Mozilla 1.4 Released

Phil writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla 1.4 has been released for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The new version is pretty similar to today's Netscape 7.1, which is based on the same code, but lacks Netscape's proprietary features. More information can be found in the release notes. The release can be downloaded from mozilla.org's releases page or via FTP. From here on, mozilla.org's focus shifts to Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird." The official release news is now up on Mozilla's main page, so let the downloading begin.

Comments

YES!

[tobocop]

Sexy, finally I can trash that old Netscape 7.1 installation!

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still using 4.78 you insensitive clod!

Re:YES!

[bofkentucky]

Any particular reason you haven't switched to the 4.8 build?

Re:YES!

[jrl87]

you got Netscape 7.1 installed already?!? The downloader says I still got at least a day before it finishes downloading ... maybe I shouldn't have bought that 9k modem for 10 cents at a garage sale

The only question that remains:

[Anonymous Coward]

when will this be available in Debian STABLE?

Re:The only question that remains:

[frodo from middle ea]

Is there a point in asking rhetorical questions ?

Re:The only question that remains:

[Poofat]

When the sun explodes.

Re:The only question that remains:

[mahdi13]

At the rate they move (as fast as Red Hat, but slower) I would expect it to be in the STABLE around the same time the four horsemen ride by

Or when 4.0 is released, which I think is around the same time...

Re:The only question that remains:

[Poofat]

Mods, I appreciate the effort, but this stuff is not funny.

It's true.

Re:The only question that remains:

[Anonymous Coward]

At the rate they move (as fast as Red Hat, but slower) I would expect it to be in the STABLE around the same time the four horsemen ride by

Which is not very far away after reading Revelation 13:16-17 and this article on RFIDs.

Re:The only question that remains:

[Lemmy Caution]

Debian STABLE offers the finest technology that the hard-working, cautious developers of the Holy Roman Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate can muster. There's nothing that says "stability" like graven marble and cuneiform tablets! Who needs newfangled bells and whistles like "wheel" and "fire," anyway?

why did we have to have a seperate post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is this a repeat of the Netscape 7.1 mentioning that 1.4 was out, it came MUCH later.

News for NERDS would put Moz 1.4 PRIOR to NS 7.1, why the hell wasn't it?

Please do you homework first boys.

Re:why did we have to have a seperate post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because 1.4 wasn't out officially in a little while ago. 7.1 was out officially first.

Must be browser day

[superpulpsicle]

Earlier there was an article on netscape.... now one on mozilla.

That's too much browser info to digest in one day. Get some PS2 articles in here. ;)

Re:Must be browser day

[Bonker]

Since Netscape and Moz are based on the same code, it's only realistic that the production relaeses of both apps should be released simultaneously.

Re:Must be browser day

[mbourgon]

Actually, it's quite odd. According to the old roadmap, they'd branch, with the Mozilla team doing further bug-fixing, while the Netscape team would focus on Netscape-oriented features and fixes. So you'd be at least a .1 or so off. Apparently they have a quick way to insert the "extra features" that Netscape wants.

Re:Must be browser day

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they have a quick way to insert the "extra features" that Netscape wants.

Was it s/mozilla/netscape/ perhaps?

Re:Must be browser day

[orpheus2000]

Apparently they have a quick way to insert the "extra features" that Netscape wants.

This is what was wanted when Mozilla went 1.0. A standard API and plug-in behavior so as to quickly develop third-party functionality (such as Netscape's AIM client, etc.).

Install caveat

[John Zebedee]

Just installed the windows version: release notes don't require an uninstall of previous versions (in my case 1.3.1) but V1.4 barfed every time it started until I had rebooted and uninstalled 1.3.1. Seems fine since though

Re:Install caveat

[H310iSe]

I can confirm this - I overinstalled many other versions of mozilla with no problems but when I overinstalled 1.3.2 with 1.4rc3 I had lots of rendering problems (win2k server).

So definately uninstall previous versions, or install 1.4 into a new directory. It does recommend this in the install documentation, btw.

Re:Install caveat

[mu_wtfo]

Yes, new versions of Mozilla should always be installed into a clean directory. Installing over top of previous versions is known to cause problems.

From the relnotes: Note: It is recommended that you uninstall previous versions of Mozilla before installing Mozilla 1.4. This will not delete your bookmarks, history, cookies and other information which is stored in your profile directory.

Re:Install caveat

[missing000]

I just did an install over 1.3 on w2k and everything went very smoothly.

The installation is aware of mozilla.exe running, and prompts that it is shutting it down.

I didn't even have to restart.

I'll see how well the update goes on a redhat box when I get home from work :)

Re:Install caveat

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're going to complain somewhere could you possibly include useful information?

it seems that i have nothing better to do while i'm sick than to troll slashdot looking for real problem reports.

useful information:
* the crash dialog from ms (even the hex number, which in one case was enough to tie to a bugzilla bug report)
* the crash data from dr watson (which was in the bugzilla bug report)
* a talkback id (which would give a developer access to similar information)
* a bug id listing any of the useful information mentioned in this comment or following the bug reporting guidelines
* a name/email address with which i could try to hunt down any bugs you might have filed - sorry christian references don't do me any good
* a list of extensions/addons/skins/plugins which you fed mozilla. things like:
* mozdev spellchecker 1.3
* pinball theme for mozilla 0.9
* adobe svg plugin for mozilla 0.9.8
(these are real candidates, and i believe i got the version numbers right)
* some system information from any of:
* dr watson
* the windows xp crash reporter - for which ms has provided a nice api which i should probably try using.
* talkback - the netscape talkback data access api is a form of s[np]earkernet, "hey, can you get foo for me?"
* resource meter - on windows we tend to leak GDI resources, i'm sure we still do in 1.4 (this is a cute one since cache is tying GDI to physical ram on the system hosting mozilla. But GDI is a fixed quantity on the win32 client displaying mozilla - note that if you aren't a developer and are using terminal services client on a 9x box then you probably won't get sympathy from anyone other than me)

Re:Install caveat

[jesser]

Had you installed any extensions in 1.3.1 or earlier, such as spell checker? I think that's the only case where upgrading crashes. (It's bad that it crashes in that case, but it's not as bad as crashing on any upgrade from 1.3.1 to 1.4.)

Re:Install caveat

[John Zebedee]

Actually, the only extension I had was mozgest from the optimoz project, without which I can't browse anymore. For a previous reply, the only sign of the crash was a message from talkback saying a log was being created. regrettably, no log file was in fact created.

Re:Install caveat

[jesser]

I don't know whether mozgest is one of the extensions that causes Mozilla to crash when the extension is used with the wrong version of Mozilla (because it uses unfrozen XPCOM interfaces, or something like that). Based on your comment, I'll guess that it is.

Re:Install caveat

[John Zebedee]

Well, a complete uninstall, followed by manual delete of the /mozilla.org tree (I keep my profile elsewhere) seems to have cured the whole shot. Of course I had to reinstall mozgest, which would have been the latest build, so perhaps an outdated mozgest was the issue. At any rate, it was relatively easy to get 1.4 running and I'm completely satisfied so far.

NTLM Security!

[kawika]

This is a very big addition. Some of the intranet sites I use require NTLM to access and I was never able to use Mozilla.

Re:NTLM Security!

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of new features, the feature I requested is in 1.4. Sweet!

This is what's great about the open development model -- the developers get a lot of feedback (Proprietary: "Hey, let's build it and then maybe have a focus group").

So if there's something you want, be sure to use Bugzilla to request it, or, if it's already there, vote for it.

Re:NTLM Security!

[gblues]

Unfortunately, it is only for the Windows version because it is simply referencing the NTLM DLL files that IE uses to authenticate. Yipee!

Mac/Linux users are still hosed.

On the other hand, Mozilla *can* authenticate with the MS Proxy Server by using Windows NT user ID format (DOMAIN\user). And unlike Safari, Mozilla actually saves the password! :P But, good luck bringing up any restricted Intranet web page (read: most of them).

Nathan

Re:NTLM Security!

[ungerware]

Unfortunately, still no NTLM over imap or nntp (aka SPA or "Secure Password Authentication).

Certain services require it (MSN, of course, and Univ. of Phoenix online courses), and the only clients that work are Outlook and OE. It'd be nice if mozilla mail and news could handle this.

Re:NTLM Security!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac/Linux users are still hosed

*sigh* When I saw NTLM mentioned I was so excited I downloaded it and... it's been a disappointment.

Anyone know when it'll be implemented (or is it implementable at all?) on Linux and Mac? It's of major major importance...

hmmmm

[deadsaijinx*]

not to be an ass, but is it really news worthy every time Moz makes a release? Didn't we get headlines for 1.4 RC2 and RC3? I use moz exclusively, but even I don't think it's news worthy everytime Moz has a new release (reminds me of the nightly releases news for Phoenix a while back).

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention every kernel minor version release, Warcraft III patch, when CmdrTaco farts and poops his undies, when Bill Gates burps, and when RMS shaves. Okay, the latter will never happen. /.: Just announce release and fucking forget putting the RCs on the front page, yeah?

Re:hmmmm

[Shenkerian]

You make a fair comment, but this is Mozilla's new stable build, and the last one distributed as a monolithic application bundle. The stories about the RC's were mostly free advertising for last-minute stress testers, because this stable build has to last until they completely separate the innards into separate applications.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather see official releases like this one get the publicity than every RC that pops up.

Re:hmmmm

[swordgeek]

"is it really news worthy every time Moz makes a release?"

No. The announcements for RC1, RC2, and RC3 were really unnecessary.

However, this release--1.4 final--is definitely worthy of a post. This is the official 'stable production' release (the first since 1.0, I think), and is also the final relase in the old development path. If there were only three Mozilla announcements on /. in its entire history, they would be for (1)the initial creation of the project, (2)the 1.0 milestone, and (3)the 1.4 release.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonvmous Coward]

"not to be an ass, but is it really news worthy every time Moz makes a release? "

You're not being an ass. I agree with you, it's certainly not front page news. If they had a Mozilla area that they blasted every little bit of news about I wouldn't complain, though.

I guess I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder, though. The Mozilla fanatics are an irritating bunch. It's a good browser blah blah blah but to dedicate a social class to it is a bit overboard. It's not the only good browser out there. Opera anybody?

Maybe Slashdot should have a browsers subdomain or something.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

when CmdrTaco farts and poops his undies,

I sit in a cubicle next to Kathleen Fent... and I've overheard *way* too many phone calls where she discusses his skidmarks.

**shudder**

Re:hmmmm

[prockcore]

It's a good browser blah blah blah but to dedicate a social class to it is a bit overboard.

You're just mad because we wouldn't let you join our club.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonvmous Coward]

"You're just mad because we wouldn't let you join our club."

Well I'm not giving up my girlfriend just to join you guys!

Re:hmmmm

[Arker]

The RC posts are great. They attract stress-testers and help the debugging process move. If you don't like em, don't click the freakin link.

Re:hmmmm

[swordgeek]

Oh, I don't mind 'em at all. I'm just saying that they're not really massively necessary from the /. perspective. (the attention they garner by being posted on /. may in fact be massively necessary from the mozilla dev. perspective)

On the other hand, the 1.4 release is News. News as in, "Hey people, wake up! Pay attention! Important Stuff happening over here!"

No slight intended.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit. You're making that up. If you were next to her cubicle, you'd at least know that HER NAME IS NOW KATHLEEN TACO.

Jesus. Check your facts before trolling.

Re:hmmmm

[jnana]

You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.

They have different connotations. 'nuff said? mmm,kay.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Same meaning: http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-whi2.htm

Both while and whilst are ancient, though while is older. There's no difference in meaning between them. For reasons that aren't clear, whilst has survived in British English but has died out in the US.

However, some people have a fondness for it as an affectation.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, the appearance of affectation is what I meant by different connotation (at least in the US).

In Britain whilst is a bit more formal. In the US (at least in California, where my ears live), one can't say whilst without seeming affected.

Re:hmmmm

[Swaffs]

Any story that gets 400 comments is, in my opinion, newsworthy as there is obviously a strong interest in it.

This was my Post!!!

[nite_warrior]

Damn, I was so close to get a post on the front page... anyways glad to see a new release from everybody's favorite browser (after konqueror, opera, lynks and telnet to port 80)

Re:When...

[frodo from middle ea]

Do those other 8500 other webbrowsers have a cool lizzard as their mascot ?

Nice improvements, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

But can't they increase the start up speed? It takes three times as long to start as IE on the same machine!!! Given that, do we really care about minor things like PAC failover or default "Compose" fonts, or whatever else.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

IE starts with Windows, so you don't notice most of the load time. Use Mozilla's quicklaunch if you want a faster load time. Personally, I don't ever close Mozilla, so start-up time in a non-factor.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[sremick]

Maybe when Microsoft integrates Mozilla into the OS. Most of what makes up IE loads when Windows starts, due to MS making IE the default interface to every fricken part of the OS. Double-clicking on the "e" icon simply loads the last 10% or so (prob not even that).

You can use "Quickstart" in Mozilla or NS to enable to same behavior, but honestly I find the whole idea of an app sucking up RAM when you aren't using it to be pretty stupid. Like leaving your car running all night just so you don't have to waste the 5 seconds in the morning to start it.

I mean, really: compare the startup time to how long you spend actually ON THE NET. Do a few seconds really matter??? Isn't it nice to close it and have it be GONE FROM MEMORY (unlike IE)?

