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Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released
levell writes "Mozilla 1.4RC2 has been released. It looks like the final version of 1.4 may be out soon. It looks good although there are some problems with java on old linux systems (discussed here). 1.4 will be a long lived branch that some distributors will base versions of their own software on (e.g. Netscape planned release, codenamed "buffy"). 1.4 will be the last version of Mozilla released as a suite, after that the switch to separate browser, e-mail etc. applications will take place."
It isn't just old Linux systems that have problems with Java - in fact, Java applets are one of two issues that cause Mozilla to crash. The other is viewing too many images in tabs - even if you close tabs after you've viewed the pics, and try not to keep more than a half-dozen open at once, eventually it will die, and the Netscape Quality Agent pops up...
I linked to it in the story but the summary of the java problems on linux is:
You need to use a version of the java plugin that has been compiled with the same version of gcc that mozilla has been, the 1.4 latest branch mozilla build has been compiled with gcc3.2 and therefore you need to use the gcc3.2 plugin that ships in the latest betas of Sun's JRE (and there is also a suitable Blackdown java).
The kicker comes if you run an old linux distribution (e.g. Redhat 7.x), - you don't have the dynamic link libraries required to run gcc 3.2 code as they weren't available when RH7.x was released. Mozilla still runs as it includes all the relevant libraries statically linked inside it - the java plugin doesn't. You therefore either need to recompile Mozilla with an old version of gcc or install the libraries for gcc 3.2.
The release notes could do with a little tidying in order to make what java works where clear to users
.If this isn't fixed in the release version it would hint that Mozilla plan to phase out support for old distributions which would open to the door to things such as nice font rendering (via XFT) in the default builds, or do some other current distributions not come with XFT?
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
This is probably the most important feature missing from Mozilla for YEARS.
NTLM Support.
From the Release Notes page:
Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use "windows integrated security".
Dolemite
_______________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
It's not the size of your .sig that matters, it's how you use it.
You don't seem to have heard about the new Mozilla roadmap.
Here is for you.
run firebird with -p, and it brings up the profile manager. If you're running windows, set up a shortcut to firebird.exe" -P Username and it should run automagically as that user.
Short answer: yes, it supports it.
I just love the FUD that flies around here...
Yes if you use a older distro you will have troubles, simply get the sources and compile it... Magically the problem goes away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is because the beta is compiled against gcc3.2. It's the first sun release to be compiled as such. I'm using the beta right now and it works perfectly.
It should be noted that this version of Moz is not meant for universal public use. 1.3 is still the 'default' public version. So what's the harm of requiring a development version of java if you're running a development version of the browser?
B
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
Yes, that checkbox in the installer does indeed control whether you get the mailnews component. If you're using a
Threaded mail is a handy feature, especially when following multiple discussions on mailing lists. And, though Mozilla supports threading, it just doesn't remember the threaded expansion state.
So, you could turn on threading (View -> Sort By -> Threaded). Then, you'd probably expand the threads (View -> Threads -> Expand All Threads). So far, so good. But, if you switch to another folder and come back to the original one, the threads won't be expanded anymore.
This is bug 64426 and you can vote for it if you like (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote). You may need to copy-n-paste the links into your URL bar, as Bugzilla doesn't accept referrerrs from Slashdot.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
For email, try Pegasus Mail. You'll *never* go back to Messenger.
The one bad thing about Pegasus Mail is that it's tied to a
specific platform (Windows), so if you're on another platform
or anticipate moving to another platform you have to settle for
less in the mailreader department. Or you can use Gnus, but it
has a big learning curve.
Usenet is trickier. The only usenet client I've found so far that's
any good whatsoever is Gnus, and it's a long way from perfect. (It
has a huge learning curve, plus some substantial problems in the
offline-reading department, and it's not properly multithreaded.)
You could try Agent; it's arguably better than Messenger, but that's
not saying a great deal.
Regarding Mozilla, the Navigator component is without question
*way* better than the Messenger component. However, with the
split for 1.5, Navigator is being set aside in favour of the
Firebird browser (formerly Phoenix), which while not altogether
bad is not yet up to the level of Navigator, feature-wise. (It
is smaller, though, and so performs better on older systems.)
After 1.4, I don't expect another good solid release until at
least 1.6 for the browser, probably more like 1.7 -- and I don't
expect the Thunderbird project to produce anything that resembles
a usable mail/news reader 2-5 years. Note, however, that I am
using higher standards here than most people do; email is important
to me and I expect a great deal from my mailreader. If you consider
Eudora and Outlook and the current Messenger to all be perfectly
wonderful, then Thunderbird may reach that level a good deal sooner
than the timeframe I'm predicting (say, 1.7 maybe).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Oh .. time bugs will happen much sooner then that.
Unix timestamp roll over
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
There are computers in England?
:)
Seriously, though, to answer the original questions: Mozilla is nothing like Netscape 4.7. Early Netscape browsers were some of the biggest crimes against HTML ever seen. Mozilla, on the other hand, is considerably better-written and far more standards compliant. Sometimes too standards compliant for its own good, in fact, since some sites that rely on IE broken features or extensions to work won't give the same results under Mozilla. There are also an irritating few sites that will just refuse to serve pages to anyone not using IE. I figure if they can do without my custom, I can do without their services.
The overall browsing experience in Mozilla (particularly Mozilla Firebird, IMO) is considerably better than that in Internet Explorer in my experience. Plenty of extra (useful) features that IE shows no signs of including, such as tabbed browsing. And it's free - other than the hefty bandwidth charge to download it.
