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."

Comments

Re:Finally!

[jridley]

Ditto that. Also maybe the mail/newsreader apps will get attention if they're split out.

I wouldn't even call the newsreader "mediocre" - "barely adequate for a few uses" is more like it.

The email client is OK but it certainly needs attention.

Watch out for new version of Hotmail...

[jkrise]

That accidentally doesn't work with this Mozilla any more... now that AOL's approved of IE and sunk Netscape and abandoned Mozilla (yet?), this is the next in line.

Camino?

[Montreal]

Hopefully the Camino developer(s) will now switch to this branch - from what I can see, the nightlies have been pretty variable quality ever since 0.7, which is when they switched to the trunk from a 1.0-ish branch.

They still haven't fixed the a huge issue

[PhysicsGenius]

MathML. It's supported, but only in pure XML pages. This means that on legacy HTML sites, like Slashdot and K5, I can't fully get across the brilliance of my scientific and mathematical ideas, which is a lose-lose situation.

As open source projects, you'd think that Slashcode and Mozilla could meet halfway on this. But, as anyone who's tried to submit a patch to either project knows, they are open in name only. Development of both systems is really closed to outsiders and only insiders (the creators, their friends and people who think exactly the same way that they do) are allowed to submit patches. Witness the recent Taco IRC interview where his response to "when will Slashdot validate at the W3c" was "Whatever. Next."

/me starts an open-minded source revolution

Browser Spoofing.

[Delta-9]

I think browser spoofing is a very bad thing. Yes it lets you load your page correctly, but it will never let the "powers that be" know that people use something other than IE.

I have stopped telling safari to use the IE "user agent" because of this. I want people to know that I use something that isn't Microsoft and sooner or later this is going to make a difference. Especially with the fact that M$ has officially dropped their IE for OS X.

Re:Browser Spoofing.

[El Cubano]

I have stopped telling safari to use the IE "user agent" because of this. I want people to know that I use something that isn't Microsoft and sooner or later this is going to make a difference. Especially with the fact that M$ has officially dropped their IE for OS X.

Boy would I love to join you there. Unfortunately there are still some websites that flat out refuse to load into anything other than IE, most notably the website where I access my payroll information to verify I was paid correctly). I emailed tech support and their reply was, "we only support IE in Windows, get partition magic and install windows on your computer." It's a tough fight righ now.

Re:Browser Spoofing.

[hawkfish]

I think browser spoofing is a very bad thing. Yes it lets you load your page correctly, but it will never let the "powers that be" know that people use something other than IE.

I recently had to write some code to identify OSX browsers from their UserAgent strings, and IE is not the problem - it is Mozilla! Everything claims to be Mozilla, and the only way to know if you have Mozilla is by process of elimination using the later parts of the string - i.e. if it is not something you know, then it must be Mozilla.

Re:Browser Spoofing.

[TheRaven64]

Opera's UA spoofing is ver easy to toggle (ctrl+alt+o for Opera, ctrl+alt+i for IE). I leave it in Opera mode most of the time, but when I find a site that diverts me to a 'your browser is not supported because our web site was designed by the Boss's 13 year old son who thinks IE rocks' page then I hit switch to IE mode. I then make a point of visiting the site in Opera mode and then leaving a couple of times a week to rack up the count of 'customers turned away by our refusal to adhere to standards'.

Ironically I have yet to find a page which doesn't work in Opera identifying as IE, while a lot of ASP sites fail to work while identifying as Opera.

Re:Browser Spoofing.

[berzerke]

make the browser spoofing feature hit the same page (with the no-cache pragma, or whatever it takes to avoid any intervening caches) 50 times with the real user-agent for each page it loads with the spoofed user-agent.

While I think that may prove very satisfying, it would not be a good idea. All those requests coming from the same ip in such a short time would be a dead giveaway. Plus word would get out and that info would quietly be discarded by various log analyzers.

Now if someone would write a tool that spoofs the ip address but sends the real user agent (a few times) before sending the fake user agent, that might prove more effective. A few clueless webmasters might actually change.

(Pion with clue to CIO): Sir, look at the logs showing all these people using non-IE browsers who tried to access our IE-only website but couldn't. Think of all that lost business!

(CIO): Change the website to make it standards compliant! (OK, I can dream can't I?)

Re: Browser spoofing problem

[Cochonou]

I think developpers have said numerous times on Bugzilla that they didn't want to implement an "user friendly" browser spoofing feature because they believe it would hurt Mozilla in the long run.

The problem is that, if many people were using Mozilla spoofing (let's say) IE6, Mozilla "market share" would appear even lower in statistics than it already is, thus making even harder for Mozilla evangelists to do their job.
Who would want to support a browser that would seem to be used by 0.003% of web surfers ?

Decent SVG support on Linux

[Monkey-Man2000]

I'm sure this Mozilla doesn't have SVG support. However, I was wondering if anyone knew the status of the Adobe SVG Plugin's compatibility with the browser (whether Adobe is developing a new compatible plug-in or Mozilla compensating for Adobe's compatibility problems). My understanding is that Adobe developed the 3.0 plugin before the Mozilla API was frozen, and now it crashes the browser. This is common to Windows and Linux and for Mozilla derivatives as well (Netscape). Neither the Mozilla developers or Adobe seem to be budging. I just want to have some decent SVG support in Linux. Is SVG development something I should avoid?

