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Mozilla 1.2.1 Released

I shouldn't be allowed to work before coffee- I posted this at like 8:20 and must've forgotten to click that all important 'Save' button. Hey, Everyone's favorite web browser besides Chimera has released version 1.2.1. The fix includes security patches so it probably wouldn't hurt to snag it if you're running it.

42 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. DHTML Patch by rherbert · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since the story didn't mention it, the only difference between 1.2 and 1.2.1 is the fix for the DHTML bug (#182500).

    1. Re:DHTML Patch by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      "Since the story didn't mention it, the only difference between 1.2 and 1.2.1 is the fix for the DHTML bug (#182500)."

      Good thing this made front page news, eh? Heh. You know how version 1.2.1 of any piece of software is sooOOOoo highly anticipated.

      Piece of advice for story submitters out there: Not every single person on Slashdot gives a rootin toot about Mozilla. Consider putting a little background in your posts. A little blurb like "This is significant because 1.2 was pulled due to a bug that 1.2.1 now fixes." would prevent people like me from making sarcastic comments (like the one above) about the importance of the news.

  2. security fixes? not really by aromanos · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the release notes: "The only difference between the two releases [1.2 vs 1.2.1] is the fix for this bug (Bug 182500)." And it was a DHTML bug, not a security bug. -- Andrés

  3. Re:What I dont understand... by Julius+X · · Score: 3, Informative

    The reason that this is "that big of a deal" on /. is because the full release of 1.2 was pulled last week because of a DHTML bug.

    This is essentially the full release of 1.2, just patched and with an added .1 on it =)

    Cheers.

    --

    -Julius X
    remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
  4. Re:DTML... by greechneb · · Score: 5, Informative

    dynamic HTML

    Dynamic HTML is a collective term for a combination of new Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags and options, that will let you create Web pages more animated and more responsive to user interaction than previous versions of HTML. Much of dynamic HTML is specified in HTML 4.0. Simple examples of dynamic HTML pages would include (1) having the color of a text heading change when a user passes a mouse over it or (2) allowing a user to "drag and drop" an image to another place on a Web page. Dynamic HTML can allow Web documents to look and act like desktop applications or multimedia productions.

    The features that constitute dynamic HTML are included in Netscape Communications' latest Web browser, Navigator 4.0 (part of Netscape's Communicator suite), and by Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 4.0. While HTML 4.0 is supported by both Netscape and Microsoft browsers, some additional capabilities are supported by only one of the browsers. The biggest obstacle to the use of dynamic HTML is that, since many users are still using older browsers, a Web site must create two versions of each site and serve the pages appropriate to each user's browser version.
    The Concepts and Features in Dynamic HTML
    Both Netscape and Microsoft support:

    * An object-oriented view of a Web page and its elements
    * Cascading style sheets and the layering of content
    * Programming that can address all or most page elements
    * Dynamic fonts

  5. Re:DTML... by joycea · · Score: 5, Informative

    From one of the bug dependencies at bugzilla...

    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126
    Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126

    If an input filed with type set to hidden is not preceded by either the body
    open tag or text it will be displayed as a text field, but will not have it's
    default value set.

    Reproducible: Always

    Steps to Reproduce:
    1. Save the following in a file:
    <html>
    <form action="/listings/update.php" method=post>
    <input type=hidden name=test1 value=value1> :test1<br>
    test2: <input type=hidden name=test2 value=value2><br>
    </table>
    </form>
    </html>

    2. Load the file in Mozilla

    Actual Results:
    An empty text input field apears before the test ' :test1'

    Expected Results:
    the field should have been hidden and kept its value.

    Workarounds are trivial, the <body> tag or any text, even a period, prior to the
    hidden input will cause it to behave normaly.

  6. Re:This is a fix release. by pointym5 · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was no "permissions bug" on Unix. It worked just fine for my non-root user ID.

  7. Re:DTML... by cheezycrust · · Score: 4, Informative

    In this case, Mozilla ate the first characters of a print() function. Many ads are constructed using print() statements, and if the first characters are lost, you don't get to see the advertisement (which could be good), but you also end up with strange html (which is bad).

    --
    Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
  8. Re:Odd? by swordgeek · · Score: 3, Informative

    It was a screwup. Plain and simple, a bug slipped into the 1.2 release candidate. It happens, and the whole Mozilla project has a better record than most at creating stable releases which actually are. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first release they've ever pulled. Any idea how many firmware and kernel patches Sun and HP have pulled on their OS?

