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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."

36 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Aint Slashdot Great? by The+Real+Chrisjc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Aint Slashdot Great? by Tyreth · · Score: 5, Funny

      Got a screenshot of the smooth scrolling? :)

  2. Ok.. you can stop now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    April Fools is OVER!

    6 months ago Mozilla was at .99..

    A project that's been in the work for well over 3 years..

    And NOW 1.4 Alpha?!?!

    Excuse me while I go pop some more of those hallucination thingies I had before

  3. 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 Sam+the+Nemesis · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I am with Mozilla developers on this decision. In my opinion, this is just an eye candy. But when it comes to usability, it is a real irritating stuff.

      Have you been through the frustrating experience of scrolling in IE with this smooth scrolling on?

    2. Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      smooth scrolling is in experimental stages.

      there's already atleast 1 crash bug filed against it (sometimes, horizontal scrolling causes a crash).

    3. Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default? by abischof · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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)

      --

      Alex Bischoff
      HTML/CSS coder for hire

    4. 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.

    5. Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default? by TomorrowPlusX · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --

      lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
  4. Not mentionned in the story ... by Pat__ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. I've had a look by Mattygfunk1 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    ___________

    Your Cheap Web Site Hosting costs as little as 3 bucks.

  6. Bookmarks, new feature by metz2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    An excellent new feature has been added. The ability to drag and drop bookmarks using the menu only. No longer do I have to go into Bookmark Manager!

    Still can't right-click the items in the bookmarks menu, but hey maybe in a future release. :-)

    Very good work IMHO.

  7. One feature i would like to see is... by !recycle · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    my sig sucks.
    1. Re:One feature i would like to see is... by metz2000 · · Score: 4, Informative

      This can be done but it is a but fiddly. You have to highlight the image (click and drag the mouse across an image), then press Ctrl-C (or Edit > Copy)... the image is now in the clipboard... It works for me anyway ;-)

  8. NTLM on Windows! by bunratty · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    1. Re:NTLM on Windows! by weave · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

    2. Re:NTLM on Windows! by GooberToo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm confused as to why you didn't do an incremental deployment or a test deployment. Seems like either would of easily caught this, with even the most modest of testing.

    3. Re:NTLM on Windows! by weave · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I agree. But as with most things in life, there's more to the story than appears.

      It all began in January of 2002, when the decision was made here to move from NT on desktops and NT 4 domain controler to XP on desktops and 2000 server and Active Directory on servers. The plan was to test the environment in vmware machines and get bugs worked out between January-April of that time period, change the servers to AD between semesters in May, then deploy XP desktop to some end users during the slow summer months, then do the deployment in August.

      We had used Netscape 4.7 for web and mail client during the NT days and had some nifty logon scripts to edit and install prefs.js and a netscape profile so users didn't have to configure squat. The profile locaton was changable by a simple registry change. It worked very well, the masses were happy.

      As anyone in academia is aware, it's a chaotic environment and crap kept being thrown on my team left and right, keeping them from working on this project. You have to understand that most faculty are primma donnas. Getting them to understand that a project of this scope requires a bunch of techs to basically disappear for months and not available to handle their pet projects, grants, and last minute crisis, escapes them. "We are here for the students" is the common mantra (which is true, but often they are best served by, ah like, decent planning).

      My pleas for understanding went on deaf ears. "We just signed a contract to provide xxx training and need this lab up in two weeks" for example. "Drop everything and do it."

      Now, understand, I'm a manager, not an administrator. I don't get to ask too many questions, I'm here to implement upper decisions and to take the blame when things fail.

      So, come May, we're not ready to move to Active Directory. I announce that we won't meet the August changeover date. I get my ass reamed. "Textbooks for XP have been ordered, syllabi changed, we can't go back now."

      So, panic kicks in and a lot was done with little testing. We also had hoped to roll out Netscape 7 but it didn't come out until the first week of classes, so we went with Mozilla 1.0.1 instead.

      Overall, the deployment was quite a success except for the Mozilla issue. I got lucky in a lot of areas. But people only see the things that fail.

      So yeah, in an ideal world, I could have avoided it through proper planning. And I got shafted due to decisions and situations beyond my control. Can you realize how frustrating it is to see decisions being made that will doom your project to failure, have no one care, and then when they do fail as you predict, you are the one who gets the blame? There is a reason why Dilbert is such a popular comic strip.

      And if you think CYA memos would have helped, they don't. I do them all the time, remind people of my dire warnings, and you just come off like a whining bitch.

      But I am the manager, and it's my job to take one for the team, so thanks for reminding me of my place...

      (Note to self: Never post to slashdot hoping to share real-life knowledge again. Everytime I do, I regret it. Just like I'll regret this one since it'll get picked apart and criticized further. It's like being in an abusive relationship. I know I should leave this place, but keep coming back for more abuse for some reason...)

  9. Export Restrictions by kinnell · · Score: 5, Funny
    This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria)

    They forgot France, Germany and Turkey.

    p.s. Taliban controlled areas? I thought the Taliban had been defeated.

    --
    If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
    1. Re:Export Restrictions by Malc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "p.s. Taliban controlled areas? I thought the Taliban had been defeated."

      What made you think that? So far they've failed to even achieve their primary reason for attacking Afghanistan: capturing Osama bin Laden.

  10. Lots of probs with RH8 RPMS by Chris+Croome · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have just installed the RH 8.0 RPMS and Ctr-T to open a new tab is broken (but right click on a link and open in new tab works).

    Also lots of preferences things are also broken, like everything under Navigator -- the error looks like the one you get with an invalid XML file.