If you can get hold of a copy while you're in England, do so. Hopefully you'll be converted before you go home. Otherwise, put it at the top of your to-download list when you get back home.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Not to mention the major burst of insanity that surrounded the removal of MNG/JNG support, two perfectly useful new formats.
0
Mind-boggling Bugzilla discussion of this is here - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19528
--riney
I'm hoping there'll be an RPM of the official 1.4 release. But rpmfind.net lists of a few RawHide Mozilla-1.4 RPMs that work just fine on a RH 9 box. I haven't been able to determine just which "official" Mozilla build they are, but they have the nice antialiasing that I've come to enjoy from the GTK2-linked builds.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Witness the recent Taco IRC interview where his response to "when will Slashdot validate at the W3c" was "Whatever. Next."
The only reason to use tabular layout (like Slashdot does) is to make things look good in Internet Explorer.
Switching to pure CSS (as the W3C recommends) saves bandwidth (as all of the formatting and layout information can be stored in a separate, cacheable file), gives you the freedom to create far more interesting and visually powerful designs, and makes the page accessible.
Slashdot should take a hint from Wired's excellent example and move into the new millenium.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
that's not the case for 1.4. MNG/JNG has been removed from the trunk (pre-1.5alpha builds), but it is still in 1.4RC2 and will appear in Mozilla 1.4.
You can download a spellchecker for Mozilla here;
:-).
http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/
It also includes links to non - american english dictionaries, I have been using the UK english one with some builds very happily.
The version for Mozilla 1.4 Beta is already there. I use Mozilla as my only mail client at work and have been using this for over a year without any major problems. If only it could test spelling in input boxes, I could even spell check my slashdot comments
For those who don't know, Adobe used unfrozen APIs, which Mozilla then scrapped entirely, rendering their work useless. Unsurprisingly, they never updated it.
So, if you want SVG in Mozilla, you need to hack on the Moz native support, which has more potential anyway. Be warned, it's a LARGE spec :( I'm not really sure what has been happening on it lately, but iirc there have not been any updates for a long time now.
Just to be silly, I opened the Bugzilla link; 3 of them are already fixed, and a 4th is a licensing issue if you link statically against gcc libstfc++ (which I don't think is the default).
Of the remaining bugs, one is about the status bar, which doesn't seem to be a blocker, and the other two remaining are mem leaks which I would consider blockers. That just leaves two big ones. They probably have time to get thse and so they're probably good for 1.4.
What? Thunderbird has everything that is currently in Mozilla Mail 1.4. The only difference is a better looking interface ( much like Mozilla Firebird ) and redesigned preferences screen ( also like Firebird ). Check out the roadmap for Thunderbird.
The Wired site loads and renders slowly, does wierd things when sized very small, and is much heavier on markup than slashdot (when balanced agasint the larger size of a slashdot page).
I agree that using tables for layout is a crappy way of doing things. On the other hand, it's well known and commonly supported (all modern browsers render tables more or less identically, the same cannot be said for CSS markup, especially level 2), but CSS layout semantics are crappy, overly verbose, and lend themselves to pixel-width positioning. Try reproducing all the built in features of table layout in CSS - it's very difficult. And your newly marked up pages will be noticably heavier than the table layout.
"WHo's to say IE is correct in their implementation?"
The market. They'd be more or less right, too. IE's not only good at rendering HTML, but it's also very fault resistant. I've had HTML in both Netscape and Opera cause the scrollbars to never appear. Can't say I've ever had that with IE.
"No browser follows the specs exactly (last I heard, Mozilla was closest), and that is a damn shame."
That's debatable. Who says the spec was correct in the first place? As people use the HTML, ideas about how it should be used evolve. For example, tables have a border feature. In Netscape (4 I think, it's been a while since I've done HTML) you can't set the color of the borders. You always get that ugly gray embossed table. Ie was quite happy to accept a hex code to draw the table with that color. The result? Instead of assigning a color value to the border, you had to set the table background color to what you want the border to be, and then set each cell to have a bg color that you want the foreground to be. That's pretty convoluted. It's possible that either Netscape was pretty dumb about it, or they were following WC3s flawed spec. To be honest, I don't know. The point is I don't think that following the spec is necessarily the holy grail of browser rendering. The code just plain needs to be usable. (I do agree, though, that a standard should evolve and everybody should follow it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's WC3's.)
"I wish I could earn a living as a lazy web designer, toying with Photoshop and Dreamweaver all day and not even lifting a finger as to do some actual work, like checking cross-platform or at least cross-browser compatability."
1.) Who says it's laziness? When you're a web-develoiper, you have unreasonable deadlines to get things done. My company in particular thought it took a week to design, build, and publish an entire website. The idea of spending time to test it on various platforms was ludicrous. "Just make it work in Netscape and IE, don't worry about anything else." Don't fault me for my boss's pointy-haired decisions.
2.) I can't speak for Dreamweaver, but FrontPage made it real easy to test your pages in various browsers. It had a 'preview in browser' mode that would give you a dropdown of all the browsers you had installed or setup on your machine, then it'd send the page to it. Then, it'd even ask you what window size you wanted to try it at. Want to test your site at 800 by 600? No problemo. I would assume that Dreamweaver did all that as well.
I probably wouldn't ordinarily have responded to that comment, but I've had that Photoshop/FrontPage 'lazy job'. And it's anything but lazy. You try coming up with an artistic design for a site and then hacking HTML to make it work. HTML is a lousy markup standard for doing artsy sites. You'd be surprised at the pixel-magic we've had to do.