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[mhifoe]

After this release the browser component will be based on Firebird

Firebird has much beter a startup time than Mozilla does at the moment.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, a few seconds do matter.
speedy startup times is a nice thing, be it in ie or in moz

for instance, as english isn't my native language, i sometimes have to look up words.. would i prefer to launch the browser, wait 10 - 30 seconds to go to dictionary.com, or would i rather have 10 - 20mb ram "wasted" and be able to look something up instantaneously?

most systems today come with 512+mb ram, and what else are you going to do with it? tear out a 256mb stick and give it to your neighbor?

-r

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[The Bungi]

Most of what makes up IE loads when Windows starts

Nope. That's an urban legend that's nice to spread around, but it's nothing more than FUD. If you don't have the fancy crap enabled int the shell and don't open any other components (or third party apps) that use the HTML parser/viewer, the first time you click on that "e" icon you load 90% of it (excluding libs already used by the rest of the system, like common controls. On Windows there's no GTK/LessTif/Motif/Yadda to contend with).

I dare you, like I've done before, to show me a single Windows process (excluding the web crap) that has MSHTML and WININET loaded after a clean boot finishes.

Do a few seconds really matter???

Well, I'd wager that if IE loaded slowly this conversation would be very different, but because we're talking about Mozilla, a few seconds don't matter. And BTW, that's the only thing I personally dislike about Mozilla. Other than that it's a great browser.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

I dare you, like I've done before, to show me a single Windows process (excluding the web crap) that has MSHTML and WININET loaded after a clean boot finishes.

What? Individual libraries don't appear as processes, so that argument isn't applicable.

When you "load Internet Explorer", its window instantly appears, and the process is tiny. Almost no CPU is used to perform this "loading" operation. You honestly believe that's all of Internet Explorer loading and executing?

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[The Bungi]

What? Individual libraries don't appear as processes, so that argument isn't applicable.

Please don't reply if you don't know what you're talking about. Ever heard of "mapped libraries"? No, I guess not.

and the process is tiny

Tiny? It's 8MB with a 3.2MB VM size (without a page loaded).

Almost no CPU is used to perform this "loading" operation

So what you're saying is it's too fast for you? OK, I buy that.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[cygnusx]

> What? Individual libraries don't appear as processes, so that argument isn't applicable.

Yes, but you can see which libraries have dependencies on mshtml or shdocvw. WinInet I am not sure -- if you use IE's mobsync.exe, WinInet may load, but then several third party software uses WinInet too.

If you load Win2k cleanly (especially with Active Desktop disabled, e.g. through TweakUI), you definitely will not load mshtml *or* shdocvw.

With all of this, IE still creams Moz (and Firebird) in startup times. One overhead IE does not have is that it uses native widgets for everything, whereas Moz/Firebird loses (I am guessing) while constructing all the dinky little XUL widgets.

Btw:

- Some parts of Windows 2000's UI do use shdocvw. But definitely not at startup!

- IIRC Windows ME and XP have an OS feature that "optimizes" load times for frequently used libraries and apps. Office (again IIRC) uses this feature. But this feature is available for *any* windows app, not just the MS ones.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[blazerw11]

I dare you, like I've done before, to show me a single Windows process (excluding the web crap) that has MSHTML and WININET loaded after a clean boot finishes

I dare you to show me a single DOS system that boots with the command prompt loeaded (excluding the command prompt and any other programs that might be running) after a clean boot.

Attempt at humor aside, but load Zone Alarm or Norton Internet Security and you'll be surprised at the programs that attempt to access the internet on a clean boot without putting the WININET process into memory.
SQL Server can't even start if prevented from phoning home. (Not that that happens on a typical workstation's clean boot, just mine at work.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[The Bungi]

I dare you to show me a single DOS system that boots with the command prompt loeaded (excluding the command prompt and any other programs that might be running) after a clean boot

Here's a better strawman: my assembler is faster than yours because the BIO$ is cached in RAM.

SQL Server can't even start if prevented from phoning home

You must be confused. MSSQL uses exactly four UDP ports, plus any incoming connections either via TCP over the standard port or named pipes. "Phone home" in my book means "visits some Microsoft domain", which is not true. You're more than welcome to provide proof to the contrary.

Re:Nice improvements, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't it eventually suck up all your free memory and cpu cycles, until you have to shut it down? It does for me, and always has, on both linux and windows.

Lovely...

[Tailhook]

W2K, just installed it. Attempt to launch it and...

mozilla.exe - Application Error

The instruction at "0x610f0769" referenced memory at "0x4349656f". The memory could not be "read".

Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program

Re:Lovely...

[tinrobot]

That's the classic 0x610f0769 bug.

Increment by 1 so it reads 0x610f0770.

Results may vary.

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

In hex, after 9 comes 'a'...

Re:Lovely...

[Tailhook]

Can't stop the popups without exotic proxy crap. Mozilla's simple "stop window.open() on load" does the trick. Highly useful while doing recreational browsing at work and not getting lots of scantly clad X-10 models all over my employer provided screen.

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

and half the functionality, and triple the viruses...

You will hate yourself for it...

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you used Google's toolbar (which every IE user should, because it rocks) you get the same feature.

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah I guess so. moz isn't really worth it for what I do anyways, I might as well just go for speed and not some gay fanboying of OSS at my own expense

Re:Lovely...

[mu_wtfo]

Just checking, did you do a clean install, or install over an older version?

Regardless of that, perhaps some of the lovely folks in #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org can help you out.

Re:Lovely...

[archen]

Well I think we just solved why it crashed.

Better submit that sucker to bugzilla.

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone else struggling to figure out why this is supposed to be funny?

Re:Lovely...

[antdude]

Me too!! I just installed it on my Windows 2000 SP4 (all updates) and I am getting stupid crash!

Re:Lovely...

[TheRaven64]

Yup. Me too. Exactly the same error (well, same instruction, different memory. Mine tried to reference "0x4d7a6f6d"). Clean install as well. Sounds like someone forgot to initialise their pointer...

I installed it since I'd read a post here claiming that someone had gone back to Moz from Opera 7 after using 1.4, but if this is the kind of quality we can expect from Moz I think I will stick with Opera...

Re:Lovely...

[commodoresloat]

The instruction at "0x610f0769" referenced memory at "0x4349656f". The memory could not be "read".

Thanks, "Windows." That was a really "useful" error "message."

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure am! Perhaps it's funny because it's wrong and slashdotters are snickering at the poster's stupidity.

Re:Lovely...

[Alsee]

"I'm" "writing" "random" "stuff" "here" "just" "so" "I" "can" "put" "quotes" "around" "each" "word".

-

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

Use IE6...twice the speed, half the kludge. Your computer will thank you for it.

Absolutely! It will even give you gifts, in the form of popup windows.

One of the great things about IE is that web sites can give your computer a whole bunch of extra background processes so it never gets lonely.

Re:Lovely...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I am. I just used my last mod point also... could someone elaborate ?

Re:Lovely...

[chefren]

More useful than "segmentation fault, core dumped."?

Re:Lovely...

[Tailhook]

No, not the same. While it helps, Mozilla takes the problem more seriously and is more thorough. Thanks for the tip though, it definitely does improve IE quite a bit and it's better than nothing.

lacks Netscape's proprietary features

[tubabeat]

Like mandatory pop-ups...

Re:lacks Netscape's proprietary features

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not mandatory, just go into preferences, turn off pop-ups, then go into allowed sites and tell it to remove all of them.

That's it.... pop-ups gone! :)

Re:lacks Netscape's proprietary features

[fobbman]

That's a good point. For all of the bloat that Mozilla is accused of having, I am disheartened that they have left out the "Put yellow running dudes all over the fucking place" feature that Netscape has had for quite some time now. Does anyone know of a plugin that I can compile to be able to enjoy that functionality that I am missing?

Re:lacks Netscape's proprietary features

[Citizen of Earth]

Like mandatory pop-ups...

Brother, can you spare a business model?

Same as RC3

[mblase]

As was pointed out to me in the recent Netscape 7.1 story, Mozilla 1.4 final is the same code as Mozilla RC3. (Check the "about:" page to see the idential release date.) So if you have RC3 installed, you can safely leave it there without worrying about major changes.

Re:Same as RC3

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only are there no major changes, there are no changes at all. The files are exactly the same. 1.4-RC3 is 1.4.

Re:Same as RC3

[Wolfier]

Are there news on features that let users block any mime type per site, just like images?

Or throttling the CPU usage of Flash/Java applets so it won't grind to a halt when I open a few pages with flash ads?

Re:Same as RC3

[Anonymous Coward]

Check Bugzilla.

Re:Same as RC3

[Anonymous Coward]

Or throttling the CPU usage of Flash/Java applets so it won't grind to a halt when I open a few pages with flash ads?
The lastest version of the preferences bar has a feature where all Flash can be deleted from the current page. The author admits its not the best solution, but it works.

Re:Same as RC3

[jonadab]

> Or throttling the CPU usage of Flash/Java applets so it won't
> grind to a halt when I open a few pages with flash ads?

You should be able to do this at the operating system level.
Just set the filesystem attribute for the plugin library
that controls its minimum nicelevel and close any browser
windows that are using the plugin (to force the plugin to
be reloaded).

Of course, a lot of current operating systems are lacking this
important feature, but in that case you work around it by using
a nicety service that watches for new processes, matches them
against a match list, and renices them as needed. You may have
to install this separately, as some OSes don't come with it.

Re:Same as RC3

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. Is there such a thing for Linux in particular?

Re:Same as RC3

[Deven]

Not only are there no major changes, there are no changes at all. The files are exactly the same. 1.4-RC3 is 1.4.

This is the way release candidates should always be handled, yet it seems they rarely are. How many times have bugs snuck into an official "stable" Linux kernel release that weren't in the preceding "pre" kernel? A strict policy of only releasing final versions as re-releases of release candidates would reduce this danger...

I'd rather use Netscape

[MisterFancypants]

Most people these days realize that Mozilla is just a repacking of Netscape, except the Mozilla group removes all of AOL's useful ad-serving technology.

Why not use the original source, Netscape 7.1?

Works much better for me....

Re:I'd rather use Netscape

[FCKGW]

It's the other way around. Netscape takes a slightly out-of-date version of Mozilla, replaces the red dinosaur with a big N and little AOL running guys, and adds AOL-TW sites to the popup blocking exemptions list. Did I just feed a troll?

Re:I'd rather use Netscape

[MisterFancypants]

BULLSHIT, you fucking liar, bitch-whore.

phew, that was close..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the joy of having downloaded it before 5:02pm.

Same as Mozilla 1.4rc3

[ChazeFroy]

This release is the same thing as 1.4rc3. Log on to their FTP site and compare file sizes. Even the Windows installer says "1.4.0.2003062408".

If you already installed 1.4rc3, don't bother wasting your time with 1.4 final.

Re:Same as Mozilla 1.4rc3

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean come on, what did you think Release Candidate meant?

For those of us used to Microsoft's 'Release Candidates', it's a big frigging surprise for the RC to be identical to the release version.

Microsoft Release Candidate == alpha version
Release version == beta version
Service Pack 2/3/4 == almost there...

Re:Same as Mozilla 1.4rc3

[Blimey85]

If you already installed 1.4rc3, don't bother wasting your time with 1.4 final

You waited just long enough for me to download and install 1.4 to tell me that what I already had was exactly the same. Thanks for nothing man! :(

The good news is that my dsl was actually working at full speed for a few minutes earlier and so the download and install only took about 3 minutes.

Re:Same as Mozilla 1.4rc3

[ChadN]

We all know that some developers make minor changes to a release candidate before releasing the final (usually bugfixes). The information does have some relevance.

Exactly what does Netscape have?

[Anonymous Coward]

"..lacks Netscape's proprietary features..."

What proprietary features are they talking about? lots of stupid icons on the desktop ??

Honestly, what does Netscape have that Mozilla lacks? Why would someone conciously install Netscape in lieu of Mozilla/Galeon?

Got it, love it

[MrZeebo]

I used to be a Mozilla-only user. However, over time, it seemed that the speed of Mozilla started getting worse and worse, especially under Windows. On my dual-boot machine, I kept with Moz under Linux, but switched to Opera 7 under Windows. For the time, Opera was much quicker, not just at starting up, but seemingly at rendering web pages as well.

When I noticed that 1.4 had been released (in the comments for the Netscape 7.1 story) I figured I'd give Mozilla another try under Windows.

I was amazed.

Mozilla 1.4 is noticeably faster than previous versions under Windows, and seems on-par with Opera 7. For a while, I was running Opera 7 for browsing and Thunderbird for mail... I think now I'm going back to Mozilla for both.

Once the xft-enabled RPMs are up for Red Hat 9, I'll give it a try on that OS as well, but, as I said, speed didn't seem to be an issue there to begin with.

Bravo, Mozilla. Firebird is certainly fast, but some people like the integration of the web/e-mail programs, and it's nice to see a speed boost for us as well.

Re:Got it, love it

[Anonymous Coward]

If the new Mozilla can import Opera's bookmarks, I'll give it another try myself... (can it?)

Re:Got it, love it

[Mistah Blue]

For RedHat 9, GTK RPM's are all you will need. I am using a GTK2 1.4RC1 (found under nightly/experimental/gtk2).

Re:Got it, love it

[MrZeebo]

For RedHat 9, GTK RPM's are all you will need. I am using a GTK2 1.4RC1 (found under nightly/experimental/gtk2).

That's true -- I'm also still using 1.4RC1-gtk2 under Linux. The clean fonts are worth being slightly out-of-date.

But, we really need a build that has nice fonts AND is up-to-date. I'm sure there will be one within a few days.

Re:Got it, love it

[Dark Paladin]

I have to agree with the speed.

I'm downloading now - but after trying out Netscape 7.1 for OS X, the speed is almost up there with Safari.

