while running NS or IE, thus cause most consequent crashes. Often it seems "fixed" for one minor browser version, but returns in the next update. (Good reason to keep your old browser version around when you upgrade.)

Do yourself a favour: run Resource Meter (windows\RSRCMTR.EXE, if you installed it) in your systray, and when it goes yellow, back out of whatever page you're on (and try it with another browser, which might not manifest the bug). It'll save you a lot of annoyance.

Re:That's not just an IE bug.

[jesup]

You may be referring to bug 39573, which is about pages with a large number of drop-down (or other) widgets. This isn't due to legacy Mosaic code per se. The problem with recent IE's may be due to code that's meant to give fast "Back" and "Forward" speed by keeping recent pages around in laid-out form - which means a lot of memory and (OS) widgets. Spyglass (which IE2 was based on) had such features.

The problem in Mozilla is based on the number of widgets that need to be created. A solution (which requires a fair bit of coding - care to help?) is to instantiate popups and the like lazily. Another thing that would help with responsiveness would be to have a more-interruptable reflow.

If you're really interested, get involved. http://www.mozilla.org/

Re:lalaa

[Anonymous Coward]

The above statement illustrates:

A. Backpedaling
B. Ex post facto rationalization
C. Self-fulfilling prophecy
D. Passing the buck
E. A, C, and D, but not B.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[NineNine]

Hey, if you can get personal pride from installing a piece of software, congratulations. I'm pretty happy with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but I'm not particularly proud of playing it. I didn't write it. See, for me "pride" has to do with actually accomplishing something. Since purchasing GTA: Vice City isn't really an accomplishment... anybody with a heart beat and $50 can do it... I'm not particularly proud of it. But hey, if you're a good, happy little consumer that takes pride in the products you use, more power to ya'. I wish that my life was that simple.

activeX, user-friendy open holes...

[wotevah]

MS has left large doors open for tools that are as easy to install or run as are difficult to remove or stop. No other company has been so careless in providing dangerous "features" that 99% of the people don't use and that are mostly used by people with malicious intent.

- activeX - allowing "Open" to do "Execute" has basically fueled the vast generations of email viruses (before it was impossible to run something just by "opening" it) - document macros in a non-sandboxed general-purpose programming language - extension hiding in the name of user-friendliness that has caused so many problems with the .jpg.exe viruses - no real protection scheme for memory, files or processes running on a machine despite all the required hardware capabilities being available since the '386.

I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. Adware/spyware would be much more difficult, if not impossible to install browsers driven by our goals rather than a corporation's. Look at where the first "no javascript in email", "no remote images in email", "disable popup windows", "no animated images" options have appeared.

So to make your analogy more accurate, it's like not buying a Honda because they are made to open their doors automatically every time somebody gets nearby.

Re:activeX, user-friendy open holes...

[numark]

Good points, but one clarification:

<i>Look at where the first "no javascript in email", "no remote images in email", "disable popup windows", "no animated images" options have appeared.</i>

I remember Opera having these features a while before Mozilla officially had them integrated into the browser.

Re:activeX, user-friendy open holes...

[numark]

OK, OK, so I forgot I had extrans enabled, but you get the point, eh? :)

eBay crashes with Mozilla?

[jchristopher]

1.2 always crashes on eBay, especially when you've got a couple tabs open. Anyone else have that problem?

Re:eBay crashes with Mozilla?

[DemonCat]

1.1 also crashes on ebay. Happened to me most on item pages at ebaymotors.com.

Standards, Monopolies, Operatics

[yerricde]

In fact only sites that have any problems are sites that refuse to code to standards.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a W3C standard. Support for SVG hasn't been turned on by default in Mozilla binaries because 1. only half of SVG works yet, and 2. LGPL licensed support libraries such as libart don't work well on embedded systems where it's often not possible to replace the library with an updated version as required in the LGPL. There aren't enough frozen interfaces in Mozilla for Adobe to port its NS4.x plug-in to Mozilla.

Of course if the webmasters there don't respond to my email to fix there site then screw em, I'll take my business elsewhere thank you.

What if the web site that works only with IE is the web site of the only consumer broadband Internet access provider in your area, or of some other local monopoly?

what exactly do you use on linux

Some Linux users browse the Web with a proprietary ad-supported user agent called "Opera".

don't need broadband to get mozilla

[yerricde]

I've only got 56k and left it downloading Moz 1.2 last night

A Mozilla web browser release for Windows is 10 MB. A V.90 modem can typically download that much data from mozilla.org in about 40 minutes. Many of us spend more than that on Slashdot every day. Just put it in the background and surf with IE or play a video game or something.