    Give them a break, and if you want stability, never download ANYTHING in the first week.

    --

    "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
  9. A few solutions by ultor · · Score: 3, Informative

    If the new release appears to cause problems, be sure to remove/move your profile directory. This is one of the things I always forget to do when installing a new release because most of the time it doesn't make a difference. Also, although the source tarballs aren't posted, I was able to steal one out of the Redhat SRPMS that appears to be authentic (using rpm2tgz/rpm2targz and there's another tarball inside). Now why couldn't they just post the tarball first?

  10. 1.2.1 does have better security than 1.1 or 1.0.1 by asa · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, the headline isn't completely wrong, Mozilla 1.2.1 only contains the "can't write to dynamically created elements" fix that was breaking some DHTML and page layout. Mozilla 1.2.1 also contains everything that the 1.2 release contained when it was released and then unreleased last week. That included new features, improved performance, better stability and security fixes. So if you're using _any_ oler Mozilla releases you really should upgrade to get all the new 1.2.1 goodness, including improved security.

    For the folks that just downloaded Mozilla 1.2 last week, if you're not having any problems (and it seems like the DHTML issue is a lot less visible on linux) then there's no pressing "security" reason to upgrade to 1.2.1 but you might as well get it for this DHTML fix which is likely to eventually cause you some pain at some site somewhere.

    --Asa

  11. Re:Chimera?! by asdfjilk · · Score: 2, Informative

    Phoenix is a mock-up of Chimera ;)

  12. Re:Maybe it's just me... by Lukey+Boy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just grab the Talkback-enabled ZIP file, skip the installer altogether.

  13. Re:What I dont understand... by MrWinkey · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is why a revision point release of a browser is all that big of a deal. I understand this is /.

    I belive they posted the story due to the story Saturday about the bug and the new release would fix it. AKA new release is out. Please refrence the older slashdot article.

    Yea I know I'm probably feeding the trolls but what the hey....

    --
    Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
  14. Re:Strange shit... by mykmelez · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, only a small subset of known bugs are listed in the "Known Problems" section of the release notes. You should check bugzilla.mozilla.org for the status of the bug report you submitted, and if the bug is marked fixed, but you are still experiencing the problem, then reopen the bug report.

  15. Re:Solaris? by asa · · Score: 5, Informative

    How come the solaris releases are always days or even weeks behind?

    mozilla.org makes binaries for Mac9, OSX, Linux, and Windows. All other builds (sometimes as many as a dozen or so platforms) are contributed builds.We release when we've got the four major platforms done and then the Solaris and FreeBSD and OS/2 and BeOS and all the other builds arrive later.

    --Asa

  16. Re:Annoyance by Spacelem · · Score: 3, Informative

    Simply go to your old Mozilla plugins folder and copy all the plugins except npnul32.dll and put them into your new Mozilla plugins folder. Unless the plugins are broken with the new version, this should just work, even if Mozilla is still running.

  17. Re:So if there's just been one bug fix... by asa · · Score: 4, Informative

    (Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)

    No one ever took it from you. If you deleted it after the install just go back to ftp and download it again. I'd recommend that you do an uninstall and remove any traces of the Mozilla install directory then try a reinstall of 1.2.1. There should be no problems with a clean install. If that doesn't work then try creating a new profile and see if that works (you can copy your old profile data over to the new profile if necessary). I'm surprised you're having this difficulty and hope that one of the steps I suggested would fix it. The chances of 1.2.1 introducing a problem that didn't exist for you in 1.2 are about zero so I suspect that some other problem is at work here, possibly cruft left over from a beta install. Like I suggested above, removing the entire beta install directory should clear up any problems if it was a beta build problem that's manifesting in the final release. Good luck.

    --Asa

  18. Re:Why so much bigger than 1.2? by mst · · Score: 4, Informative

    Was the fix that involved?

    To my (faint) understanding: Maybe :-)

    Looking at the bug page of bug #182500 on bugzilla.mozilla.org (sorry, direct links blocked from slashdot), the list of associated bugs has 32 entries, and is a result of an incorrect backout of way too much code at some point just before the 1.2 release.

    Somebody closer to the mozilla project could surely give more detailed / accurate info on this though.