Jaw, meet the floor.

Well done to the Mozilla team. I'm going to play around with it for a bit and see what happens. It probably won't replace my Safari right away, but I always like trying things out and having my mind changed if its better.

Re:Got it, love it

[Citizen of Earth]

Once the xft-enabled RPMs are up for Red Hat 9, I'll give it a try on that OS as well, but, as I said, speed didn't seem to be an issue there to begin with.

They don't seem to have relased any Xft RPMs in a long time. I guess they figure it makes their releases to useful to too many people.

Re:Got it, love it

[Joe Tie.]

I had the same experience, but with a move to phoenix/firebird. Out of curiosity I downloaded and compiled one of the nightlies, and have not touched firebird since. With the same skin, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference betwean them in terms of speed. With spellchecking broken in the kde cvs currently, mozilla mail is going to make a fine substituion for kmail.

Re:Got it, love it

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a program that allows you do this, called JetLinks.Get it here.

Re:Got it, love it

[Billly Gates]

Check out Phoenix and the upcoming Mozilla 2.0.

Both have been purged of ancient Netscape code. Phoenix is alot faster on older hardware.

After Phoenix forked off from Mozilla and became stable and usable, the Mozilla team decided the next 2.0 series will be based on it. Infact the javascript debugger in Mozilla 1.4 is based on Phoenix.

We hear of forks all the time in the OSS world. I have never heard of a merge before which is what is happening now.

Re:Got it, love it

[Anonymous Coward]

The Xft builds have been superceded by the gtk2 ones. If you only want Xft and not gtk2, edit the 2nd line of the spec file and rebuild the rpm.

Re:Got it, love it

[Anonymous Coward]

Under build/package/rpm in the source tarball is a model spec file (from which the RH8 builds available a couple of days after the official release from mozilla.org are based). Nothing prevents you from adjusting it to your liking.

Or, if you don't want to/can't build it for whatever reason, I'll try to have something for RH8 tonight, and from then I'll check for RH9. I'll repost here after.

Re:Got it, love it

[Greg W.]

gcc 2.95 was a merge of egcs back into gcc. So now you know two. :)

Re:Got it, love it

[Papineau]

Finally got to it for RH8.

And then I notice that there's an RPM/SRPM for RH8 on mozilla.org... Here it is.

Proprietary Features

[JewFish]

lacks Netscape's proprietary features

Such as a spell checker and AOL icons?

Re:Proprietary Features

[mu_wtfo]

Actually, there is a spellchecker available for Mozilla - http://spellchecker.mozdev.org. It's planned to be included into Mozilla at some point - hopefully soon.

However, no AOL icons available, sorry. :)

Re:Proprietary Features

[commodoresloat]

Anybody hack this to work with Camino on OS X?

I would like to get this, but...

[Meat Blaster]

While Mozilla seems like a state-of-the-art platform in a couple of respects, I have qualms about using software that accentuates features over reliability. For example, Internet Explorer 4 and above are proven to work with Year 2000; on the other hand, even in this most recent release, the README states:

We do not guarantee that any source code or executable code available from the mozilla.org domain is Year 2000 compliant.

We've been in the year 2000 for a while now. How can an organization continue to release code that has not been tested to comply with four digit dates? This seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[caferace]

I don't know why you haven't upgraded to 2003. I did it nearly seven months ago...

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[swordgeek]

You're mistaking a lack of guarantee with a lack of testing.

Mozilla isn't guaranteed to do ANYTHING. It's not guaranteed to be Y2k "compliant," it's not guaranteed to cause no damage to your hard drive, it's not guaranteed to cause SOME damage to your hard drive! Nor is it guaranteed to render web pages correctly, avoid sleeping with your spouse, or save the world.

The y2k non-guarantee was put up many years ago, because nearly every organisation on the planet was being hounded with the "are you y2k compliant?" question. Mozilla is just as non-compliant today as they were then, which is to say that nobody has found any issues.

Mozilla HAS been tested to work with four digit dates, and also been tested to render almost all web pages properly (certainly all proper web pages). It has NOT been guaranteed to do these things.

Seriously, download 1.4 and give it a go. I think you'll be very happy with its behaviour.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[MarcQuadra]

Excuse me, as far as I know almost EVERY piece of software has a warning attached that says that it may or may not work at all, every OSS piece of software I've seen has a warning about 'fitness or merchantability' in it, meaning 'sure, use it for your missile targetting systems, but you can't sue us if you get fried.'

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[jhunsake]

Oh come on! We're talking about a web browser here, not your respirator.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[jpdbest]

The y2k non-guarantee was put up many years ago, because nearly every organisation on the planet was being hounded with the "are you y2k compliant?" question. Mozilla is just as non-compliant today as they were then, which is to say that nobody has found any issues.

The term 'Y2K Compliant' is something of a catch-all for many of the dates that were tested, not just Jan. 1, 2000. When a company I was working for was doing Y2K testing, we were testing dates from Sept. 1999 ('9999' was used in some systems for 'exit' or 'quit') through to February 29th, 2004 - which has yet to occur. As such, don't be surprised to see Y2K Compliance mentioned for a little while yet.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[delphi125]

Grandparent: We've been in the year 2000 for a while now.

Parent: I don't know why you haven't upgraded to 2003. I did it nearly seven months ago...

I'm not sure which is more worrying: being 2 1/2 years behind the times or almost a month ahead. Or the state of the U.S. educational system?

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[jonadab]

> How can an organization continue to release code that has not
> been tested to comply with four digit dates?

It's lawyerese. It means, roughly speaking, nothing. Ignore it.

There are, however, a couple of date-related bugs in Mozilla.
They relate to cookies expiring too soon if the expiration date
is beyond a certain date. Search bugzilla for 2038 and you will
find them. By the time 2038 gets close enough that anyone might
have a legitimate need for cookies to expire later than that,
the date libraries will have to go to 64 bits. What has to be
done to make this happen is a known quantity, and there won't
be any problem. It just hasn't been gotten around to yet.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of which, we should probably post our 2038 disclaimer. mozilla on some platforms isn't 2038 happy (it's not mozilla's fault, there doesn't seem to be an api available). the vendors of those platforms (well probably all platforms) are just hoping that people will replace their systems with a living/growing os by then.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[abpimentel]

Maybe he is not in the U.S.. It is July now where I am (Manila, Philippines).

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent: I don't know why you haven't upgraded to 2003. I did it nearly seven months ago...

I'm not sure which is more worrying: being 2 1/2 years behind the times or almost a month ahead.

*cough*

June 30 - January 1 = NEARLY 7 months.

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[maaleron]

As it is now July 1st, we have had 7 months of 2003...
I don't follow your one month ahead comment. Maybe a reflection of the state of the US educational system ?

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[DJPenguin]

OK. Those months would be... Jan, Feb, Mar, April, May, June. That's six. Are you counting a few hours of today to be another month?

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[Kynde]

As it is now July 1st, we have had 7 months of 2003...
I don't follow your one month ahead comment. Maybe a reflection of the state of the US educational system ?

Do I even need to say anything? I guess this is as redundnat as it is funny... well, not quite _that_ redundant. :)

Re:I would like to get this, but...

[xtrucial]

or is it guaranteed to render web pages correctly, avoid sleeping with your spouse, or save the world.

God DAMN it! I knew I smelled CVS on the sheets...

RPMS ...

[Mr. Mai]

rpms normally are available 3 days after the initial release so dont despair =)

Re:RPMS ...

[dave_f1m]

But-But-But... How will I find them? If they don't post a story on /. about them, who will tell me where to find them? Will anyone actually come back in time to this story, and post it here? If so, I'd like to know where to get it for Mandrake 9.0.

And yes, I could just install the tgz, but then I have to do it for my friends and family, and I just don't feel like keeping track of what programs have been installed and how for them. It's much easier to just use 'rpm -q' and urpmi and such. If it's a program I'm trying for myself, I don't mind, but I'll be damned if I'm going to fsck with that while I'm troubleshooting someones machine through ssh.

- dave f.

So many yummy downloads

[chia_monkey]

I like the fact there have been three decent downloads in the past week...Mozilla, Netscape, and Safari. It kind of kills the argument "well of course Mozilla is faster, it was just released and Netscape has been around for the past few months". It'll make it easier to actual performance tests for similar products released all around the same time.

Good googly I have a lot of downloading to do tonight when I get home...

Re:So many yummy downloads

[Anonymous Coward]

um...shit...you know what I meant.

Re:Linux loosers summed up in 3 panels...

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha.... that's hilarious. Though it's not really aimed at Linux users as a whole, more like the "hackers" that found a "new vulnerability" on the XBox, or any Linus on XBob hacker.

rats, just finished downloading netscape 7.1!

[BigGerman]

joke BTW

Re:rats, just finished downloading netscape 7.1!

[Anonymous Coward]

YUO ARE TEH FUNNEY!!!!!!!111111111111!
LOLOLOLOLOLOL~~~~~~

Favicons?

[cK-Gunslinger]

Do website icons work for anybody the way I think they should work? I get the website icon in the URL bar, on the tab itself, but NOT in my bookmark list, which seems to contradict what the HELP file says. Can anyone confirm this?

Re:Favicons?

[mu_wtfo]

What you are seeing is the correct (well, intended) behavior. There have been issues with favicons/site icons for some time, since before 1.0. They've been pulled out, put back in, and pulled out again. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113574 goes over most of the issues, and can point you at most of the other relevant bugs.

As I recall, however, Mozilla Firebird *does* do favicons in the bookmark menu.

Re:Favicons?

[cK-Gunslinger]

Thanks. I just finished reading the *many* issues with favicons in bugzilla. It's not exactly a critical issue, but I expect my nearly perfect browser to be, well, nearly perfect! ;-) I think I'm going to try Firebird on my home machine tonite and see how well it works.

Re:Favicons?

[mu_wtfo]

I hadn't noticed this until just now, when I looked more closely at the Release Notes: Mozilla's bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.

So site icons seem to work everywhere except the Bookmarks menu. Cool!

Where's the sourcecode?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can find precompiled packages, but no source (src/) in the release dir, nor in the rc releases.

While precompiled is nice for users of many distributions (and windows for that matter) - people like myself who use a source meta distro like Gentoo (well ZyNot as soon as possible really). Is there no other way to get the source anymore than to checkout CVS?

-Lovechild

Re:Where's the sourcecode?

[Glytch]

Not to sound like an AOLer, but I agree. Where's the frickin' source? Isn't that one of the benefits of open source software? Hell, isn't that the definition?

The generic x86 binary is nice, but includes a whole lot of stuff I don't want and lacks a whole lot of stuff I do want. I want Xft, I don't want mail and news or ldap. That kind of thing.

(Wishing I had mod points instead of just replying...)

Re:Where's the sourcecode?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently downloading it via. CVS.

http://www.mozilla.org/cvs.html

The branch is: MOZILLA_1_4_RELEASE

BitTorrent

[cos(0)]

Get a BitTorrent download here!

Re:BitTorrent

[notbob]

Massively impressive 10k/sec... woah there 1995 don't hold me back! ;)

More companies need to use bit torrent for downloads, I don't get why they don't use it more often, if I ever distribute anything I'll use it to save me bandwith.

Re:BitTorrent

[YellowSubRoutine]

BT scales UP extremely well, but not down.

Since the mozilla files are 10-15MB, I doubt it's worth it.

Re:BitTorrent

[Dahan]

This reminds me... shouldn't Mozilla provide checksums and/or PGP signatures for these files? While I'm not 100% trusting of files on mozilla.org (servers can, and have been, compromised and files trojaned), I don't trust software from random .torrents at all...

FWIW, this torrent is probably fine--it's identical to the one on www.mozilla.org. Checksums are:
MD5(mozilla-win32-1.4-installer.exe)= 28cb37dfe56476fe0c5a74689cdc0063
SHA1(mozilla-win32-1.4-installer.exe)= c46336c7ceeeaa349f2546c1009f53271b186213

But you shouldn't take my word for it... Mozilla should be providing checksums; their distribution build instructions even recommend making a MD5SUM file.

Re:BitTorrent

[gmhowell]

70 kB/s

thx.

Re:BitTorrent

[afree87]

Try the Gnutella MAGNET here!

Re:BitTorrent

[jesser]

Can bittorrent URLs contain checksums? I think it's a bad idea to give out P2P urls that don't contain checksums.

But, But, But, ...

[Hal The Computer]

I just installed Netscape 7.1 :-(

/me bursts into tears because his browser is out of date.

Re:But, But, But, ...

[minusthink]

it was out of date the minute they stamped 'Netscape' on it. :D

Site swapped!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, I thought I typed slashdot.org but then I realized I was looking at freshmeat.org!

Yes, it is.

[MarcQuadra]

Mozilla is one of the 'pillars' of OSS software, along with GCC, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, and Apache (I'm probably forgetting some too). It's important to hype it up and keep us informed so we can test and push the technology. If we were all still using Mozilla 1.0 there wouldn't _BE_ a 1.4 release for a LONG time.

Slashdot is the appropriate place to make such release announcements. If you don't like them taking up space here, turn off mozilla stories in your prefs, if you want to track Mozilla closer turn on the Mozilla slashbox.

Re:Yes, it is.

[LarsG]

Mozilla is one of the 'pillars' of OSS software, along with GCC, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, and Apache (I'm probably forgetting some too).

Glibc, XFree and Samba.

Re:Yes, it is.

[mnemonic_]

The GIMP, Blender, Ogg Vorbis.

Re:Yes, it is.

[Boing]

What about OpenOffice, you insensitive clod?! :)

Re:Yes, it is.