Re:don't need broadband to get mozilla

[daveirl]

You do need boradband if you don't have unlimited 56k net access. Wasting an hour downloading something isn't a luxury we have here. IT COSTS.
Read more about our crappy telco Eircom

Re:don't need broadband to get mozilla

[yerricde]

9 cents a minute DAMN!

Even the UK has calling plans with unlimited access to the ISP's phone number.

If I were you, I'd wait a couple years, save up a couple hundred thousand euros, and get out of that
(Comment terminated)

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[Maul]

How will it fix it? The answer is that with IE, someone can access your hard drive for you and upgrade Mozilla when the new patch is ready!

Easy!

nightly works nicely / looking for breakage

[timothy]

(say that 20 times fast)

Scanning comments, I see that some people say that the "tainted" 1.2 has trouble with ebay among other sites; can anyone point out specific pages which break 1.2?

I yesterday's nightly (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021129), and it's been working very nicely for, well, the last 12 hours, it's only been on since then ;)

It seems snappier than the last Mozilla I had on here, a nightly from probably 5 or 6 weeks ago.

timothy

Users are Idiots

[JanusFury]

In my experience, as well, a few developers on the Moz project have gotten the idea that all users are idiots.

Just this bug in particular (I'm sure there are more similar ones, but I participated in that one way back when before I quit using Moz), shows how the team has gotten the idea that users are idiots and do not deserve the ability to customize simple aspects of their browser. It seems that bugs take the back burner when the dev team has to choose between fixing bugs and adding kewl new features. :(

Build error (was Re:1.0.1 and 1.1 too good!)

[isdnip]

A release candidate is a place to look for the last few critical bugs, no? In this case, the bugs that were going to be squashed were squashed, and everything was ready to go. They just had to do a final build and let it go.

But oops, the build process went awry, and the binaries were built against the wrong sources. So the RC process wouldn't have worked, because it would have put fixes into the tree, which would have been ignored in the erroneous build.

BTW, 1.1 was very unstable for me under Linux, while 1.2 (as released) is rock solid.

This proves what we've known all along!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla sucks!

Try out this neat little browser: http://www.microsoft.com/ie

Re:no matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you install on top of the previous version? That can cause problems like this. As the release notes say, you should either:
Install to a different directory
or
Remove the previous version (after running the uninstaller, it might be worth removing any remaining files except for those in the plugins dirtectory from your mozilla directory)
That will almost certianly resolve the problem.

The real cause of the DHTML bug

[jesup]

The DHTML bug was caused by an 1-character-incorrect backout of a patch that I did in too much of a hurry (removed the entry from the list, but didn't adjust the count). Mea Culpa. This happened 2 weeks before 1.2 final, but most testers were working on 1.3 by that time, and the ones that weren't didn't visit the type of DHTML that causes the problem (most DHTML doesn't have the problem). There was a separate problem where the wrong files were tagged (some recent fixes weren't included).

We're fixing these and will have an updated build up soon. How long would Microsoft take to fix this sort of problem?... (Let alone tell you why the problem happened.)

Updates re what ditros are for

[xeno-cat]

You sort of answered your own question when you mentioned that "some" ditrobutions make it easy to get updates to software. The thing to do is pick the one that you like best. Try aptget, Redhat/Suse/Mandrake autoupdate, emerge from Gentoo for source level updates and compiles, Ximian's redcarpet, and many others. Pick one and stick with it if that's what it takes.

For Mozilla I generally just rm -rf the old version's directory and install the latest and greatest.

Many of the updaters I mentioned above are easier than anything Microsoft has come up with in my opinion. Particuarly Redcarpet from Ximian and emerge from Gentoo.

Kind Regards

Re:Get MS Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1

[KewlPC]

*Sigh* That's the point. It isn't a problem, it isn't hard, and it isn't a big deal. Weenies who troll on and on about how everything in Linux requires you "to edit some obscure text file" and that "everything is designed for programmers, not the users" are just that: weenies and trolls.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[jonadab]

> Call me nuts, but I'd rather have an actual working product

It is an actual working product; has been since... well, for
some time now. Sure, it's buggy, but all software is buggy.
If anything, Mozilla is less buggy than the average browser.

