Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla.org Launches Mozilla 1.3
theBrownfury writes "Mozilla 1.3 is out and about. New to this version are features like image auto sizing, bayesian junk-mail filtering, dynamic profile switching, about:config for a pretty view into all of Mozilla's "secret" settings, an initial version of Midas for rich text editing, and a lot of other fixes for performance, standards compliance and site compatability. Also with 1.3 Mozilla is now applying machine learning to improve the autocomplete feature. Mozilla 1.3 is now the official stable release from mozilla.org. Users of all previous versions should upgrade to 1.3 for the latest in features and stability. More info at the 1.3 release page and discussions at mozillaZine.org."
what, no mp3 player?
Thats fine is you want the bloat. (although the kitchen sink is pretty funny) But when is the phoenix browser project going to release .6?
Choose wisely you must...
Yeah! Got the Linux and Windows versions before the Slashdotting! In your face, Taco!
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I just heard this sad bit of news on talk radio; Slashdot browser star Phoenix was found dead in its Seattle home this morning. There weren't any details. Even if you didn't agree with its minimalist style, there's no doubting its contributions to browser culture. Truly an open source icon.
Autocomplete: the only browser feature that can turn Disney.com into DonkeyHumpingMaidens.com.
"Also with 1.3 Mozilla is now applying machine learning to improve the autocomplete feature."
Sounds good. Eventually I can just tell it "porn" and it will go grab all sorts of crazy shit for me to do naughty things to. Of course, I hope it doesn't work like the Tivo's related feature or I'll end up with 30 translations of goatse.cx and a giant pic of Janet Reno in a bikini.
Shawn
Because you gotta bitch
If you haven't been using the 1.3 preview releases, and so haven't been running the spam filters yet, remember they take a while to get going. Look at http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html , the results are for around 8000 sorted messages. Just keep correcting it and you'll be fine.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
...you can now use a version of Galeon later than 1.2.7 without worrying about a dodgy beta copy of Mozilla. In the past if I'd wanted 1.2.8 I'd have to download and use the possibly unstable Mozilla 1.3 beta.
Get Mozilla 1.3 here and here.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I just barely got done downloading Netscape 4! stupid 1200 baud modem!
Everything you need to know, step by step, can be found here.... I've been building AA/TrueType support into Mozilla for a while now, and I have no idea why it's not enabled by default, or why others don't config their builds to do the same. Mozilla looks like absolute shit without smooth fonts.
Additionally, you can find a webcam movie of me eating a donut by clicking the link below.
Bowie J. Poag
Finally mozilla supports unicode in the titlebar properly and also the address bar! Not the most important feature but it certaintly made things ugly to look at when you look at sites in different character sets. (This is reffering to Windows rels. btw)
Make Moz1.3 look just like IE... with the IE skin.
Force-upgrade people without them noticing.
At least it doesn't have an operating system built into it like IE.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Autocomplete doesn't use machine learning in 1.3. It was an experimental, disabled-by-default, feature in 1.3beta for data-collection.
Aren't we supposed to be nerds here? Doesn't that mean we should all be capable of installing a fucking browser properly?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
If you read the ML autocomplete page, the main "feature" in 1.3 is logging what entry people tend to pick from the autocomplete list; this will be fed into development of the ML autocomplete. They have a super-alpha version of the engine in there, sure, but really what you should be doing with 1.3 is feeding them the info. Don't expect intelligent autocompletion.
Unfortunately they still haven't added NTLM support. If you're in a total Microsoft shop with a MS proxy, if the admin has it totally secured, nothing other than IE can be used. Having this feature in Mozilla will help reestablish it as a corporate browser....and help some of us who can only use IE.
Oh and the bug is 3 years old. I know some work is being done on the Windows Mozilla, but damn. Three years?
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
This is the quickest I ever installed software... hot off the press.
I LOVE mozilla... too bad more users don't have this expirience.
Just installed it on OS X. Installation was literally "dragon-drop" (ba dum bum).
What is music when you despise all sound?
The RPMs for RedHat 8 have the Xft support enabled. (They're not released yet, but they probably will be soon.)
It's not enabled by default because it requires libraries (Xft2, fontconfig) that many users don't have. At some point someone might modify the code so that it tests for the presence of the library and loads all the required function pointers manually, but that's a bit of work. What's available now is good enough for distributors and good enough for people who know to get the RH8 RPMs.
It's bug 176715 and should be fixed by Mozilla 1.4: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176715
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
How about this ?
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
Nice OS, all it needs now is an internet browser. [SlashCompo: Fastest Post to Get a Troll Mod]
Am I the only one here that is happy Mozilla 1.3 is out? After reading the posts here it sounds like /. would bitch if they were hung with a new rope.
/.ers also complain about)
What is wrong with Mozilla? "Bloat" what exactly is "bloat" memory footprint? HDD footprint? Load Time? Compaired to IE I find it to be very compeditive, plus you are not helping lord gates and mount redmond take over the net/world. You are providing them with a serious challenge which is better for everyone.
