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Run For Cover; It's Mozilla 1.4 Alpha

Posted by timothy on from the you-could-be-the-lucky-winner dept.

asa writes "Mozilla 1.4 Alpha is out. This release features dynamic image and table resizing in Composer, smooth scrolling (see release notes for enabling this feature,) and usability improvements to spam filtering. In addition to these feature improvements, 1.4a also contains fixes for performance, stability, standards support and website compatibility. This is an alpha release so expect bugs, and don't use it unless you are willing to live with the risks inherent in such a release (ie. crashes, data loss, etc.). More information is available in the release notes."

2 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Smooth scrolling not on by default? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not on by default? What's up with this? Those less technical users who value eye candy like this are the ones that don't know how to turn this thing on and they wouldn't know that such a thing exists, either...

    1. Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default? by RoLi · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Why do so many people believe that "less technical users [are those] who value eye candy"?

      Is there even something, I'm not even asking for proof, just a hint or some study that supports the hypothesis that less technical users want eye-candy?

      I have several hard facts that are supporting the theory that less technical users don't give a shit about eye candy:

      • Less technical users used MS DOS for over half a decade when Apple and others were available as alternative
      • In the late 90's, Enlightment was sure one of the most - if not the most - eyecandy infested Windowmanager. Yet it was only used by geeks, less technical users didn't care.
      • The first search-engines like Yahoo put more and more eyecande (and advertisments) on their sites - and Google wiped the floor with them by providing the simplest search engine interface possible with absolutely no eye-candy, just a white page.

      I also tried MacOSX. In the first 15 minutes, you are really blown away. It's smooth, everything is animated, everything looks good. After about 20 minutes, you get used to the effects, after an hour they just slow you down and go on your nerves. I could only choose between 2 different types of animation for minimize, so you can't even get rid of some of it.

      If eye-candy gets into the way, it should be off by default, IMO and smooth-scrolling is a prime example.