[josephgrossberg]

Umm, Perl and MySQL?

Re:Yes, it is.

[Vanieter]

Mozilla is one of the 'pillars' of OSS software, along with GCC, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, and Apache

Debian, Redhat, the kernel, XFree86 ...

Re:Yes, it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I thought Freshmeat was the appropriate place for this.

Re:Yes, it is.

[jonadab]

Emacs. And that other editor too, seven or whatever it's called ;-)

Re:Yes, it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is one of the 'pillars' of OSS software, along with GCC, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, and Apache

Debian, Redhat, the kernel, XFree86 ...

Don't forget the kernel, too...

You should really upgrade

[burgburgburg]

to Netscape 4.8. It's so much better.

NT Authorization

[jj00]

Wow, sitting here using Mozilla to check my MS Outlook webmail. How nice it is...

Re:NT Authorization

[bheerssen]

MS Outlook *Webmail* does not require anything special. As far as the web browser is concerned, it's just a collection of dynamically generated web pages. Outlook itself is a different matter. Nothing has yet to make the 100% comapatibility mark, not even Outlook webmail.

To be sure, cross-over office can do it, as can vmware, et al, but those all run the actual Outlook client so compatibility there is a non-issue. Evolution connector is close, but still not 100%.

Re:NT Authorization

[jj00]

Yeah, my company uses NT Authorization to validite my login. I couldn't use Mozilla with it (Outlook webmail) until now. No matter...

Re:Curious..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's _boku_ bucks. Can't anyone spell around here. :-)

GTK2

[Mistah Blue]

Anybody here have an idea how long we'll have to wait for GTK2 builds? I'm spoiled by the 1.4RC1 GTK2 build on RH9.

Re:GTK2

[MarcQuadra]

Honestly curious, what's the difference?

I was building Mozilla with GTK2 on my box for a while, but moved back to GTK because 2 was 'crashy'. I didn't notice any difference besides very minor widget appearance changes. What's the draw to GTK2? Are there any 'real' advantages?

Re:GTK2

[mu_wtfo]

The GTK2 builds are done by Chris Blizzard, a mozilla.org staff member who works at RedHat. There weren't any (that I could find) done for RC2 or RC3, but I'm still hopeful that we'll see one for 1.4 final. Perhaps he's waiting for http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201209 to be fixed. (-moz-opacity makes things invisible in GTK2 port)

Re:GTK2

[Mistah Blue]

It brings you antialiased fonts (at least in RH9). It is built for Gnome 2.x.

Re:GTK2

[foonf]

It brings you antialiased fonts (at least in RH9). It is built for Gnome 2.x.

You can compile against GTK 1.2.x and still get antialiased fonts if you also enable Xft support.

Building against 2.x lets you use Galeon 1.3 and Epiphany though, which is why I do it (and am eagerly awaiting the source release).

Re:GTK2

[MarcQuadra]

Right on, I was thinking "I hava AA fonts, but compile against gtk1"

Re:TEH TRIUMPH OF TEH OPEN SORES!!!

[Tailhook]

This doesn't happen with a quality, commerical product like IE

Heh.

also released today...

[pb]

Wouldn't it be great if you could get some sort of 'sidebar' that told you what software has been released today, instead of having to post new /. stories every time? Well, until such a feature is implemented, or a new site is devoted to such things, I guess we'll just have to keep track of all the software releases the old fashioned way, by releasing new stories every time Netscape, Mozilla, or indeed any other software package that our readers might find relevant is released.

I know, it's a tough job, but some site in the open source community needs to take this on. Now some of you might say this gets in the way of actual news, but I don't think there's actually that much risk of that here. If it pushes another Anime story off the front page, I think that's a risk I'm willing to take just to make sure that I have the latest version of Mozilla available to me. And I'm sure the rest of you will agree, once you see the new vision for slashdot's software section, which will soon greatly boost our daily story posting, as well as provide reviews of all the software, and meaningless license debates, which will surely degenerate into GPL misunderstandings and anti-BSD flamewars, and more zealotry! As you can plainly see, everybody wins.

Also Released Recently Today:

- CodeTek VirtualDesktop 2.3.5
- dnspython 1.0.0 (Stable)
- Alt+Connect 2.5.7/9 (Development)
- Advanced Bash Scripting Guide 1.9 (Stable)
- bes-cms 0.3
- BlogPlanet 1.0.2
- PhotoGen 1.9b
- imgSeek 0.7.2
- The Tamber Project 1.2.10 (Pogo)
- OSSP fsl 1.2.0
- Minimalist Queue Services 0.0.3
- OSSP l2 0.9.2
- Cyrus SASL 2.1.14 (SASLv2)
- Bugzero 2.7
- tclperl 2.5
- tclpython 3.1
- PHPXref 0.3
- SimpleData 3.0.17
- Postfix 2.0.13 (Stable)
- Firepass 1.1.1a
- Nmap 3.30 (Stable)
- GKrellM 2.1.14 (GTK 2.0)
[...]

...watch slashdot.org for updates!

Re:also released today...

[nathana]

Uh, just visit freshmeat.net, or enable the FreshMeat sidebar in your Slashdot preferences. :-)

-- Nathan

Re:also released today...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're such a spaz.

Re:also released today...

[(startx)]

ummm, you mean like freshmeat or the freshmeat sidebar? Are you trying to make a joke or troll? Whoever has mod points today thinks your serious...

Re:also released today...

[fobbman]

That's a fantastic idea, pb! I wish that there was a way to make your post somehow stand out above all the rest so that it would be noticed...*sigh* A point system would be REALLY cool. Smiley faces? Who knows!

Re:also released today...

[Willis Wasabi]

This brings up an interesting issue. A lot of the moderators seem to be as dumb as rocks (ha watch *this* post get moderated), or at least severely humor impaired. After a half hour or so it seems that moderators actually take time to read posts and moderate funny when appropriate.

Is this the equivalent of "First post!"? "First moderation with no comprehension of what the poster was getting at?" Can we moderate the moderators and get rid of anyone who took the parent's parent seriously? They don't belong here. They're probably Windows users anyhow. :)

Re:also released today...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah yeah yeah, in other news, worthless crap that I don't care about (that would be my definition of "worthless crap" what's egocentric?) was released. Big deal, I actually care about mozilla: it's a big project, used by many people, and it's really cool.

wow, bug-city!

[Tumbleweed]

Too bad, so sad. Moz 1.4 is fulla da bugs.

Within 1 minute, I found that it's listing sans-serif fonts as serif, and serif fonts as sans-serif. Yikes.

Also some weirdness in the toolbar buttons with vertical alignment. (Back & Forward buttons 'valigned' to the top, whilst Reload & Stop buttons are on the bottom). Bizarro.

At least this is the FIRST time a Mozilla release has actually NOT decided to make itself the default browser in spite of my always telling it not to. One bug fixed, yay! :)

Re:wow, bug-city!

[nathana]

Also some weirdness in the toolbar buttons with vertical alignment. (Back & Forward buttons 'valigned' to the top, whilst Reload & Stop buttons are on the bottom). Bizarro.

I've seen stuff like this happen when you install a new version of Mozilla on top of an old version, or you install a new version and still continue to use your old profile.

Try wiping out your old profile after backing up your bookmarks and mail (rm -r ~/.mozilla/ or delete Mozilla under Application Data in Windows), and let Mozilla 1.4 generate a new one for you. After that, you may find that all your problems have disappeared!

-- Nathan

Re:wow, bug-city!

[Anonymous Coward]

Within 1 minute, I found that it's listing sans-serif fonts as serif, and serif fonts as sans-serif.

That definitely shouldn't behave like that by default. (Although yes, it is now possible, if you really want to, to use any font as the default for these font-families.)

Re:wow, bug-city!

[otherwhere]

Within 1 minute, I found that it's listing sans-serif fonts as serif, and serif fonts as sans-serif. Yikes.

Actually, it's allowing you to select _any_ font you want to be displayed when the page author has suggested serif, it's not saying "these are serif fonts, pick one". Therefore, both dropdowns contain all installed fonts. It's a feature, not a bug.

I will admit, however, that toolbar weirdness is probably not a feature.

Re:wow, bug-city!

[Tumbleweed]

Sweet - I don't know how I missed that, but okay, you're definitely right!

That's a cool feature, now that I think about it. Now I can specify no fucking serif fonts EVER. *ahhhhh* 'Trebuchet MS' goodness wherever I browse. Schweet.

Okay, so my only gripe about it is the crappy handling of old Moz profile data left lying around, which is hardly a big deal to me. Yayness and goodness.

danka for de 411

Re:wow, bug-city!

[bheerssen]

The old profile can't be deleted (by the installer) because that profile may contain information important to the user such as email settings, bookmarks, and such.

If you don't need any of that stuff (maybe it's not your primary browser/email client) you can always manually delete the profile directory before or after installation.

Perhaps that should be an option during install, but I could see problems with even that on multi-user systems.

Re:wow, bug-city!

[Tumbleweed]

If it's just a matter of deleting files & directories during install, then, yes, the installer COULD do that, and quite easily, rather than making someone go hunting them down. That's pretty ridiculous. You shouldn't HAVE to go hunting down stuff like that!

And I _am_ just saying that should be an option during install, not a default (though it should make the option prominent). re: multi-user systems

The vast majority of people are certainly not on multi-user systems, so making the installer default to behaviour you would expect on such a system is pretty dumb, IMO.

But then, what do I know? I'm just a usability/UI expert. :)

Re:wow, bug-city!

[Zathrus]

The question is, how old were the profiles and other such that you had laying around? If they were from pre-1.0 releases then there's no guarantee made of compatibility -- and that could explain some of the weirdness you saw.

If all the profiles were from 1.0 release or upward then it shouldn't have an issue -- but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an issue.

I'm running Firebird 0.6 (well, one of the 0.6 dailys) and don't plan on upgrading it until needed because they explicitly warn that prior to 1.0 release the recomended install procedure involves deleting all of your config files... and I did indeed have to do that at one point between 0.5 and 0.6. It annoys me, but as a developer myself I can understand the pitfalls of running beta software.

Re:wow, bug-city!

[dewie]

At least this is the FIRST time a Mozilla release has actually NOT decided to make itself the default browser in spite of my always telling it not to. One bug fixed, yay! :)

Not quite, at least for me. Mozilla didn't make itself the default browser, but it did change my default from Firebird to IE, which I didn't appreciate.

Re:wow, bug-city!

[Tumbleweed]

> Not quite, at least for me. Mozilla didn't make itself the default browser, but it did change my default from Firebird to IE, which I didn't appreciate.

Wow, bizarre! Seems the Windows installer folks have a fair amount of work ahead of them.

Other than that, I've been using it a few hours now, and it's working fine once you get the beast installed correctly. Gotta love them tabs!

GOD

[Anonymous Coward]

DAMN IT.

Get Safari already. And if you don't have a Mac then get a G5 already! What is your god damn problem??

Re:GOD

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your god damn problem??

I believe its called heterosexuality. It afflicts a majority of people in fact.

WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

"MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla 1.4 has been released for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

What the fsck! Are the editors even awake! Come one guys, read the damn article! There is nothing in the article that says it's released for those systems, especially not the implication that it's released JUST for those systems. Mozilla 1.4 has been released for all platforms!

The systems that Mozilla 1.4 work on are: Linux (all architectures), GNU/HURD, IRIX, Tru4, BSD/OS, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, OSX, OS/2, BeOS. There are probably others systems as well...

Re:WinOSXnux?

[ChristTrekker]

So where do I get an official release build for PPC Linux? I see a link to official nightly builds, but not a release build.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[kirun]

Read the release page:

We initially release builds on the Win32, Mac OS X and Linux x86 platforms. In the days following the initial release, volunteers contribute builds for other platforms. If the build you're looking for isn't here yet, DON'T PANIC.

As I look at the releases page, there aren't releases for some of the OSes you list yet...

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Tackhead]

> The systems that Mozilla 1.4 work on are: Linux (all architectures), GNU/HURD, IRIX, Tru4, BSD/OS, Solaris

$ ./run-mozilla.sh
ld.so.1: ./mozilla-bin: fatal: relocation error: file ./mozilla-bin: symbol gtk_set_locale: referenced symbol not found

Really? Solaris?

Not yet. (Yeah, it's the goddamn GTK libraries, and which compiler they were built with this week. And which things you'll break if you replace 'em. And where the hell do you get 'em?)

Rant: Mozilla binary tarballs for Solaris 2.6/7/8 should just include a copy of the libraries as part of the bundle, compiled under whatever compiler works with the frickin' Mozilla binary. It's a binary, the whole point is so that you don't have to compile jack shit. Diskspace is cheap. The sysadmin's few remaining strands of hair are not.

This has only been an outstanding issue against Mozilla binaries for... what, three years now?

Re:WinOSXnux?

[bheerssen]

Uh, it was released for just those systems. Although the article did not say one way or the other, a click through to the mozilla download directory would have revealed the following mozilla builds:

mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.4-installer.tar.gz 30-Jun-2003 12:38 95k
mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.4-sea.tar.gz 30-Jun-2003 12:40 13.4M
mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.4.tar.gz 24-Jun-2003 11:38 11.9M
mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-egcs112-1.4.tar.gz 30-Jun-2003 17:03 11.8M
mozilla-mac-MachO-1.4.dmg.gz 24-Jun-2003 11:13 15.1M
mozilla-win32-1.4-installer.exe 30-Jun-2003 12:44 11.7M
mozilla-win32-1.4-stub-installer.exe 30-Jun-2003 12:41 222k
mozilla-win32-1.4-talkback.zip 30-Jun-2003 12:45 10.4M

Clearly, no other platforms are yet listed. According to the release notes, however, we can expect builds for other platforms relatively soon.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

Yeah yeah yeah. I was under the stupid assumption that Mozilla was open source, and thus you could build it for any damn platform you liked.