Sorry, I just work up and I'm a little cranky. I don't meean to bitch at the parent post specificly just people that are complaining about nit picky stuff while overlooking all the time/energy spent giving them a free speech/beer answer to IE and redmond (something
I just check my weblog stats and non IE browsers accounted for 12% of hits so far today (out of 1.1million). About two months ago it was only 7%. Mozilla itself is at about 6.2%. Let's hope this trend continues.
Automatic image resizing is off by default in Mozilla (although on by default in Phoenix), and can be toggled by clicking on the image.
I have to say I don't like it much either. For Phoenix users, it can be turned off by adding user_pref("browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing ", false); to user.js in the profile directory, or by manipulating the browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing preference in about:config .
I'm sure the Mozilla gods have blessed us with a config option to disable this "feature."
Actually, you have a preference to _enable_ the feature. It's off by default. Also, once enabled (by going to Edit->Preferences...->Appearance and checking the box titled "Enable automatic image resizing") a simple click on the image will restore it to its original size.
This really is a friendly implementation. I much prefer it to the feature implemented by the other guys.
--Asa
You are aware that mozilla is hosted in AOL's datacenter, arn't you? Good luck slashdotting it.
From domainwhitepages.com:
OrgName: Netscape Communications Corp.
OrgID: NSCP
Address: 501 E. Middlefield
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US
NetRange: 207.200.64.0 - 207.200.127.255
CIDR: 207.200.64.0/18
NetName: NETSCAPE-CIDR
NetHandle: NET-207-200-64-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.NETSCAPE.COM
NameServer: NS2.NETSCAPE.COM
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1996-09-06
Updated: 2001-03-28
TechHandle: AOL-NOC-ARIN
TechName: America Online, Inc.
TechPhone: +1-703-265-4670
TechEmail: domains@aol.net
I think AOL can hold up aginst a slashdotting...
The nightly builds support AA but it isn't enabled by default. I'm using this in my user.js:
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", false);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
pref("font.antialias.min", 0);
Looks good to me!
Check out the Progress and Future of Mozilla-the-application-suite for information on what's coming up in the next few months.
The way I think completion should work is to match the shortest matching non-unique segment. /info.
3 /20282 09&mode=nested&tid=95&tid=185&tid=154"
If I type "www.moz" and I've been to "www.mozilla.com" (and various subdirectories) and "www.mozone.com" (and various subdirectories), it should show just those two matches, without the subdirectories. I should then be able to hit tab to choose one or the other, and then continue to type. Say I choose www.mozilla.com and type
Now, if the only pages matching this is "/info/win32/editor.html" "info/win32/browser.html" "/info/linux/browser.html" then I should get to choose between "/info/linux/" and "/info/win32/".
This way I can type "sl" and see all the individual sites starting with sl, before looking through thousands of lines like
"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/1
Also, if there are no matches, the window shouldn't come up at all. It's a pain to have to click repeatedly to get out of the URL entry if the url you are entering doesn't match anything. (at least on the Linux version)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
That the idea to use it as a platform to develope portable applications (using ECMAScript + XUL) is catching on slower than some people would expect. This is a pity, because ungodly amounts of effort goes in making this possible, and still people see it just as a web browser (a large one).
Other than that, Mozilla-the-web-browser is fine, Mozilla-the-messaging suite is at least good enough, and Mozilla-the-javascript-debugger shows lots of promises.
I don't include Mozilla-the-IDE (Komodo) in the list, since it deviates too much from the usual distribution (even if it is Gecko Inside(TM)).
Now waiting for Mozilla-the-organizer (thru Calendar, planned for 1.4 ~ 1.5). Perhaps a Mozilla-the-file-manager would be something worth implementing (but Meow seems definitively dead).
"Tools | Mark Selected Messages as *Not* Junk"
There have been a bunch of posts to the newsgroup and this has been the problem.
Unless you tell the filter what is spam *AND NOT* spam then it only has half of the information it needs to make a decision. It's a bimodal decision tree that is used to determine whether a message is spam or not. ie;
for each word {
the probability it is spam is x
and the probability it is ham is y
}
A calculation (Bayes) of those probabilities intersecting usually places the probability that any given message is spam either close to 1 (spam) or 0 (ham). What happens if you don't train ham is the probability of all messages will be around .5 and that is not enough to say anything definitively and defaults to delivery.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
For a better web browser that does support mp3 playing, go here.
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
Yes, I know I can save some folders and do other weird stuff to make sure this doesn't happen, but by god, think of the newbies. (Ok, so the last part was a bit over the top, but still...)
Oh, and with the new spam-filtering-rules Mozilla has now become my fav mailclient. Combined with IMAP it just rocks.