Re:that's not a new problem

[Chris_Jefferson]

... that is the most stupid thing I've ever heard.

Mathematicians and physicists have been communicating for three hundred years by drawing mathematics, complete with symbol sets. Whenever I want to send / recieve mathematics nowadays, I tend to just write it in latex, because I (along with many mathematicans) can just parse raw latex off the screen. However I'd kill it have the latex (or MathML) parsed by my newsreader / e-mail client / browser in an easy-to-use way

Blockers once again seem non-corporeal

[gringer]

I have been trying to keep up with Mozilla developments, and have noticed here that there are still bugs to be resolved that are apparently blockers (or go straight to the bug list). The strange thing is, there was mentioned a possibility of rebranding RC2 as final, according to the recent staff meeting minutes (*1.4*, Point 3).

I find it strange that the Mozilla team is prepared to release 1.4 (which will replace the 1.0.x branch) with previously-declared blocker bugs still floating around.

Don't cave in.

[haeger]

I emailed tech support and their reply was, "we only support IE in Windows, get partition magic and install windows on your computer."

Then do what I do. Refuse to use their service. My bank didn't allow me to use Mozilla on Linux, bye bye bank. I can find someone else to give my money to. My company recently installed a time-reportin tool that requires Windows and IE, I still send my report card to a secretary since I don't have a computer with IE on it, it's either that or they can PAY me to come in in the evening to fill out those damn web-reports in IE, and I guarantee You that I will do this on high pay time.

Don't cave in. All over the world there is one thing people understand. Money. If not supporting Mozilla starts costing them money then they'll have to rethink.

I'm sure I could install windows if they like, provided that they pay for the licese, the computer, my time to install and administer the box. If they want me to run it, they'd better pay me. I don't do boring stuff on my spare time.

.haeger

Re:Don't cave in.

[El Cubano]

Then do what I do. Refuse to use their service. My bank didn't allow me to use Mozilla on Linux, bye bye bank. ...

<snip>

Don't cave in. All over the world there is one thing people understand. Money.

I agree with you in principle. But, this the U.S. government, not a bank. It's my payroll, not an account. Believe me, I understand money, especially mine. At least for now, I can still get my pay statement in the mail, but what happens when they stop mailing them out (like when they went to exclusively direct deposit)?

At least I recently talked to a supervisor in the tech support shop (I managed to a get phone number to them) who seems to be more helpful than that twit of a tech who responded to my first email.

Re:Netscape, why?

[Zathrus]

I asked a coworker this (I run Firebird, he runs Netscape) and he said that Netscape comes with most of the plugins pre-installed -- e.g. Java, Flash, etc. I don't know if this is true or not, but if so then there's one reason.

Yeah, fine, bitch and whine about how awful Flash and java and whatever are. But some people actually want to use the web, and some websites require their usage.

Oh, and to contradict a previous poster - Netscape no longer removes popup prevention from the preferences dialog. IIRC, it's not enabled by default, but you can enable it without having to go and edit the user.js file or about:config

Re:MNG, JNG support gone, too.

[Joe Tie.]

I'm still very annoyed by this, and trying to decide what to do with my site. I'm working on a little 2D rpg engine, and have some of the demo sprites previewed for download in mng format. While it does run in windows, Linux was my primary target, so losing IE support for the site was not that big of a deal. So now I'm stuck with the decision to re-encode the sprites as animated gifs and degrade their color quality to 256 colors, only use a single frame as an example, have some sort of script running on the page to fake animation using pngs, or offer up konqureor (and safari?) as the only supported browser.

Re:discrimination?

[ChristTrekker]

This is still a bit iffy, IMO. In this case, the user doesn't really have a choice...he is limited by his disability. He cannot access the page because his browser is dictated to him, and that browser is denied access.

This is very similar to the issue of wheelchairs and curb cuts. Businesses don't necessary discriminate actively against the mobility-impaired, but the impaired person has no choice to how he gets about. He has to be in a wheelchair, and the high curb denies him access.

Both are cases of not choosing the lowest common denominator to begin with. The web developer could have coded to standards with little additional overhead. The business could have built their curb with a cut with little additional overhead. Retrofitting in either case incurs more work than doing it right to start with, and that's why people fight against this. Not because they are bigots, but because it's expensive and the returns on the investment are relatively small. Most would agree it's the right thing to do, and if they could do it over again they'd "do it right", because those small returns would be worth the smaller investment.

But again, my point was only that this is not discrimination per se, in the most general usage of the term. Most people are free to choose their browser (and what store they go to). A small minority don't have that choice, but you can hardly take ignorance or oversight and call it discrimination.

Government must make every reasonable concession necessary to serve the public - that's its job. Smart business owners should do so likewise - it's profitable and it's the right thing. But I still disagree with the expansion of the definition of discrimination from "kicking some people out" to "not doing enough to help some people in".

Again, my only point was how the term "discrimination" was used by the poster. I did not intend to address the morality or legality of the actions themselves. I feel like I'm being drawn into an argument I didn't intend to get involved with.