I was wrong. There is no source code for any Mozilla later than 1.4b.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

I was wrong. Seriously wrong. The sound you hear is me gagging on my words...

I always thought Mozilla was Open Source. I was wrong. How could I ever have been so stupid. There is no source code for mozilla-1.4! This is not Open Source. This is not Free Software.

Even stranger, they say to stay tuned for further releases by volunteers. But there is no source code for volunteers to build volunteer releases with! Aaagh!

Off to log a major serious critical bug with the project...

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

You build it yourself from the source code. It is an Open Source and Free Software project, so the source code has to be there somewhere. Just don't ask me, I can't find it... Sigh. My respect for Mozilla just got flushed down the toilet.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

Okay, the source code is there now. It took them awhile, but they finally got their act together.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

No wait! The source code magically appeared at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla 1.4/src/ mere minutes after I posted my previous reply. Bitching sometimes does work!

Okay, now that you have the source code, you can build it for any Win32, Aqua or X11R6 platform, which include all of those that I listed.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Arandir]

Funny, in the middle of logging that bug, as I was copying over the url where the source code should have been, suddenly there it was! Bitching on Slashdot sometimes works :-)

Okay, now that the source code is available, feel free to go build it for any of those platforms I listed.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[ChristTrekker]

Fear the pain of trying to build the hulk-that-is-mozilla on my ancient systems.... Or even downloading that much source over 56k.... I just find it strange they build PPC nightlies but not the final releases.

(Posted with Links from one of my ancient systems.)

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Anonymous Coward]

blastwave.org - Community SoftWare for Solaris

The package should be updated to 1.4 before long.

Re:WinOSXnux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they released the source cause you complained.

SURE.

Still bugged...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still cant add links next to my bookmarks like I used to be able to

Proprietary "features"

[Ikeya]

The new version is pretty similar to today's Netscape 7.1, which is based on the same code, but lacks Netscape's proprietary features.

Uhh... and it's a bad thing that Mozilla lacks these "features"? I personally like Mozilla with less crap. Oh well. To each their own...

ikeya

the irony is...

[Anonymous Coward]

that he's using win2k. I just installed it under linux and it works like a dream. Looks like the weakest link isn't OSS in this case.

Normally I don't respond to trolls, but I thought this was funny enough to share :)

Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[truesaer]

Hopefully these things will be addressed in Mozilla 1.4. I have been trying to transition from Internet Explorer, but it has been a bit rough because Mozilla is still missing some of the polish that IE has.

1) I still find an occasional page that renders incorrectly. Or maybe what its actually doing is rendering correctly due to spec compliance. But I don't really care what the problem is, I just want them to always render like other browsers.

2) There are weird problems with keyboard keys not working right sometimes. For example, occasionally if I click in the document that has been displayed, the arrow keys will not move the page. Or in forms the home/end keys, etc. dont work. It seems like these events aren't being captured, although I can't find any consistent way to cause it.

3) When I view my rental queue in Netflix, Mozilla crashes completely. This is the biggest problem...other things are just irritating, but I can't get rid of IE while this still happens. Again, maybe Netflix is using improper javascript or something. But, my perspective as a user is only "does it work." In any case, the browser should be able to handle nasty code in a way that doesn't cause a complete crash even if it infinite loops or something.

Despite these kinds of annoyances, I am going to stick with Mozilla. I love tabbed browsing, and I really like being able to bookmark a set of tabs that I may want open for reference while working on a project. 1.3 was the first version I started using regularly because my form filler/password manager finally supported Mozilla, and with googlebar all my needs are met.

I guess I'll go see now if 1.4 has addressed any of these issues...

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you file the bugs in Bugzilla rather than complain about them here?

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[truesaer]

Why don't you file the bugs in Bugzilla rather than complain about them here?

I have. All I'm doing is explaining what I still see as problems from one user's view of things. Its one way that the Mozilla developers can understand what people are thinking about their product.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[hawkbug]

As far as pages not loading correctly as your gripe #1 - this is not Mozilla's fault in my cases. It's IE's. How? Well, lets look at this page for a moment:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/clubhouse?team=col

It looks like total ass in Mozilla, and basically any browser I've tried besides IE. It used to look just fine BEFORE that damned MSN ad bar that takes up most of the screen now. You can write terrible code, and have it look fine in IE because IE just ignores a lot of mistakes. I see this as a bad thing, because when browsers try to correctly render a page according to standards, it makes you think the browser is broken and not the page.

BTW, I have tried repeatedly to notify the ESPN guys about all their messed up pages, but obviously nobody cares as long as they get their MSN money.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonvmous Coward]

ooo careful about pointing out problems you've had with Mozilla dude. The Denial Sentinels will mod you down!

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's true, why not watch the bug status to see when they're fixed?

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[ZipR]

I've never had that Netflix problem with any recent version... using mozilla on a win 2k sys...

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[The Bungi]

I love how posts like these are modded down. Flamebait? "look! someobody is saying bad tihngs abuot oppen sourse!! adn i haven mod pionts!!! bahahahaha!! take that, m$ suporter!!1!".

Stupid crackhead mods.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[egomaniac]

Mozilla 1.4 on Win 98, Win ME, and Win XP -- NetFlix works fine in all of them for me.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[truesaer]

None are listed as fixed. I just tried the netflix page which is fixed. All I can do is report instances of problems, they may well fix the root cause without knowing which reports are the result of that bug, which is I guess what happened here. Anyway, thats one bug to close out.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[swordgeek]

Can't believe that you got modded down as flamebait. Must be an idiot with moderator points.

At any rate while I have sympathy for your points, consider it from the point of view of mozilla. There is an internationally agreed-upon set of standards on how to write HTML. A website that doesn't follow those standards is broken, in the same way that a PCI card that requires a nonstandard voltage is broken. If you got a card that didn't fit in any PCI slots other than the ones on motherboards made by the same manufacturer, it's pretty hard to blame the other board makers for following standards, even though you can't use this particular PCI card in their boards.

Ultimately, it's a lost cause. People see websites that are broken because Microsoft promotes broken websites (and renders them the way the creators intended, rather than correctly), and blame Mozilla for behaving properly.

Try dropping a message to netflix. I did that to Toyota Canada a year ago, and within four months they had a site that worked 100% with mozilla, opera, and IE. (Furthermore, they had a note up indicating their intentions to implement this no more than three weeks after I emailed them! Good on Toyota.)

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[truesaer]

Actually, netflix is now working with 1.4. So that is good news. I guess I should have tested before posting...the other bugs are intermittent for me, so I'll have to see in the coming week or two how things pan out.

But I'm glad to see this, because now I can stop the two-browser dance.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[HBI]

Can't believe that you got modded down as flamebait. Must be an idiot with moderator points.

They pretty much all are idiots. I mean seriously - anyone with an opinion about anything gets removed from the pool fairly rapidly.

A jury of your peers my ass. More a jury of one-celled life forms.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[mu_wtfo]

It could also be argued that IE is the most broken browser out there. Specs *are* important - no specs mean a fragmentation of the web, different vendors just randomly inventing 'html'. That means that page development time goes up exponentially, as developers now have as many different targets as there are browsers, instead of one target, the w3c spefification.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[The Bungi]

this is not Mozilla's fault in my cases. It's IE's.

Well, that's another unlikely thing to accuse a browser of. Here's a concept: how about blaming the people who write the pages, can't give a shit about cross browser compatibility and can't be bothered to test with more than one? Wow, that actually makes sense.

And as for "they won't listen to me, bhwaaaaa" part, keep in mind that +90% of the web is viewed through IE. No amount of whining about how product X is better because it's free will change that. Instead, vote with your eyes and go somewhere else. But stop whining.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[MarcQuadra]

Well, since the original poster seems to take his Mozilla issues to Slashdot instead of bugzilla, we're using the 'slashdot WORKSFORME' flag, which is to mod down as flamebait. It has nothing to do with open source defensiveness, it has to do with the poster using the wrong outlet for his problems. Look at how many folks DON'T have that issue, most likely the original poster has installed several versions of Mozilla on top of each other or has totaly borked plugins.

If I were to post that IE crashes every time I open a PDF you wouldn't give me credit, you'd say that I probably screwed up my plugins or something.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're a troll (I mean, who sits around on a website posting inflammatory comments for fun? Get some friends and a life, please!).

IE is the only browser that works.

That's funny. I do EVERYTHING in Mozilla. Shopping, reading, researching, banking, games... About 1 in 30 sites don't work exactly right, and I just ignore them.

open source projects will always be labelled as second rate by the masses

Yeah, the "masses". Even though the people who I've introduced to Mozilla like it far more than the insecure, advert-ridden popup-laden IE. Oh well, eh? And yeah, shame open source projects aren't being widely used by the masses, just large sites and installations like Google, Amazon, Munich, blah blah blah.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[TheRaven64]

Although, oddly enough, the guy who pointed out that if you install Moz 1.4 on 2k it crashes on start-up has not been modded down.

Oh well, time to uninstall and go back to 1.2.1. At least that one didn't crash until after you'd used it for a bit...

10 seconds later: ARGH! I've just discovered that Moz 1.4 doesn't seem to include an uninstaller.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

It IS flamebait, for at least two reasons: He complains about problems which he had with 1.3. This is a story about 1.4. Second, if he wants a browser which renders exactly like other browsers, he should use other browsers (like we don't know what "other browsers" means). If he favors proprietary rendering over correct rendering, then we don't care about his problems with broken sites. Nobody has to use Mozilla. If following the "industry standard" is more important to you than the usability features and standards affinity of Mozilla, then by all means, use the "other browser".

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[TheRaven64]

Correction: It does have an uninstaller, but it doesn't show up in the add/remove programs dialog for a few minutes after installation, for some reason.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[The Bungi]

we're using the 'slashdot WORKSFORME' flag, which is to mod down as flamebait

Right. Hurry up and mod down all the AC's and trolls. You still have quite a few to go after eliminating this one, this terrible transgressor.

It has nothing to do with open source defensiveness, it has to do with the poster using the wrong outlet for his problems

If the mod had been offtopic I'd start to maybe perhaps buy that. Unfortunately that's not the case.

If I were to post that IE crashes every time I open a PDF you wouldn't give me credit, you'd say that I probably screwed up my plugins or something.

I don't moderate. But regardless, this is a discussion (right?) about Mozilla (right?) and modding down a post like this one as flamebait is the epitome of moderator stupidity. And I've seen a lot of that.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

(I mean, who sits around on a website posting inflammatory comments for fun? Get some friends and a life, please!).

This, coming from an AC. Just as I think I've seen it all here, someone comes up with a more pathetic excuse for a human being and surprises me.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[swordgeek]

You're probably the moderator who called him flamebait.

1) Discussing problems he's had with past versions is VERY relevant to the current announcement--are they fixed or are they not?

2) If you modded down every post that talked about 1.3 (or earlier), there would be five posts left in the entire discussion.

3) He didn't claim to favour anything, and he didn't try to incite flames (the very definition of flamebait I'd say), but he DID bring up what are at least perceived by the user to be mozilla issues, even though in fact they're Microsoft-sponsored developer problems.

Flamebait? Damn, three out of every ten posts on slashdot are more effective (and usually illiterate) flamebait than that was. The guy raised a serious issue, and brought it forth as a discussion topic. I can't think of anything more relevant.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[mnemonic_]

I have experienced your problem #2 many, many times. It seems like Mozilla is going into some alternate keyboard shortcut mode or something. When the arrow and page nav keys don't work, I can press "a" and my bookmarked site which starts with the letter "a" will immediately start loading. After that, all my keys work normally.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Arker]

Hrmm I took a look, I don't see what you're complaining about really. It's readable in Moz. Looks like shit, but there's a reason - view source and you'll see that Mozilla is simply being honest - it's written like shit too.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[bmalia]

The source of dynamically generated HTML is always going to look like ass.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not that moderator, and while I probably wouldn't moderate his comment at all if I had modpoints, I do understand the flamebait moderation. His comment is nothing but the same old "why can't Mozilla be like IE" bait. His 1.3 pet bugs are not relevant. If he wants to know whether they still exist in 1.4, there's an easy way to find out: Install the damn thing. He even promises to do just that at the end of the comment, so why would he post old bugs if not as flamebait? And no sane person can really expect the Mozilla team to "fix" the rendering differences. If you want IE, go use one of the browsers which use the IE ActiveX control for rendering. "Other browsers" my ass.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Skater]

How I wish I had mod points right now! ;)

--RJ

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[HBI]

heh heh

Telling the mods the truth about themselves loses you a bit of karma but hey, I have some to burn.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[jonadab]

> The source of dynamically generated HTML is always going to
> look like ass.

It doesn't have to. I write Perl code that dynamically generates
HTML that's nicely formatted and validates. This requires only a
very small amount of extra effort initially _and_ it makes your
code easier to maintain.

When you see dynamically generated code that's messy, it's usually
because the person who wrote the code to generate it writes HTML in
a messy fashion. For example, HTML generated by CGI.pm is gross,
because the author of CGI.pm doesn't write HTML very well.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Malcontent]

"Instead, vote with your eyes and go somewhere else. But stop whining."

Do both.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Reziac]

[looks] Believe it or not, it's decently readable in my preferred NS3.04 (js and images off), other than some pukey side-menu colours. But that is truly ugly source -- it's so screwed up that AOLpress (my fave completely-anal code validator) doesn't even recognise it as HTML, and treated it as plaintext.

