Run For Cover; It's Mozilla 1.4 Alpha

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."

Comments

Aint Slashdot Great?

[The Real Chrisjc]

Heh, thanks to my Slashdot subs, I have already downloaded this release, and I must say, the smooth scrolling is lovely :)) Well, its not majorly different, but nice.
about:config anyone?
Get it for cheap thrills of smooth scroll if you havn't already :D

Re:Aint Slashdot Great?

[Sam the Nemesis]

Well, regarding the smooth scrolling stuff, I have always hated that feature in IE. When I just want to scroll by a line or two, it will scroll away 5-6 lines. And I'll tell you, it is really irritating.

I hope that in Mozilla, it is not on by default.

Not mentionned in the story ...

[Pat__]

The code for the bookmarks has been rewritten so you can see major updates there including icons in the sidebar (still waiting for icons in the personal toolbar) but that's a good start.

Also the dynamic image resizing in Composer is way too cool :-)
Worth launching Composer just to see it in action.

And finally for those of you using the pie-menu extentions you should download the latest version compatible with 1.4 alpha.

I've had a look

[Mattygfunk1]

I have been playing around with the development version prior to this, and it will definately be a big step-up from 1.3 when the final is released. The speed, look, and feel make the best browser even better.

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One feature i would like to see is...

[!recycle]

the ability to copy images straight out of a browser window. it is one feature that i have always liked about IE.

NTLM on Windows!

[bunratty]

Asa didn't mention one new major feature -- Windows builds now support NTLM authentication. This was the one blocker for lots of folks who wanted to run Mozilla at work. Eventually, other platforms will get NTLM, too.

Re:NTLM on Windows!

[weave]

Let's hope they fix bug 162025, another huge corporate blocker. If a place has a GPO that redirects the %appdata% folder, mozilla won't work. If a mozilla profile is pointed at UNC pathname, it won't work.

Read my ranting about it for more details in comment #28 of that bug.

I manage 2000 desktops and deployed Mozilla before fully understanding the ramifications of this bug. The end result was a lot of pissed off users of lost profiles over and over.

Don't think it's a big deal? My employer's entire IT structure was recently looked over by an outside consultant and during my interview, she asked "What is your e-mail client?" I said "Mozilla." She was like "Mozilla was a big mistake let me tell you. Your users hate it."

And the only reason they hate it is because Windows, when using roaming profiles (and my users roam a lot being it's a college) likes to move the location of the profile (eg, ...\username, ...\username.domain, ...\username.domain.001, etc) and if that happens, mozilla goes to hell and loses the profile. And you can't move %appdata% to a UNC path via GPO to get around this because Mozilla just plain ole won't work then.) And while you can move most of the profile to a fixed drive letter place, like Z:\mozilla, registry.dat file still must remain in %appdata%.

So here I tried to give my users a browser alternative and I got reamed by a consultant (whose final report hasn't been released yet) for doing it.

So yeah, I'm a bit bitter... If you manage a windows domain environment, avoid Mozilla, Netscape 7, or anything based on the code, until this bug is fixed,. Learn from my misfortune.

another good thing about 1.4a is...

[jonwil]

that it now builds with MingW GCC on Win32 (well ok, some of the patches havent gone into the tree yet but still).

If you want to see the details, check bug 134113

Calender?

[the endless]

Can anyone tell me if the calender is part of the default build now?

I'm not sure because (naughty puppy that I am) I installed straight over the top of my previous installation... so I'm not sure if the calender happens to be there because it was carried over from my previous install, or because it's part of the build.

Seems like a funny omission from the release notes if it is there by default now!

Reading Spam-filtering rules?

[hiryuu]

One thing I had hoped to find, based subsequent interest from reading the various whitepapers on Bayesian filtering for spam, is an ability to study the spam I get and the rules implemented and learned. Even just an overview of the statistics would be nice (or a plainly-obvious way to access the data to do my own analysis); this became particularly relevant to me after "training" my filters on 1.3 on several hundred spam I'd saved, only to find several false positives in the first few weeks (most related to my job-hunting efforts, one from a friend letting me know briefly that her email had changed, and one from an old college buddy asking how I was doing after so long).

I hear "usability improvements" in regards to the junk mail filtering, and wonder if this kind of thing might be involved, or on the horizon. (Yeah, I know I could download the alpha, but I'm a wuss who likes stable releases.) I see "context menu items" in the release notes, but that doesn't mean much to me. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Linux/X11

[Ender Ryan]

Another poster pointed out that this can be done in windows by first highlighting the image, but I'm assuming he's doing this in windows. What I'd like to know is, is this even possible in Linux/X11?

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[abischof]

You can enable smooth scrolling by adding this line to your prefs.js file (while Mozilla isn't running).

user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true);

However, it's not entirely useful since Mozilla will crash when you try to scroll horizontally if smooth scrolling is enabled. In any case, here's the bug discussing whether smooth scrolling should be enabled by default (which I think could make sense, once that horizontal-scrolling crasher is fixed).

