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?

[Tyreth]

Got a screenshot of the smooth scrolling? :)

Ok.. you can stop now

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[Anonymous Coward]

smooth scrolling is in experimental stages.

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

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?

[RoLi]

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.

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.

Bookmarks, new feature

[metz2000]

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.

Re:One feature i would like to see is...

[metz2000]

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 ;-)

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.

Re:NTLM on Windows!

[weave]

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...)

Export Restrictions

[kinnell]

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.

Re:Export Restrictions

[Malc]

"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.

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?

OS X eye candy

[alexhmit01]

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

Where is Phoenix?

[DeadBugs]

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.

Location bar autocomplete tip

[ortholattice]

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).

SPELLCHECKER ... ADD IT DAMN-IT!!!

[molarmass192]

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!

Get em out of the way

[buzzcutbuddha]

• 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?