    However it's still my fave browser and hopefully it's going to be more stable than 1.4 was... :-)

    --
    Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
  11. another good thing about 1.4a is... by jonwil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  12. Reading Spam-filtering rules? by hiryuu · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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?

    --
    Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
    1. Re:Reading Spam-filtering rules? by Aanallein · · Score: 3, Informative
      The spam filtering is a little too aggressive. Seems to mark everybody that isn't in my address book as junk.

      So mark all that email as non-junk again to correct the behaviour. The filters will learn very quickly if you do.
      The bayesian filters working correctly depends on having knowledge of both email that is considered junk and email that isn't junk.

      Is there a way to re-train the filters?

      If you really have to, you can delete training.dat to remove all training information (found in your profile, see the release notes for the location if you don't know).

  13. OS X eye candy by alexhmit01 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For 15 minutes, it blows you away. After 30 minutes, it fades into the background. After an hour, someone convinces you that they slow you down. After two weeks, you realize that they provide you with visual clues that make you faster, because you know what is going on without thinking, because that "eye candry" is a useful part of the UI...

    Alex

    1. Re:OS X eye candy by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Funny

      without thinking

      No truer words have ever been spoken about users in general.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  14. Where is Phoenix? by DeadBugs · · Score: 4, Funny

    There has not been a new release of the stripped down Phoenix browser since December 7th. I notice that the nightly builds are still being updated. I hope they are not spending all this time trying to come up with a new name.

    --
    http://www.kubuntu.org/
  15. Important bugs still open by digitect · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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.)

    --
    There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
  16. Re:bookmark improvements by mu_wtfo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Roaming Profiles *is* being worked on...It's the pet project of Ben Bucksch over at Beonex. He's already made great progress - you can see for yourself, check out bug 124029.

    --
    If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
  17. Location bar autocomplete tip by ortholattice · · Score: 4, Informative
    I liked the 1.2.1 behavior of "first click on location bar selects all", so that "click" then "s" immediately autocompletes the most frequently visited "s" site (e.g. slashdot). This went away in 1.3 with a kind of 3rd-click-selects-all behavior. To restore it in recent nightlies, and I assume 1.4alpha, put in your user.js:

    user_pref("browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll", true);
    user_pref("browser.urlbar.clickAtEndSelects", true);

    This will also restore the behavior partially in 1.3, but only if you click on top of the currently displayed URL (i.e. it won't work if you click in the blank area because the 2nd user_pref was implemented after 1.3).

  18. SPELLCHECKER ... ADD IT DAMN-IT!!! by molarmass192 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What is it going to take to get them to add the spellchecker from mozdev to the main Mozilla CVS. Smooth scrolling, great fantastic but where's the spellchecker?!?. I'm getting really tired of the "oh ... next release" promises. Stop adding menial improvements and get this moved to the main!!! Even Slashdot is a perfect example, imagine ... right click, check spelling your posts. It's certainly a hell of alot more important than "oh look, the redraw is somewhat less jerky when you scroll", wow, fantastic. Come on, somebody with a say get this moved in PLEASE!

    --

    Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
    1. Re:SPELLCHECKER ... ADD IT DAMN-IT!!! by Crispin+Cowan · · Score: 3, Informative
      I have been using this Mozdev spell checker for about a week, and I love it.

      Crispin
      ----
      Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
      Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
      Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
      Available for purchase

  19. Not really so surprising by sjbe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    This shouldn't really be so surprising. With OSX replacing MacOS, there really are just two major operating system platforms out there, Windows and unix, of which OSX is one of the many varieties of the latter. It's unix underpinnings make OSX much easier for developers to port their projects to.

    MacOS for all its good features is a very unique and hence more difficult to support operating system, at least from the standpoint of cross platform compatibility. Impossible? Obviously not. But since MacOS is no longer under active development, it shouldn't surprise anyone that it isn't really worthwhile for the "official" project to continue to develop for it. There are only a finite amount of development resources out there so it makes sense to develop for the platforms with the best prospects moving forward, namely Windows and unix.

    I'm half sure that someone will probably take up the banner and try to port the more recent versions to MacOS. And that's one of the great things about open source. But there is a cost to remaining with older code bases. You take the risk of being left behind. That is among the reasons I no longer run OS/2, Windows 3.1, MacOS and a few other operating systems I've used heavily over the years. Eventually the costs of not switching become tooh great. Apparently for many Mac owners they aren't at that point yet. But they will be sooner or later. It's inevitable. The maintainers of the mozilla project simply recognize this fact and chose to deal with it now rather than later.

  20. lack of MNG support in IE by yerricde · · Score: 3, Funny

    Got a screenshot of the smooth scrolling? :)

    Yeah, but IE 6 can't display MNG images out of the box.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  21. Re:I miss the lizard by keith73 · · Score: 3, Informative

    go to deskmod.com for lots of alternative splash screens for mozilla. just save any one of them to the directory where mozilla.exe resides. 1 cool feature would be if you could save them all in a directory and select one from the preferences or have it load a random one everytime you launch it. http://www.deskmod.com/?show=showcat&cat_name=mozs plash - keith

    --
    -- Does anybody know where the 'any' key is on the keyboard?
  22. Get em out of the way by buzzcutbuddha · · Score: 4, Funny

    • Mozilla is dead! Use [Phoenix|Opera|Chimera|Galeon]
    • [Phoenix|Opera|Chimera|Galeon|IE] suck, Mozilla is the only true browser.
    • Mozilla is not a browser, it's a platform
    • Mail client in Mozilla sucks
    • Why haven't they fixed bug xxxx yet. It's been like forever!
    Did I miss any?