Personally, I don't WANT my browser to ignore errors. Who knows when ignoring bad HTML might lead to being Exploited? No thanks.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[Anonymous Coward]

this page is written by microsoft. of course they write shitty code in the page that f*cks up every bowser but ie.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[hawkbug]

Look at the page in IE and then look at it in Mozilla. See how the paragraph in the middle of the page is only supposed to take up a small part of the screen? Instead, in Mozilla it completely goes off the page to the right and covers up the stupid MSN ad bar thing. This is NOT the fault of Mozilla, it's bad code, plain and simple. IE simply renders the incorrect code to look fine because it's less picky. Mozilla on the other hand barfs over it. I think any web developer for an orginization as large as ESPN needs to do their job and test sites in multiple browsers, and I don't care if 90% of people only use IE - that simply means your page will look like crap for the other 10%.

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[srvivn21]

Care to know why ESPN has been ignoring you?

Click here and scroll down to the graph titled "Web Browsers Used to Access Google". At the very bottom right of the graph you can see that Netscape 5.x+ (which includes Mozilla) does register. Barely. At least it's beating out IE 4.0...

Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3

[smallfries]

2) There are weird problems with keyboard keys not working right sometimes. For example, occasionally if I click in the document that has been displayed, the arrow keys will not move the page. Or in forms the home/end keys, etc. dont work. It seems like these events aren't being captured, although I can't find any consistent way to cause it.

I'm using an older build but I've noticed this as well. Try clicking in the address bar, now up/down/home/end change it. Now click on a blank part of the webpage (not over text so you have an arrow instead of the text cursor). Bingo, address bar still has focus and keys don't move the page. I'm sure somebody will reply that its a feature not a bug but it is annoying...

finally, I can mount Buffy!

[numbski]

MacOS X requires you to mount Buffy and drag it to applications. Gotta love it! :P

What was it....

mount;fsck;more;yes;umount;sleep

Now where is that Spike pr0n search plugin?

Re:finally, I can mount Buffy!

[Electrode]

Now where is that Spike pr0n search plugin? Spike Lee sued the author.

Re:finally, I can mount Buffy!

[paulpuddles]

Don't let Giles find out!

Re:finally, I can mount Buffy!

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't fsck a mounted filesystem - it can lead to massive data corruption. The only safe time to fsck a mounted filesystem is if it has been mounted read-only.

Thus 'mount -o remount,ro /dev/buffy' then do your fsck'ing.

Haven't I seen this before?

[Lane.exe]

Oh yes... HAWTALTA! Definition here.

Disable Window pop-ups in Linux?

[boy_afraid]

I know how to disable window, aka ad, popups under Windows/XP, but that option seems to have disappeared under the Linux version. Does anyone know where I can find it?

Re:Disable Window pop-ups in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Type "about:config" into your address bar. (No quotes)

Netscape in Linux Distros

[ad0le]

I can remember a time when just about every distro under the sun shipped with a stock installation of Netscape. Well before Mozilla was anything to write home about. Considering its history alone is pretty amazing.

Re:Bush Re-election News Released: +1, Patriotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Two thousand peacenik Internet geeks can't be wrong!

so...

[di0s]

From here on, mozilla.org's focus shifts to Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird.
So what ever happend to Mozilla Camero and Mozilla Trans-Am?

Re:so...

[siphoncolder]

Those brands are MS codenames. I'm waiting for the AOL Mustang, myself =P

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla Trans-Am

They ran out of users with mullets to test it?

Type and find...

[Rahga]

I'll go ahead and stick my neck out: It may be newer to Netscape rather than Mozilla, but I can't tell you how much I love little things like "Find As You Type"... This is kinda second-nature stuff to those of us who commonly use vi & co..... to find a link, if the browser has focus, just type a word to find a link containing that word, or "/" followed by the word to search the text. Bad part: "/" + "Enter" won't go ahead and look for the next word, instead you have to do "Ctl+G" or "F3"... bah! No regexp support either, at least as far as I know.... maybe not useful for a ton of users, but wouldn't it rock?

Re:Type and find...

[mu_wtfo]

Thanks to the magic of XUL and XBL, you *can* change key bindings. See http://mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html, the "Key Bindings" section, for info on how to change things around to suit you better.

Oh, and don't be fooled by the 'unix' in the URL - most of the info on that page is completely cross-platform.

Re:Type and find...

[the Atomic Rabbit]

The biggest advantage of Type Ahead Find is that it makes keyboard navigation practical. Type Ahead Find selects links preferentially, so you no longer have to tab through a zillion links to get to the one you want; just type the text of the link and you'll get there immediately.

Re:Type and find...

[Flarelocke]

Yeah, it'd be nice if Mozilla had some more convenient keys than this, but Enter should not be that key. Currently, find-as-you-type is set to check only the text in links by default, so if you use that default, to find a link, you can then press enter to load the page linked to by the link you found.

Personally, I'd rather have it use [ and ] or , and . or even just ; and shift-;

Re:Type and find...

[Crispy Critters]

"The biggest advantage of Type Ahead Find is that it makes keyboard navigation practical."

Hear, hear! Watch someone using a computer, and see how time he wastes switching from keyboard to mouse. Especially for text searches. Old way: hitting C-f, finding the dialog with the mouse and getting to the text field, moving the dialog so you can see the page, and so on. New way: hit / and start typing. No mousing, no annoying dialog box. Amazing! Years of using "less" has conditioned me to use / for searches, and this works great.

"Type Ahead Find selects links preferentially"

This is an option you can change.

Re:Type and find...

[Anonymous Coward]

Type and find is garbage. It locks up the entire program for a couple of minutes each time you use it.

Netscape

[milesbparty]

So when is the new version of Netscape coming out?

Typical

[BollocksToThis]

I downloaded Firebird 0.6 last night because Mozilla was still in release candidate mode. If I'd realised they were serious about the term Release Candidate, I would've just grabbed that.

Does anyone know if anyone is working on a usable 'save tabs' feature? When I use Opera, and accidentally close it (or it crashes), I load it up and all my previous windows are there. I *need* this feature because I can't just browse in a single window, and I have yet to use a browser that doesn't crash after a few arns.

Once Mozilla has this, Opera and it's ads (and it's stupid 'wand' that doesn't ever properly disable) is history.

Oh, and have they fixed the bookmark manager in this version? It's incredibly annoying right now (in Firebird 0.6, if you select a folder and add a new folder, the new folder is made a sibling of the selected folder, not a child).

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure they've added an option for a prompt when you close a window with multiple tabs to the next version. Not quite saving them, but still stopping you from accidentally closing them all.

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not usually my own accidents I need to avoid though. It's when I'm browsing with about twenty different windows and the browser crashes, or I need to restart the machine or leave the house. Sometimes I do click the top close button because the tab-close button doesn't seem very visible, but that's something I can overcome (and I'm willing to accept the consequences if I do something stupid - it's the software doing stupid things unpredictably that twists my nipple).

Re:Typical

[mnemonic_]

I know exactly what you're talking about with a recovery "save tabs" feature like the one present in Opera. In Mozilla, I've usually found viewing the History sufficient for re-visiting sites that I was at before a Mozilla crash.

Re:Typical

[cristofer8]

I think that firebird's tabbed browser extentions has that ability. Instead of opening your homepage, it can open the tabs that were opened when you closed the browser. I'm not sure if it works after a crash though.

You can get it at texturizer.net/firebird

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if anyone is working on a usable 'save tabs' feature?

Galeon (the better Mozilla(tm) :P) has had this for a while (despite the fact that it never crashed on me so far).

Re:Typical

[dave_f1m]

For me, that doesn't work. It seems whenever the power goes out I have 2-3 weeks worth of 'tab-marked' pages that I haven't bookmarked, and it isn't worth going through the history for that long to find them. Of course, Google works fine for that.

- dave f.

Features?

[Realistic_Dragon]

Yeah baby! Let's get Netscape 7.1 instead of Mozilla for all of those proprietary features I want like... uhhh...

AIM? Yeah, right. Other than that Netscape 7.1 has _less_ features* than Mozilla 1.4, as well as having the wholesome open-source-goodiness impaired.

*Does it still not block pop up ads from AOL.com BTW? Nice trick there I must say.

Re:Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can stop it allowing aol.com pop-ups by going to Edit > Preferences > Privacy & Security > Popup Windows > Allowed Sites, highlighting aol.com and clicking Remove.

great!

[pb]

So what you're saying is that now slashdot can stop posting all these extra software release stories! :)

(Seriously, I hope you noticed that the list I posted precisely matches the last [n] software packages listed on Freshmeat. I just felt like posting something a bit more interesting than the typical "slashdot is turning into freshmeat" post...)

Also, your homepage is a 404, dude. :)

Re:great!

[nathana]

So what you're saying is that now slashdot can stop posting all these extra software release stories! :)

Bah; trolling for responss like mine to make a point, eh? ;-)

Also, your homepage is a 404, dude. :)

Ah, foo...I never even thought to change that. That URL has been outdated for a while. ;-) Thanks for the reminder...

-- Nathan

Mozilla - Firebird

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Firebird as my primary browser for a while, and I do quite like it.

But I'm a bit concerned. Firebird's developers have now made me very, very reluctant to download nightly builds so that I might try to find and report bugs.

This for several reasons :

• The "tabbed browsing extensions" has been unusable on more than a few of the nightlies I've downloaded recently.
• If you report a bug that they determine belongs in an extension it gets zapped and I'm not sure it ever gets reported to the extension writer. Further, I've had a few rude responses when I've reported bugs in extensions - they don't want to cope with bugs that belong in mozilla or in extensions. And I'm supposed to determine that by ESP?
• Starting in the last few weeks, I've been having Firebird just hang completely on me. Often it keeps running and starts to sop up all the CPU time it can grab.

I hate griping about OSS developers - but Firebird has become such an important tool to me that I'd like to help - even if only by reporting bugs - and when that process seems not to work, it gets a bit frustrating.

No it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

freshmeat.net

Do you know why we aren't all using Mozilla 1.0? Because most of us are using IE. Or a later version of mozilla, since v 1.0 was buggy, bloated, and had crippled functionality. In the IRC interview, Hemos gave browser percentages. opera and konqueror had almost as much share as mozilla or netscape.

Mozilla is hardly an Open Source Success -- most of the contributors and developers are paid AOL employees. You can look at the code, but have you? You can compile the code, but be prepared to wait. The only good things to come from mozilla are a version of netscape without a "shop" button, an engine used in galeon, and bugzilla.

Mozilla - so crappy we had to develop our own bug tracking system. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Re:No it's not

[molarmass192]

Given this is an AC post, it's probably a troll but I'll bite. I disagree with you wholeheartedly.

If you want to use IE, Opera, or Konqueror, good for you. However, I roll my own Mozilla, have several code changes that I wrote (wallet and javascript functionality) and some 3rd party diff patches (spellchecker and menu enhancements). I optimize the hell out of the code using every compiler option available to me and it takes just shy of 20 minutes to compile. The result? My self-built Mozilla puts IE and Opera to shame for speed and flexibility. Memory use is slightly higher (~20M) but for 10M I have the Ferrari of browsers, customized and faster even than Opera 6 when it was at it's peak. On a reasonably fast site like Yahoo, uncached pages render a full second faster than in IE 6.0 (under W98/Win4Lin) and about 1/2 second faster than Opera 6. Now, compiling code is not for everybody but if you know how, you cannot beat Mozilla.

Also, you're confusing contributors and those with CVS write access. AOL controls almost all the CVS write accounts but there are PLENTY of unpaid non-AOL contributors who submit code to be checked-in. While I'm at it, Bugzilla was created because the original Netscape developers hated the 3rd party bug tracking system used there. So, to correct your parting shot: "Bugzilla - because 3rd party closed source bug tracking systems are so crappy."

Now, let me turn the tables. Have you looked at the code? Have you ever compiled the code? If not, then I'd counter that even you don't know why you aren't using Mozilla.

Re:No it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd counter that you are a complete and utter dipshit. HTH, HAND

Re:No it's not

[molarmass192]

Well, at least you're gracious in defeat. Hope I get to run into you in a dark alley some day kid.

Re:No it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

don't suppose you could share with us what optimizations you did to make moz faster than ie or opera, could you?

anyone know when rh8/9 xft builds will come out?

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmm... xft!

MS Content Insecurity!

[fm6]

Do any web servers besides IIS use NTLM? If your intranet sites are running IIS, then it's probably safe to assume that the content is full of IE-specific hacks. Especially if pages were authored with various Microsoft Office applications.

Is anyone at Mozilla working on a quirks mode for Word- or Excel-generated HTML? Don't even think about Powerpoint!

Re:MS Content Insecurity!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Proxy Server uses NTLM by default, so this prohibits some users from seeing any webservers.

fonts in linux

[jtilak]

default mozilla font settings in x11 suck. they are difficult to read at 800x600 or 1024x768 (i dont know about other resolutions). is this ever going to be fixed? is there a workaround? besides using galeon...

Re:fonts in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The mozilla team are anal about this! Despite HUNDREDS of bug reports they REFUSE to enable Xft (nice font support). I suggest you use Konqueror until they pull their heads out of their ass!

Re:fonts in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn on freetype support in $MOZILLA_HOME/defaults/prefs/unix.js and play with some of the hinting and size settings.

Also switch the font settings under Edit/Preferences and change it to Sans Serif and use the B&H Luxi or Bitstream Vera font.

Re:fonts in linux

[Joe Tie.]