(You may need to cut-n-paste the Bugzilla URLs into your browser, since Bugzilla doesn't accept referers from Slashdot)

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[TomorrowPlusX]

I don't know about you, but I think smooth scrolling shouldn't be considered "eye candy".

Smooth scrolling is there for a valid *reason* -- it makes it so much easier for your eyes to follow the vertical jump a page makes when you click up or down (or mouse-wheel, etc).

Think about it, you're at the end of some line, you mouse wheel, and now the page has jumped up (say) 20 pixels. Now, where do you bring your eye to start the next line? You might have to track the end point of the line you started on, and then progress.

With smooth scrolling it's easier to follow because there are no jumps, just transitions. Simple, obvious, and very very worthwhile.

And if you're worried about cpu usage, it's all done in the video hardware anyway. Just blit the region up one pixel and draw one new scanline at the bottom. Scrollable regions have worked this way since the early 90's anyway, even in marginal operating systems like BeOS, so it's not like this is radical new technology and really hammering your multi-gigahertz processor anyway.

Oh, and by the way, I've been using mac os x for several months now, and frankly, I find the smooth transitions to be transparent and actually completely useful. I go back to windows or linux where things just *pop* into place and I think "who did that?" and "what are you modal to" etc etc, whereas the transition effects in os x, which take up all of .25 seconds of my precious time, make relationships very clear.

So there. Ptttbt.

Sill no MacOS support :-(

[Andy_R]

It's interesting/annoying that since version 1.2, Mozilla only supports Mac OSX, especially given that a large portion of the Apple community is unwilling to move to the new system.

I'm in a building where there are about 2 dozen macs, and I've converted about 50% of the people here to Mozilla, but as none of us use OSX (and quite a few have horror stories about trying to change), I'm starting to see people switch back to IE.

I'm not trying to spark off the MacOS vs OSX debate here, but I wonder if the Mozilla project will end up losing a lot of it's market share by not supporting people like me who can't/won't/don't need to switch to OSX. It's strange that there are ports to OSes so obscure that I've never heard of them, but not the OS that the majority of people in my building use.

Is there any way which someone not tech-savvy enough to help with a port to OS9 could help to persuade the Mozilla people to give us the extra features and stability that we are missing out on?

Being the only MacOS browser with decent spam filtering would give people a really good reason to change, I'm sure I could boost Mozilla's market share here to 80-90% in that was available for MacOS.

Mozilla trying to become IE?

[G.I. Suck]

I just want to know why Mozilla is trying so hard to become the next IE? I mean, with useless features like auto-image resizing and smooth scrolling, features I never use at all anyways, Mozilla might as well be soo bloated like IE! I miss my M4 mozilla :( Thank god for junk mail controls though, its twarting my spam at a rate of 17 emails a day!!! Hazaa for Mozilla Junk Mail Controlls!

Important bugs still open

[digitect]

Version 1.4 *still* hasn't closed my three favorite bugs:

Home button should appear on main Toolbar:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89350

Edit Source using External Editor:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35268

Address book: Lists lose addresses:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96877

(Sorry for the dumb links, bugzilla won't accept SlashDot referals.)

question about profiles

[cetan]

How often am I supposed to be creating a new profile? Every release? Every major release (i.e. non alpha or beta)?

It's a real pain in the rear to get a new profile going, especially when it comes to mail/news. For some reason I've got about 37 different "Inbox" files in what I perceive to be my Local Folders. who the hell knows which one is which?

Anyone have a clue on this one because my tube of cluepaste is fresh out...

alpha software disclaimer

[illegalien]

I update nightly builds every 3-5 days and I find that even the alpha builds are stable enough for everyday use.

I know the disclaimer is just to stop lame bastards from complaining about crashes, but it's hardly an issue...

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[farnsworth]

In my opinion, this is just an eye candy.

Hi, I coded the smooth scrolling that was checked into 1.4 (with help from roc, thanks roc.)

I can assure you that I my motivation was *not* to create eye candy. If you use high latency displays like those on a laptop, smooth scrolling makes it *much* easier to read more than a page of text. Smooth scrolling became almost a necesity for me.

I don't work for netscape and I have no affiliation with mozilla.org. I just patched my local tree then filed a bug so I wouldn't have to keep patching. As it turns out, some other folks liked it, it got tweaked, then checked in.

If it doesn't serve any purpose for you, by all means leave it turned off.

Using Mozilla 1.3 now but STILL need IE for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do, and there's just one remaining reason for me:

The ability to save an entire web page including all images, etc. into a single file.

With IE, I can save to a .mht file and this is a must-have feature for me.

If Mozilla can both read & write these .mht files, I would never need to use IE. I'd even settle for Mozilla using its own "open" format to achieve this although I'd have to use IE to open up the existing .mht files I've already archived.

I don't give a crap about smooth scrolling but its features like support for .mht files that I'd value most in future releases of Mozilla.

And finally, keep up the great work Mozilla team! The frequent releases over the past year have been very much appreciated.