  19. Re:This is a fix release. by Penguinoflight · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, there was a permissions bug. Bug 163524 would mess up the permissions in the components directory if a earlier version had been installed. This would cause any non-root user to not be able to run mozilla, at all. Most distributions come standard with mozilla, so it's very hard to get a installation without it... making the release a hurdle for practically everyone.

    --
    "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
    1 John 4:14
  20. Re:font smoothing in KDE? by tuffy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Did you download the experimental xft version? The regular version doesn't have the smoothing code, so that one won't work.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  21. Re:Annoyance by billbaggins · · Score: 5, Informative
    Is there some way to preserve these plugins that I don't know about?
    Install to a new directory each time. What I do is install to /usr/local/mozilla-$version and then symlink /usr/local/mozilla to that. Then, once you've installed, copy the plugins directory from the old version to the new one (though you'd probably better leave libnullplugin.so alone; easy way to do this is 'cp -iR mozilla-old/plugins mozilla-new/plugins' and say 'no' to the overwrite request. (And remember to change the symlink!)
    And why oh why do I have to be root to install mouse-gestures under linux?
    Well, were you root when you installed mozilla? If not, I don't know... but if you were, then there's the problem! I think there's some sort of script thingy you can do that might help with that though. Check with someone who knows more than I do.

    The problem that I'm running into here is that the installer segfaults while it's trying to install the EN-US language pack. Anyone else have any idea what's going on here?

    --
    "The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
    --Winston Churchill
  22. Re:Ack my Themes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Always been true.

  23. Re:Where's the tarball?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    If you grab the srpm you can build on a 7.3 system if you just edit the .spec file and change gcc296 and g++296 to gcc/g++. At least, thats what I did :>

  24. Re:Minor release patches? by M1000 · · Score: 2, Informative

    You might want to compile from source and sync to their cvs...

  25. Re:This is a fix release. by mfago · · Score: 3, Informative

    There _still_ is a permissions bug. Hasn't been fixed (for me anyhow) in 1.2.1.

    Should be simple to fix?! Why isn't it?

  26. Re:Potential feature? by fawadhalim · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check out the mycroft project at mozdev. Goes waay beyond the Google toolbar. If you really want the GOogle toolbar, get it from here.

  27. Re:Why so much bigger than 1.2? by egoots · · Score: 3, Informative

    The 1.2 release also had a build problem where some of the changes checked into the branch did not get pulled for the build.

    Specifically, from an artical on www.mozillazine.org they say that "the 1.2 release tag was not complete so builds created from that tag may have additional problems"

    I suspect that the difference may be due to this

  28. Re:Potential feature? by alistair · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is an excellent browser toolbar for mozilla which emulates the googlebar at;

    http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

    This seems to be having problems with the Linux build at present but two other projects linked from this page are Mycroft which has plug ins to allow you to search over 170 different search engines (check it out) and Easysearch which allows you to search google and others.

    While exploring the mozdev site, check out Mouse Gestures, Pie Menus (both under Optimoz) and the Multizilla toolbar. These, for me, have made browsing fun and efficient once again.

    If you are keen, there is an easy to follow tutorial on building your own toolbars at;
    Building a toolbar for Netscape 7 (applies to Mozilla too). I used this to write a toolbar to search our Corporate Directory, Intranet and Google, It took me three days to write from scratch but is now quite widely used.

  29. Re:Potential feature? by Malc · · Score: 3, Informative

    I haven't tried under 1.2.1, but GVdP's instructions worked for me under 1.2 on both Win2K and WinXP.

  30. Re:Minor release patches? by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree, but for a different reason.

    Every time I get a new Mozilla, I have to uninstall and reinstall the entire thing. Trying to install on top inevitably leads to problems (not that I don't try to make it work.) For instance, this time, the Bookmark Sidebar couldn't load my bookmarks. When I uninstalled (and eliminated the resources) and reinstalled, they worked again.

    Of course, this is under Windows. I never had problems like this undir Linux.

    Anyway, I think that a Windows patch would probably leave enough alone that I'd be able to go along my merry way without this much hassle.

  31. Re:DTML... by C14L · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or for short:

    DHTML = HTML + CSS + JavaScript

    Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
    Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

    ??? I am not using "so many caps", I am using abreviation! What the heck...

  32. Re:No source yet? by sconest · · Score: 3, Informative

    As usual, source tarballs will be released some days after.
    In the meanwhile, get the source from CVS (The tag is MOZILLA_1_2_1_RELEASE)

    --
    Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
  33. Re:DTML... by Andreas(R) · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.alltheweb.com/ didn't render properly for me with Mozilla 1.2.0. Most of the text on the page was gone.