Compile it yourself with xft support. It's a pain getting used to the process, but in my opinion the end results more than justify the time I put into it.

Re:fonts in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

How to recompile it to include xft support?

same as rc3?

[geekBass]

I just installed rc3 today and now I see this. Does anyone know if rc3 is same as this one?

Re:same as rc3?

[kirun]

It is the same. RC3 was to see if anything final turned up. Nothing did, so it was released. You may say "Make me download twice! That's evil!", but would you rather they changed something for the sake of it and break something else in the process?

Re:same as rc3?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed rc3 today and now I see this. Does anyone know if rc3 is same as this one?

Yes. No new bugs came up, so it's identical.

The only change is the version number (you know, like with Internet Explorer releases).

Re:same as rc3?

[Craig69]

No new bugs came up ... but bugs that were already known and marked as blocking 1.4 were ignored and not necessarily put in the release notes. Idiots.

In particular, see GDI Resources are used till the UI/website displays faulty for the really messy GDI-slurping problem it has under Windoze. Leaving that undocumented in the release notes and unfixed is a perfect way of preventing new users from using Mozilla.

Not everything's fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try viewing the following page:

http://www.zophar.net

Notice anything...odd?

Re:Not everything's fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice anything...odd?

No?

Re:Not everything's fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well perhaps you weren't looking hard enough, or are using the Linux version..because in the current version, for Windows, the graphics for the logo, counter, and some of the next in the near vicinity is not rendered correctly. This is a regression from all versions previous to the 1.4 releases.

chicken egg

[Anonymous Coward]

The new version is pretty similar to today's Netscape 7.1

Today's Netscape 7.1 is pretty similar to this new version

but lacks Netscape's proprietary features.

but is free of Netscape's steaming proprietary load.

Re:wow, bug-city! updated!

[Tumbleweed]

Nope, still font weirdness, though it is different now. There are a mix of serif and sans-serif fonts in each listing, though the columns are still mislabeled, and I have to have it select 'serif' fonts to get the 'sans serif' font I want.

The button label weirdness is, however, gone. Yay! Thanks for the advice. I'm temping on a piece of crap laptop and it had some old profiles laying around (though not Moz itself). Whew, stinky.

So, it's still got problems, and the installation of Moz is still pretty ridiculous if things like this can occur. What's it gonna take to get this stuff fixed? These problems have been around since the beginning of the project! Unbelievable. No wonder MS thinks they can get away with not updating IE anymore. *shaking head*

penny-arcade

[Steveftoth]

Is it just me or does anyone else have problems rendering Penny-arcade.com with the new 1.4 mozilla on windows?

Re:penny-arcade

[kirun]

From my experience, Penny Arcade looks odd when loading, but renders fine when it finishes. Does it still look off when it's done?

Re:penny-arcade

[Steveftoth]

No, it's messed up. Repeated images where there shouldn't be, strangely scaled images and it doesn't fix itself after a refresh of the screen. Very strange.

Re:wow, bug-city! updated!

[nathana]

Yeah, I agree...newer versions of Mozilla really should handle upgrades and importation of old profiles more gracefully than it does.

Glad to hear that my advice helped some.

-- Nathan

SLASHBOXES

[MarcQuadra]

That's what the slashboxes are for! Your post makes me want to rip my eyeballs out! ARRRRRGHHHH!

SGI IRIX version?

[minnkota]

Is there an IRIX version of either Mozilla 1.4 or Netscape 7.1 (as they use basicly the same code base)? I see that there are some links to some older builds of 1.4 and to a nightly build from May, but I can't seem to find 1.4 final. Would be nice to run the latest browser on my cheap "ebay special" Octane.

Re:SGI IRIX version?

[Anonymous Coward]

SGI builds of Mozilla are occasionally posted to two different sgi servers, one url for them is: opensource.sgi.com/projects/mozilla/news.html

I can't remember the other. But as an IRIX user, they should be familiar to you.

The problem I had with the urls I was given is that they were temporary, subject to disappear perhaps every 6, 12 or 18 months. Since I don't want to update links more than once I wasn't going to put in links which I knew were going to die.

At some point I'll probably just ask for ftp-stage access and upload the IRIX binaries w/ permission.

fwiw, Afaik only Sun and IBM actually rebrand Netscape these days, but I'm not employed (by IBM, Sun, or Netscape/AOL, or any other vendor...) so I can't speak officially for anyone.

iirc Red Hat decided to switch from packaging Netscape to Mozilla a few releases ago.

Yes, that means people on other platforms miss out on:

NIM (AIM, ICQ) - consider jabberzilla

Spellchecker - consider spellchecker.mozdev.org

AOL Webmail using Netscape Mail - i'm sure someone is working on a reimpl of this, all you need to do is write an IMAP server that speaks to Netscape/AOL's mailservers and configure Mozilla to use your IMAP server.

Sun Java - either there's a OJI impl for your platform that works with mozilla or there isn't an OJI impl for your platform

Packaged Plugins - see Java

Certain strange printer things - you'll live

Stuff on your desktop - I have enough stuff on my floor...

Umm.. it's called Freshmeat

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.freshmeat.net

Answer!

[MarcQuadra]

Some stuff moved around or was simplified. Check:

options -> privacy+security -> popup windows
options -> advanced -> scripts and plugins

Java Plugin doesn't work for Redhat 7.x

[bmcent1]

There's no fix in the final version for the java plugin issue affecting Redhat 7.x users.

Any good ideas for how to fix this?

Re:Java Plugin doesn't work for Redhat 7.x

[Anonymous Coward]

please... not the java/c++ library thing again... go to blackdown and get a java built with your version of gcc and against your c++libs

The memory could not be "read".

[pr0ntab]

Oh, it couldn't be "read". In reality, the CPU was going to jump and execute it TOO, weren't you! Oh, no, you have "assertions" that won't let you do that.

Psshaw.

Mozilla, you lie out of both sides of your mouth.

[this comment posted with Mozilla (TM)]

Why is Firebird that wonderful?

[jbs0902]

I hate to say that the Emperor has no clothes, but ...

I haven't bothered to update from Moz 1.2.1 because it works and I am happy with it. I don't see how the browser (the only portion I use) has improved significantly. From the 1.3.x and 1.4 release notes, it seems most improvements have come to the newsgroups/mail.

As for Firebird (a.k.a. the browser formerly known as Phoenix), is it just me or is this the most IE-clone, kiddie like browser. I know we're all supposed to say how much better Firebird is, but I don't feel like an adult while using it. Most of the settings are only reachable (unless I am missing something) from the about:config screen. The preferences (under the Tools menu, just like IE) is so icon centric. Maybe Firebird is trying to reach out to the mom/pop crowd, but could I have an option to put it in advanced mode? In addition, NONE of my XUL/XPI/whatever plug-ins/skins work. The plug-ins and tabs are what makes Moz worth running in my opinion.

Yeah, the bloat comments have legitimacy, but I have HDD and CPU speed to waste (except when gaming). The only thing I am concerned about is the way Win Moz 1.2.1 seems to memory-leak.

Re:Why is Firebird that wonderful?

[asa]

In addition, NONE of my XUL/XPI/whatever plug-ins/skins work. The plug-ins and tabs are what makes Moz worth running in my opinion.

That's strange. None of my XUL/XPI/whatever plugins don't work in Firebird and there are considerably more of them available for Firebird than for Mozilla (74 for Firebird vs. 51 for Mozilla extensions at last count at http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/index.html and 55 themes for Firebird http://texturizer.net/firebird/themes.html vs. about 25 for Mozilla http://themes.mozdev.org/)

--Asa

Re:Why is Firebird that wonderful?

[BZ]

> From the 1.3.x and 1.4 release notes, it seems
> most improvements have come to the
> newsgroups/mail.

Frankly, this is because the release notes just list "new feature" type things. There is a lot of work going on with the layout engine, starting after 1.3 and still going strong. None of it is mentioned in the release notes, except in the form of the vague "performance, correctness, stability fixes".

Re:Why is Firebird that wonderful?

[swordgeek]

versus mozilla 1.2.1...

1.4 is faster, more stable, smaller, more cleanly coded, better at rendering pages (esp. the badly coded pages), and has controllable pop-up blocking (can't remember if that showed up in 1.2 or 1.3, but you can now have white-lists or black-lists of sites that can override your general policy)

Definitely worth the upgrade, just like 1.3 was definitely worth skipping.

Re:Why is Firebird that wonderful?

[73939133]

Breaking up Mozilla isn't primarily about making it smaller, it's about making it more maintainable. The way it is, bugs in the mail component may hold up release of the browser component. Separating them into separate programs means they can be released independently. Besides, many people don't want to use one or the other Mozilla component.

Functionally, Firebird is as full-featured as the Mozilla browser, and there are more extensions and skins available for it (most of the Mozilla extensions just work).

Re:Why is Firebird that wonderful?

[rsborg]

Separating them into separate programs means they can be released independently. Besides, many people don't want to use one or the other Mozilla component.

For those naysayers, these two apps (among whatever else gets componentized in the mozilla go-forward plan) WILL use the same VM to conserve footprint, if configured to do so.

Functionally, Firebird is as full-featured as the Mozilla browser, and there are more extensions and skins available for it (most of the Mozilla extensions just work).

Not only that, it's FASTER than the lizard. Call it the lizard-lite, if you will, but Firebird is the only browser I drive :-)

Christ!!

[Anonymous Coward]

(after konqueror, opera, lynks and telnet to port 80)

I can't believe you fucked up the name of the console browsers! You could have chosen from "lynx" or "links", but nooo you had to go and fuck it up spectacularly. How do you do it, turdhead?

Re:Curious..

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh, try _bocoup_ bucks you Freedome-phobe

Is this a troll?

[mnemonic_]

Your post sounds like a troll, but your past posts seem to imply otherwise. Anyway, I'll bite.

"How can an organization continue to release code that has not been tested to comply with four digit dates?"

Everytime Mozilla has been used since 2000 has been a test. So far, for the thousands of people using Netscape 6+ and Mozilla, it's worked fine.

"This seems like a disaster waiting to happen."

The hyperbole in this statement needs no explanation.

Where's the sources?

[frankjr]

I know that you can get them through cvs, but if there is no tarball with the sources then an ebuild for Gentoo can't be made with all the mirror sites having the tarball.

Re:Where's the sources?

[sconest]

As with the previous releases, you have to wait a few days before the source tarball is available.

Re:Where's the sources?

[skamp]

A bzipped tarball has just been uploaded. Of course, I downloaded it before posting this :-)

Old easter egg

[mnemonic_]

This easter egg has existed since the Netscape/Mozilla 0.9.x days, but it's still neat. Type "about:mozilla" in the address box and see what comes up...

Try it in IE too. You get something rather cryptic, to say the least... No, I don't know what it means either.

Re:Old easter egg

[Omnislack]

It's the blus screen of death, showing inherent incompatibilities in using Non-M$ software...

Gee That'd be swell

[PetoskeyGuy]

http://freshmeat.net/add-mozilla-sidebar/

argh

[redtail1]

I think this release needs to bake a little more before it is ready. After uninstalling Mozilla 1.3 the Windows executable crashed sometime during install... twice... and it won't run even after rebooting the machine. Looks like I'll have to reinstall 1.3...

It is not a mozilla problem with MS Office program

[Anonymous Coward]

There is major faults in MS Office it does not make HTML it makes a lot of internal stuffups with the made code. Basicly Internet Explorer allows these errors to work. There are ways to fix this perl scripts exist that remove the microsoft dumb faults from the page. It is to be noted it is not only mozilla what is in the reciving end of these faults text based browser used by the blind also has trouble. Reason why all links with graphics should have a alt text if the text is in the graphic.

The about page

[Pac]

I am certain I am running 1.4 rc3. The about page, nevertheless, contrary to all reason and to the thingsbeyong reason like the Windows registry, insists it is Mozilla 1.02 (which it can't be, the mail has bayesian filtering, the most recent Orbit theme works, etc).

I even searched for such a bug in Buzilla but found nothing. Must be some WK2 wierdness.

Re:The about page

[Briareos]

Maybe you've got an entry for "general.useragent.override" in your prefs.js in your profile? That way you can even make Mozilla pretend it's IE in it's about screen.

If you find such a line, you can just safely delete it, and your user agent string should be back to normal.

np: Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit - Royal Roost (Secret Rhythms)

Re:The about page

[jonadab]

If you do this by editing that file, you have to do it while
Mozilla (including quicklaunch) is NOT running, else it'll be
overwritten when the program exits. You can, however, change
the pref while Mozilla is running, in about:config

Junk mail settings don't stay

[The Analog Kid]

I set them, and click ok, go back to them the settings are gone. Anyone else getting this?

Mozilla Contributors

[joelgrimes]

most of the contributors and developers are paid AOL employees

That may be true, but just looking at the tree, It's clear that there's substantial work being done by developers that are not on AOL's payroll.

There are 15 unique email addresses checking in in the last 12 hours. Of them, 7 are from outside netscape:

• web.de
  
• dbaron.org
  
• ibm.com (2 unique addresses)
  
• iol.ie
  
• bigfoot.com
  
• cms.edu
  
• maths.uq.edu.au

I won't bother with the rest of your troll.

Re:Mozilla Contributors

[Anonymous Coward]

be careful relying on hostnames

bigfoot=sicking = ibm employee

iol = adamlock = nscp employee

dbaron is sometimes a nscp employee

cms is actually cmu (roc), i believe he's an ibm employee

from the same day, scott-macgregor is a nscp employee

MOD UP!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

ITS FUNNY CUZ IT BASHES MICRO$OFT!!!!!

ahahahahahaaaa!!!!