> DHTML working is very, very basic.

DHTML is not quite so basic as you imply, but even if it were, DHTML
is basically working. There's just a bug in it that causes a few
sites to fail. FWIW, I've been using the buggy release since some
time yesterday and haven't managed to find a site where I can
reproduce the bug yet. Sure, I'll upgrade to 1.2.1 when it comes
out, and meanwhile if I happen to run into a DHTML site that's
broken, that I need to access, I can change my symlink back to
the previous release temporarily (though, unfortunately, that would
mean exiting my browser and restarting it, which means finishing
with all the tabs I currently have open, which would be something
of a pain).

> You can't have a security problem until you at least have a
> working product.

Interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I'm doing
any security checks; things that don't work right are immune to
security problems. I bet a lot of so-called security experts are
unaware of this axiom; perhaps you should write up a white paper.

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[jonadab]

> Tell me, did you roll out IE6 within two days of release? Nobody
> in their right mind rolls out a release before it's seen a few
> weeks of action in the wild.

Right. I tend to use myself as the guinea pig, testing stuff like
new releases on my own workstation before I deploy it for anybody
else. The only thing is, this doesn't catch OS-specific bugs, since
our network (at work) is heterogenous, and I only usually test under
one OS. If our network were larger, I'd probably test on multiple
OSes before deploying, but with the relatively small number of nodes
we have, it's not a huge problem.

This policy (testing on myself) also fails for stuff I never use,
that other people ask me to install, such as Real Player. (I have
yet to figure out what purpose that one serves... I have never
once visited a site that uses it, despite spending hours a day on
the web. When people say they use it all the time, I have to wonder
what kind of sites they're going to; must be something in which I
have absolutely no interest, whatever it is.)

Re:no matter

[spike hay]

I've tried both already. :-(

Re:Oh, the OSS zealots would say this is a "featur

[jonadab]

> Well, the only thing is that the security flaws we've > seen in IE have been relatively minor.

Sure. Minor. A dozen lines of javascript on an untrusted site can do quite literally anything (within the permissions the user has, which tends to be pretty lax on NT), and it's minor.

Well, I guess it's a good thing there Aren't very many of these minor bugs.

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[ssstraub]

You don't need to deal with 3rd party apps like that with mozilla.

Problem: Mozilla is slower and doesn't handle XP themes.
Solution: Phoenix. Faster and uses native windows themes. Apparently, you've never had the joy of using tabbed browsing...

Re:Mozilla 1.2 - The Release that Shouldn't Have B

[Kanasta]

That's the problem

It's too hard to get a problem noticed by someone who has the skills to fix it.

Say I have a problem with feature X because of my condition Y. Unless I can find a developer with the condition Y, it's going to be marked WONTFIX or for future release v5.0 or whatnot.

There's no sense of responsibility there, cuz they're not paid. And because they're not paid, with any criticism, users are treated like ungrateful bastards who should shut up.

Shows that they demand perfection

[digitalgimpus]

If this were Microsoft. They would just give developers an idea how to structure a work around until a service pack could be made....

Mozilla folks pull the entire program rather than tell webmasters to patch up... and plan to fix it ASAP.

I appreciate that.

They aknowledge the problem ASAP, and are responding. And pulled the download and created some waves so it's known and 1.2 is imediately disposed of...

Microsoft would deny the bug for 6 months, give a work around... then eventually fix it.

Being able to admit mistakes is important.

Not even a paperclip

[driehuis]

Regardless, usually the IE method works out.

It sure does. It's the same misfeature that causes lookOut to show foo.bmp.pif as foo.bmp, and that causes Windoze to look inside the .pif to see that it is in fact a .exe. Which is precisely what the virus author intended.

This has been pointed out years before the actual viruses started to hit. This "intelligence" in the name of user friendliness is one of the bigger design flaws in Windoze.

The web server tells the browser what the content is supposed to be, and IE then cheerfully starts to to its own thing, with no override or even a warning. Not even a paperclip that tells the user that he is "correcting" the info.

Here's a hint if you want to download a URL as a bag of bytes with no interpretation: right click on it in Mozilla, select "Copy link location", type "wget " into a window and paste the URL.

An even better hint: tell the good folks at divx.com that their web server is misconfigured.