  34. Re:Annoyance by felipeal · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think someone posted a hint about that here on slashdot sometime ago. I took note of it, but haven't tried yet. Anyway, here it is:

    You can share bookmarks amoung all your installs of Mozilla, Phoenix, and probably other Gecko browsers (untested). All you do is add the following command to your prefs.js file:

    user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\userdude\\Application Data\\Mozilla\\Profiles\\default\\wx4vqyna.slt\\bo okmarks.html");

    In addition, you can share plugins by adding the following line to your environment. Her is an example of what I did on my Windows box:

    MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH = "C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Share\Plugin" (in Environment Variables on Win2k)

    Really helps so you don't have to redo plugins all the time and you can share one bookmark file for all!

  35. Re:DTML... by greed · · Score: 2, Informative

    "display" is a CSS thing, which would mean 'style="display:none"' in this case. "hidden" is a type of input widget, along with "text", "password", "checkbox" and has been in HTML for ages, at least since 2.0. (I didn't do any work with forms in older versions of HTML.)

    If you rely on CSS to hide your hidden field (I've used them for session IDs on generated pages, instead of using cookies), then it will "unhide" on non-CSS aware clients. Also, when unhidden, it will probably also be input-able; readonly is pretty new. "type=hidden" gets all the semantics right all at once (style="display:none" type="string" readonly), and it is valid HTML 2.0.

    Graceful degredation and all that. Of course, one must also fail to trust the client, so be careful what goes in anything the client sends back to you, hidden or not.

    (And you can omit the quotes on attribute values in certain cases; check http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#at tributes.)

  36. Use the Net Installer for smaller downloads by ChrisCampbell47 · · Score: 3, Informative
    I see your point about just getting a patch, but you should also know that you can just install using the Net Installer, which gives you a 200KB program to select the exact configuration you want to install, and THEN it downlaods and installs.

    http://www.mozilla.org/releases/

    Scroll down looking for "Net Installer" .

  37. Re:Why so much bigger than 1.2? by dbaron · · Score: 5, Informative

    The fix to bug 182500 was a single character. An 9 was changed to an 8. There was not a backout of way too much code.

    The problem was that a checkin that added a value to an array was incorrectly backed out. The size of the array was written explicitly instead of using sizeof and preprocessor magic, and the change to the size wasn't backed out along with the value added to the end of the array. The incorrect size caused whatever random data was stored after the end of the array to be read. (The array was in the HTML parser, containing a list of the types of things that are valid children of the HEAD element. Thus, I think the bugs can be traced to things that should have been in the BODY ending up in the HEAD.) Depending on the compiler, this caused different behavior, so the bug was worse on Windows (with MSVC 6.0) or on gcc 3.2 (on x86 Linux) than it was with egcs 1.1.2 (on x86 Linux).

    So, in other words, the size of the binaries shouldn't have changed. That's odd.

  38. Re:Do we really need this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    just go to your user preferences and disable the mozilla box. Don't bitch to us about it.

  39. Re:font smoothing in KDE? by Wylfing · · Score: 2, Informative
    why can't I figure out how to get Mozilla 1.2 to go ahead and smooth fonts in KDE on a RedHat 8 system

    You have to build Mozilla yourself to get the XFT font-smoothing goodness. Compile with the

    --enable-xft
    option. I haven't tried this yet myself. You have to get the code from CVS until the source tarballs are out later in the week.

    --
    Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
  40. Re:Strange characters in Mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Character coding.

    Check View|Character Coding

    It's probably mis-set.

  41. Re:font smoothing in KDE? by silvaran · · Score: 3, Informative

    Mozilla.org now has xft RPMs available for RH8. Check a mirror (mozilla.org is slow right now), but in any case it should be around /mozilla/releases/mozilla1.2.1/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft /RPMS/i386

    You can replace "xft" with "vanilla" if you want (to get the non-xft support), and RPMS with SRPMS if you want to build RPMS from source (perhaps for a different arch, remove the i386).

    Note that Mozilla isn't exactly dependent directly on KDE. To get smoothing, you actually use XFT, with is unrelated to KDE (KDE uses it through QT, but neither are a part of each other).

    Another poster mentioned the xft support is experimental. He's probably right, so ymmv. I've been running the RPMS I mentioned above for a few hours with 0 problems on RH8, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.