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Mozilla 1.4b Loosed
An anonymous reader writes "The fine Mozilla folks have decided to bless us with the release of Mozilla 1.4b this weekend. Highlights include support for NTLM authentication, usability improvements, and lots of performance, stability, and site compatibility fixes. As always, the release notes have more detailed info on changes."
Much more closely than I do now. After 1.0 the improvements seemed less noticeable to me. I suppose this means the software has matured. Is anyone really excited about the new features? Are they interesting from an end user perspective?
Actually, that could be a good thing. It may lead to a deployment of Mozilla within an organization that has resources secured by MS server packages (IIS, SQL Server, etc).
In my opinion this shows the Mozilla team being a bit more agressive in making inroads into the corporate (sometimes MS-dominated) world. Good for them.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Many people will consider NTLM support as superfluous pro-MS bloatware and another useless addition to Mozilla.
:)
I'd like to point out this is just plain wrong. There are many developers that are forced to use IE to do their job just because the company's product runs on IIS and uses NTLM.
Mozilla supporting NTLM means better ways of testing software for these developers, as well as giving a better idea of the web homogeneity of the product.
Free myself from IE at work ! Go for NTLM, Mozilla !
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
I realy don't care anymore about its features. Its a fine browser as it is, however launching it on a Linux or Mac boxen takes long time -- compared to Opera or IE (on a Mac). I wish they could make Mozilla a little faster and lighter, than add features to it.
"source availability?"
Fair enough. However, source code availability is not everybody's big concern. A lot of us just want a browser with a good interface, and Opera provides just that. It's certainly better than IE and arguably better than Mozilla.
The big Pro for Opera here on Slashdot is that they've ported it to portable devices such as the Zaurus. They've done a lot of respectable work in that area. They may not be 'Open Source', but they are kicking Microsoft's butt in both UI and usefulness outside of PCs.
Ignoring Opera is heartbreaking. It's taken a number of steps in the right direction, it deserves more credit than it has now. I can't believe I got modded down for my earlier comment about it. "You must love Mozilla to enter".
"Derp de derp."
If you're crashing, it's probably Java. Reinstall it. Get the latest. Also, make sure you have the latest Flash plugin.
"when they give it away for free without ads... I'll think about it. why pay for something you can get for free?..why fuck over the home user? "
Who says the user's being 'fucked over'? I've been using Opera since 6 came out. I thought the Ad support would bother me. It doesn't. It just sits up there unobtrusively. The only time it ever bothered me was when they had an audio ad. When people complained it, it disappeared. There are no popups etc.
Asking people to pay for software is not ridiculous. Yeah, it's okay that Mozilla's free and may end up in perpetual development. But what we've seen so far is a slow evolution with new features popping up here and there. That's a far cry from a team of people with profit as a motive working their hardest to come up with something new and interesting. Take a look at the difference from Opera 6 to 7. It's a HUGE facelife. Mozilla doesn't have the incentive to do anything like that until they find themselves behind.
I'm glad that Opera found a way to do not charge the customer and remain profitable. None of this PBS style pledge drives to get money to keep it going. (note: that comment wasn't directed specifically at Mozilla, just remembering a lot of discussion over the last coupla years about keeping free-software alive)
So no, I don't see it as the customer getting 'fucked over'. If Opera were using Kazaa style 'pop up all over the place' ads, then yes I'd agree that's a doomed product.
"Derp de derp."
Slashdot covers opera releases including major releases and minor ones for Linux. It is hardly ignored.
/. is news for nerds stuff that matters, but it also unabashidly has an OS bias.
Perhaps if Opera had an open and transparent development prossess, and provided a free (as in free Godammit) rendering engine used in few other browsers. And built a cross platform GUI toolkit (ok this release is not too relovent to the last two) it would be get a front page story every time a developer farted.
As is Opera is a great browser that gets a fair amount of buzz on this site, but due its slower and opaque developement it does not get as much continual praise.
And it is a weekend on tope of that.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Because, if one component crashes, the other does also. They are that integrated.
Mozilla is considered to be the flagship open source browser, and one of the strengths of the open source desktop lineup. Therefore, a lot of open source fanboys are interested in its progress. Opera is of interest to a far smaller subset of people, seeing as it has neither the standards compliance, platform support, or freedom (beer and speech) of Mozilla. I'm not saying Opera doesn't have it's strengths, but a lot of people are more interested in Mozilla than Opera.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
IMHO if the mozilla developers organized one thread or one fork per window - they would be better off. If they are interested in doing this - then they should change the way malloc() is handled.
What do you mean by "better off"? Would it fix bugs? Improve latency? Or what?
Ever heard of profiling? If you think that something's slow, or inefficient, you profile it to figure out where the inefficiencies are. Believe me, if malloc showed up on the list, it would have been optimized long ago (and from what I understand, Mozilla already does some pretty clever things with malloc).
You're trying to suggest a solution, when you haven't even established a problem. Until you have some gprof or cachegrind output proving that more malloc kung fu is needed, I doubt any Mozilla developers will listen to you.
Besides, your original premise is that Mozilla needs one thread per window. What about the networking thread? Do you know anything about how a modern web browser is implemented or are you just making up random junk?
The norm on Unix/Linux is for an application to be usable by all users on the system. Anything less is a severe bug. I'm very disappointed that 1.4 will still have this bug and still require the work around in the release notes for multiuser installs.
Once you get past that bug it is a great program. I love Mozilla.