Re:Not even a paperclip

[Sivar]

IE's implementation may be flawed (imagine that), but it should not be difficult to read the first few bytes of a file to determine its type. It is easy to tell the difference between text files and, say, RAR files. Most media types have a header which can be used to determine the type within the first 20 bytes. For example, GIF images start with "GIF8xx" (xx is the version). PNG files begin with "xPNG" (where 'x' is 89h). .RAR files begin with "Rar!". It would not be difficult to examine the next few bytes for verification, and would not be difficult to keep a little database of known filetypes.
No, it should not be necessary, but neither should dialogs asking "are you sure you want to format this disk drive." People aren't perfect, webmasters are bound to make mistakes, the best that can be done is to make your program intelligent enough to realize when they are being made.
Displaying a RAR archive as text is not the proper response to RAR download, no matter what the webserver says.

Re: Ha.. no humor left on slashdot

[Jimithing DMB]

Man.. back in the day the parent post would have been +5 funny. It's not a goatse.cx link, just a decent looking girl (being penetrated in an awfully strange position, but yes, it is porn after all). Besides, linking to CoolSweetGirls.com might be a tip-off that it is porn... just maybe

Please.... please... have a sense of humor once in a while.

The original comment follows (without the link, which originally went to an image on a porn site)

I actually tried and downloaded Mozilla 1.2.1 for Windows today. Having installed it on my computer, I tried going to some DHTML-based sites. However, I still keep getting the same error message as 1.2.0 :(

For example: this site won't work

Of course now the joke is completely ruined.. dickhead trolls and moderators

Does Mozilla even care about users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Mozilla for a week, both releases and daily builds (the daily for bug fixes). I've been disappointed. I start reading news and going to websites and get comfortable and start thinking this seems to be working well, then it has some memory corruption issue and the OS kills it. The feedback tool that they include doesn't work. I've tried to send the bug reports using it and it fails to connect to the server.

Why must the whole damn thing be in one process with threads? It would be much nicer if at least the newsreader/mailer ran in a seperate process than the browser. Then at least I wouldn't waste as much time starting the stupid thing and getting all my windows back. Are the Mozilla programmers afraid of interprocess communication?

OT: Spamcop

[Seehund]

I'm a freebie user, but I think we too have access to the mail forwarding feature.

What I wonder is, if as a paying user you can set domains/addresses to ignore? You see, all mail I get to my university account is filtered through a virus checking relay, and Spamcop interprets those headers as open relay activity and wants to send reports to abuse@myuniversity, so I have to uncheck those boxes for each spam on the Spamcop site.

If I could set a preference to automatically ignore any headers referring to "myuniversity" domains, Spamcop would have a new customer. And if they could clearly state fixed prices for their service... It's kinda twisted that spam victims should pay for reporting the abuse, in an ideal world Spamcop could charge a fee from the spammers' ISPs for each confirmed abuse report - that might make even the Taiwanese and Chinese ISPs a bit more interested in cooperating... ;)

To get back on topic; as you say, the Mozilla bug would still be there though. I'm happy to see that the number of votes for that bug has more than doubled after I mentioned it here. :) It is "Major," damnit!

Re: Mozilla vs IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about IE? Why the knee jerk reaction? Nobody is denying what you are saying, except of course you exagerate, but I'm surprised you are turning this into an "us against them" kind of argument.

I like Mozilla, but am aware that the more popular it gets, the more it will attract the kind of problems that very popular programs such as IE get.

Your point seems to be "Let's not talk about problems with Mozilla, because IE has more" But if you ignore these kinds or problems, then the end result will be worse. Mozilla will get a bad name.

Re:Big deal. IE4 does that too.

[riscthis]

Don't know about 6.x as it is not installed on any of our 1200+ nt4 and w2k boxes (compatability problems with several internal IIS sites; go figure).

Had the same problem, turned out that IE6 kept losing the Session ID when connecting to a web server with an _ (underscore) character in the name. Maybe that's causing your problem too?

Re: There are bugs and the are bugs.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we only talk about critical IE bugs why should we talk about non-critical Mozilla bugs.

oh my god!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is stupid BS. Why don't you go suck Bill Gates's dick you fucken asshole.

Last Post!

[alpg]

Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring
you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter
to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or
other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the
list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add
yours to the bottom of the list.

Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San
Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find
his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent
out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to
build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at
this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in
her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's.

Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today!
For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if
you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or
not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is
that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip;
when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor
1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and
'\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear.
-- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80

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