Thank You to all developers. Perhaps I should go file that bug now. The annoying one.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Unfortunately Mozilla still has a horrible usability flaw that the developers refuse to address. It caches DNS lookups forever, and does not honor the TTL on the record - there is no way to turn this off. This means that any site that uses changing DNS records with a short TTL for failover or load balancing will be broken for Mozilla users. IE works fine. This issue makes Mozilla look really pathetic in a corporate environment.
Search bugzilla for "dns cache".
Since my computer started getting infected with all kinds of ActiveX exploits, I've switched to browsing the internet only with Mozilla. (I use IE for work stuff that requires ActiveX) Popup management alone would have been a good reason to switch. However, I haven't noticed it being any slower than IE lately. I _HAVE_ noticed that Windows tries to swap Mozilla out of memory the first chance it gets. It's almost uncanny. I'll have a bunch of applications running, and Mozilla is always the first one to get swapped out when I'm working on something else. Obviously, this rarely happens with IE (presumably because 9/10 of it is loaded when you boot Windows). Anybody have any idea why it seems to be so much worse with Mozilla? (Running Windows 2000).
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
We looked into XUL as a solution to our content management system about 12 or 18 months ago, I don't remember, and my concept of time is seriously warped from the dor-com days.
At the time, they CLAIMED that you could do all this cool stuff with XUL, but the documentation (including the 1 ONE official book on XUL, sucked). They all focused on building the GUI inside of the Mozilla browser.
We were working with a potential partner that has a browser based application, whose bain of existance is IE's print feature (they log printing with their print button, but an IE print would trash that). The idea of a "stripped down" browser that would start at their screen would rock. Additionally, using XUL widgets would let them eliminate the frames and other garbage, making their app easier. They liked the idea of using a XUL toolbar instead of a frame with buttons.
Unfortunately, weeks of research through their docs went nowhere, and we worked on a Java solution, and the deal went south over time. Now we have our own Java based solution, and don't want to migrate to XUL.
The XUL + ECMAScript stuff should have been pushed earlier with proper documentation. Instead they pushed it to grab some marketshare when they weren't ready.
I love Camino/Chimera, and the other Gecko browsers (use Phoenix when on a Windows machine), but they missed a lot of time with not getting XUL as an early solution. They should have put out (early) some shells that you could start from then add your other functionality.
Sure, other projects have picked it up since then, but with the XUL + ECMAScript solution being the red-headed stepchild for a while, they lost some steam.
It'll happen, but every year that they wasted will take 2 years to recover, as growth has slowed down and projects chose other tech.
That said, I love Mozilla now, but I think that the shifting of priorities cost them mindshare that will be painful to recover.
Alex
Oh, please. That's just one big stupid OSS flag-waver. IE versions since 4 have been plenty stable and, yes, I do administer LANs of up to 80 machines, all running MSIE 5.5 and 6 reliably. For me and other "die-hard Windows users," Mozilla hangs and crashes. IE doesn't. Does that mean that Mozilla sucks?
Hm. First, I will say this: IE is stable, sure. But does IE do what the user wants to be done?
How many users can raise their hands and indicate that it's okay for web pages to pop up additional browser windows to display advertisements. Perhaps even maximize some of them.
How many users would say it's okay to "stretch" the standards -- standards that the rest of the Internet is based upon -- implementing them in MSIE so that pages end up being IE-only?
I will give you this: MSIE is stable on Windows 2000 and XP in my experience. Mozilla is stable on Windows *lt;any version>, Linux, *BSD, Mac, and so on. Mozilla lets you decide if you want sites to spawn new browser processes on your machine. Mozilla complies with established standards -- standards that extend far beyond the Wintel world.
If you use linux because it works for you, that's just great, but don't go making blanket statements that are dead wrong. Wishing doesn't make it so. If IE 'sucked,' it would be obsoleted by popular opinion. It doesn't and it isn't.
Honestly, this has nothing to do with reliability, or Linux. It has to do with a browser doing things according to *your* preferences, *your* best interests, as opposed to those of the company distributing the browser (or their partners).
And, WRT your familiar commentary about the magic of having "the source," how much does that mean to the 99.6% of the world who can't code? I certainly can't code beyond scripts, so I don't care and I'm not about to hire someone to do it for me. If it's broken, I find something that ain't, just like everyone else.
It's not about being able to modify or review the source, it's about the methodology that is open source. The fact that hundreds, possibly thousands in this case, of competant programmers are reviewing each-other's source code. All coming from different environments, different backgrounds, different training -- and all spotting different potential problem areas. Bringing in different new ideas.
This, as opposed to a company who may say something like "Okay, you've found a potentially serious security flaw. Here's what we're going to do: pretend it's not there, we'll fix it in the next major release, and hope no "hacker" finds it on his or her own."
Don't tell me this doesn't happen on a daily basis over in Redmond (and in other closed-source projects).
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
That sounds like a challenge! Everyone, hit AOL quick! We can do it! GO GO GO!
Sorry, couldn't resist ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.