I just pooped my pants! Mod up, mod up.

Re:MOD UP!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, they are modding me up.

Perhaps they're doing it just to spite you, kid.

What about RPMs and MacOS9?

[erroneus]

Would someone please do these for someone stupid and/or lazy like me? I love RPMs for installation... and for MacOS9? I haven't even thought about how to install GNU tools and a compiler for that thing yet... where do I begin?

Re:What about RPMs and MacOS9?

[Darby]

Would someone please do these for someone stupid and/or lazy like me? I love RPMs for installation... and for MacOS9? I haven't even thought about how to install GNU tools and a compiler for that thing yet... where do I begin?

OK, it was stupid and it was lazy ;-)

Click on the link for MacOSX.

Re:What about RPMs and MacOS9?

[Mitchell Mebane]

Mac OS 9 is no longer supported. :(

I think the Firebird team has been talking about continuing OS 9 support, but I'm not sure.

Re:What about RPMs and MacOS9?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there is now an unofficial mozilla1.3.1 derivative for macos9.

unfortunately the macos classic building system required effort to maintain hard. no one volunteered to support it. if you're seriously interested in working on building mozilla for macos9, you might visit irc.mozilla.org and ask about wamcom. someone should be able to direct you the right way.

no guarantees.

Re:BitTorrent --- Bleah, Windows Version

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is for opensource operating systems only!

I'm typing this on Mozilla 1.4

[miketang16]

I don't know why that's important... but hey.. it's better than "696th POST"!

Crash recovery

[David Gerard]

Not perfect yet, but being worked on: http://recall.mozdev.org/.

Re:Crash recovery

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks David (and cristofer8) for those links - I'll try them out and keep an eye on them while they evolve.

I especially like the tab browsing extensions adding a close box and progress bar on each tab... I might be ditching Opera sooner than I thought! :)

Panther compatibility?

[penginkun]

So is it MacOS X 10.3 compatible yet? Both 1.4rc3 and Firebird/Phoenix refuse to launch. The icon goes bouncie bouncie and then just stops, and nothing else happens. 8^( I wish Moz would work, because I can't stand using Safari. No image blocking, cookie blocking or animation blocking. 8^P Of all these, animation blocking is the most important to me. Static images I can ignore, but moving pictures I can't.

your all stupid

[libnatel]

MOZILLA IS SLOW! phoenix was good, but mozilla is so slow that the wqhole pop up thingie is not worth it. so hah. i can close the explorer pop ups faster than mozilla can load

No source though

[Anonymous Coward]

The release asks us to pull from CVS to get source code. I've been pulling for 7 hours.

fUx04.

It's a speed demon - wowowowowowowow

[DrSkwid]

on windows anyway

I'll have to wait for my erstwhile FreeBSD packager :
gnome [at] FreeBSD [is not dying] .org
to keep up 8)

Typical is the word don't look don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

There a extras to mozilla like themes and script add ons my most used it Uabar as it lets me get into more sites. But there is also a extra call recall guess what it does. Its full names is Total Recall(recall.mozdev.org) developed from the Aphrodite browser. It is for mozilla 1.4 but it is a addon.

Note there were other versions but they have not been stable or safe and this one might not be either. The reason is if you have a page that destroys mozilla recall saves the pages you reload the pages you crash the browser again. Basicly due to the faults I don't expect this ever to be a feature of mozilla but always a addon.

Basicly missing a feature go and surf www.mozdev.org or if you wish www.mozdev.org/projects/active.html to get the list that is being worked on. There are sometimes very good reasons why these features dont get added to mozillas core.

I feel it is very important to point out..

[Ender Ryan]

Specs *are* important - no specs mean a fragmentation of the web

No specs also means that you have no guarantee that your broken html will still render how you want in the next version of the browser!

In the past I was often "bitten" by newer versions of IE recognizing mistakes in my HTML, or the reverse ie. actually rendering to specs.

What I'm saying is, IE si teh suxXors!

still annoying mime type problems?

[forkboy]

Does it come preconfigured with MIME types yet? I'm tired of having to "save link as" when I try and grab something that's not an mpg, exe, or avi. Not to mention that doesnt work with redirected downloads.

Is there a fast way to enter all known win32 mime types so I don't have to do it by hand when I come across a new file type I want to download?

Lack of reliability?!

[mmol_6453]

Isolated anecdotes aside, Mozilla 1.3 has been very fast, and very stable, on the machines it's been installed on at my college.

I installed it on one machine, and the tutors liked it, and have installed it on the tutor stations. Several of the tutors have mentioned to me that Mozilla has been much faster and reliable than NS4 and IE6.

Ahhh.. Smooth Scrolling...

[eples]

If pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing are the leather seats, smooth scrolling are the butt-warmers :)

Gotta love this browser.

__vt_17nsGetServiceByCID

[Anonymous Coward]

__vt_17nsGetServiceByCID undefined symbol. My java is broken
when I downloaded Mozilla 1.4 and installed
latest Java from Sun.

Any ideas?

Why the spyware?

[Brett Glass]

When it installs -- even as an upgrade -- Mozilla 1.4 forces the browser to a specific page on the mozilla.org site on startup, effectively "phoning home." This is exactly the sort of spying against which users should expect a project like Mozilla to defend them. What gives?

You mean polish like...

[infernalC]

... total lack of CSS2 fixed positioning?

Internet Explorer is the bane of a web developer's existence: it is the browser that does everything differently, and doesn't support loading Java applets with object elements sanely. You try making an XHTML 1.0 Strict validating document with an embedded Java applet using the W3C's reccomended method. IE sucks.

email crashes immediately

[_randy_64]

Been using RC3, installed 1.4 over top of it (maybe that was a mistake?). Now it locks up when I try to send mail - locks up and has to be killed via task manager. Anyone else seen this happen? (Windows XP)

GoogleBar + Moz 1.4

[andrew.hill]

http://googlebar.mozdev.org/installation.html MozDev's Google Bar works wonderfully with the new Mozilla 1.4

See-Oh-In-spiracy

[blazerw11]

After uninstalling Mozilla 1.3 the Windows executable crashed sometime during install...

You must have been to Windows Update recently.

Re:See-Oh-In-spiracy

[redtail1]

Care to explain your cryptic comment? Or was it a poor attempt at sarcasm?

The Windows version of the Mozilla 1.4 installer fails on both of my machines running Windows XP. Never had a problem with any previous version of Mozilla.

Re:See-Oh-In-spiracy

[redtail1]

I found the problem. Deleting the Mozilla directory in c:\program files does the trick.

Here is the Mozillazine forum thread.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still using Microsoft Internet Mail and News. It's just as not-bloated as ever!

Umm NO

[bogie]

"As for Firebird (a.k.a. the browser formerly known as Phoenix), is it just me or is this the most IE-clone, kiddie like browser."

See above.

IE Clone? Why because you don't want to bother downloading a new skin?

Kiddie-like? Why because they simplied options that most people don't even look at anyway?

For your plugins/skins, use the Firebird specific ones of which their are plently. At phoenix help at last count there were like 55 skins and 53 plugins. Have you even registered at Mozillazine?

Its so lame when people complain but aren't willing to do even basic research.

http://texturizer.net/firebird/index.html

Re:Lovely...-incompatible mozdev spell checker rel

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone reported this as bug 208205, i'm 99% certain it's the spellchecker bug, we have one just about every version update. I'm sorry, we're all sorry. Read the bug, I only need a single comment indicating I'm right. after that please enjoy your new (hopefully working) browser.

As usual, people are encouraged to use talkback although i'm not certain it'd really have helped here (people are welcome to guess how i reached the conclusion which i reached).

1.5a

[bware]

So why does my copy of 1.4rc3 (OS X) say that it's 1.5a under "About Mozilla"?

Hmm, Netscape or Mozilla?

[crashnbur]

Let's see: proprietary features plus AOL ownership minus ad blocking and other neat features (even if tweaking that is a cinch) versus essentially the same thing minus the corporate bloat...

On second thought, let me rephrase my question. The question is not "Netscape or Mozilla?", but rather, "Should Netscape discontinue its web browser development?" Anyone?

Re: Solaris + Gtk

[Anonymous Coward]

afaik that's a licensing issue, so mozilla could never include Gtk libs. just wait, i'm sure the xlib and xprint vers will show up. And Netscape 7.1 from Sun will probably have a package path for Gtk.

That said, you're supposed to type: ./mozilla
not ./run-mozilla.sh i know it's confusing, for some reason the product is called mozilla, so the script end users are supposed to use is also called mozilla, but the internals happen to be called run-mozilla, because well that's sort of what the internals do.

The fix!

[antdude]

See comment #5 at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208205 #c5 ... It worked for me. :)

torrent!

[oohp]

Don't scream "torrent!" in a room full of people. Does anyone have the Linux binary (not seamonkey, the other one) on a torrent.

Re:YES! tsarkon reports for great justice

[Anonymous Coward]

very nice story there, Ace. keep up the good work. say, your sister wouldn't happen to be Jacinda Jones, would she? works at the denny's kitty-corner from ol' rosco's?

Re:Lovely...-incompatible mozdev spell checker rel

[Anonymous Coward]

stop being so criptic, your making my head hurt!

Install crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I know it explains in the release notes that you need to uninstall and re-install... But you need to remove the "install directory." Wonder where that is? Hmmmm I guess I'll need to go searching. Great.

Flashy versus useful features

[edxwelch]

I don't like to criticize Mozilla but they seem to be more concerned in adding flashy cool features like theme handling and smooth scrolling, rather than features that actually provide useful functionality like, for instance, a context menu item to copy images to the clipboard, or flash blocking.

Not again..

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not 100% trusting of files on mozilla.org (servers can, and have been, compromised and files trojaned)

I guess it's my turn to be the guy who points out the obvious by saying: checksums are completely useless against these attacks. If a cracker can change mozilla-win32-1.4-installer.exe, he can also change mozilla-win32-1.4-installer.exe.md5sum -- You need verifiable signatures.

Re:Not again..

[Dahan]

I guess it's my turn to be the guy who points out the obvious by saying: checksums are completely useless against these attacks.

Well, not completely useless, although certainly much weaker than a signature. While having a checksum only on mozilla.org would be useless against this type of attack, checksums tend to get mirrored in various places--an attacker would potentially have to modify the checksum on tens/hundreds/thousands of machines. For example, that's how the OpenSSH trojan was noticed (within a few hours of the files being tampered with); the FreeBSD ports system keeps a checksum of the distribution file for this exact reason, as does NetBSD's pkgsrc.

But yes, a real digital signature would be so much better...

Flash blocker?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will there be a Flash blocker anytime soon?
Flash banner ads are really annoying.

Re:Flash blocker?

[Craig69]

I find not loading the Flash plugin is a good starting point. Alternatively, using an ad-blocking proxy and putting "/.*\.swf" or the equivalent as one of the patterns to block works really well too.

Spell Check

[Anonymous Coward]

This release still does not include a spell checker. I actually had to delete the old spell checker plugin to get the new Mozilla version to install without crashing.

Judging from the lack of response from http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/ I am not the only person interested in this feature. Unfortunately, the attitude of the developers seems to be "learn 2 spell, 100z3r".

I agree

[jopet]

Unfortunately, those who are motivated to contribute work prefer to add flashy features (that are not too hard to implement too). But even so, Mozilla has more to offer than IE, Opera, or Konqueror, is multi-platform, and is free (something that Opera or IE are not).

Re:First Fuck Nigerians Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats to the FFNP, but next time try to put a little more effort in it.

Everybody already knows that they tote spears, send spam and are AIDS monkeys.

Some innovative and offensive trolling please, not just stating obvious facts.

Red Hat Rawhide has Mozilla already...

[aksansai]

The release that is contained in Rawhide (check rpmfind.net) is based off a pre-release. A new RPM should be available quite soon with the final version (doesn't take very long for the mirrors to catch up).

Re:Curious..

[Anonymous Coward]

That joke went over your head by a beaucoup margin.

What 'about:mozilla' means in IE....

[Steve Hamlin]

The "about:mozilla" quote in Netscape/Mozilla is "from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)", and appears on a red page.

"about:mozilla" in Internet Explorer is a blank blue page.

Get it?

Red vs. Blue - not true color opposites, but close enough, and Red vs. Blue is used in a lot of "opposition" contexts (e.g. miltary war games, paintball, board games)

What's interesting is that "about:FOO" in IE for any other word just returns FOO on a blank white page with an "about:FOO" title, while "about:mozilla" actually is a formatted HTML page that calls from "res://mshtml.dll/about.moz"

Re: Solaris + Gtk

[Tackhead]

> afaik that's a licensing issue, so mozilla could never include Gtk libs. just wait, i'm sure the xlib and xprint vers will show up.

I did manage to get it working once on a Solaris box. It was... weird. Profiles seemed to chop off the last character of everything typed. (Create .mozilla/foo, display ./mozilla/fo, quit, re-run, get told that ./mozilla/fo doesn't exist. WTF? That's where I gave up and said "Fuggit, keep using NS4.7, and drop back to NS3 for those web pages with a million nested tables in 'em", and having seen how confused Mozilla was with whatever version of whatever libraries we'd managed to find, the user was actually happy to continue to do so. That was a few releases ago, I'd forgotten about it until today.)

As for the other libraries... well, OK, but this should be in the README for the release. Or the release should be distributed with libraries where there aren't dependency issues. Or there should be a URL in the README that says "You need these libraries. Go here. Download these files. Put them here. Add this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Don't download those files. The are known not to work."

If there are three Mozilla binaries, one for each set of widget libraries, say so. "Download this to use with xlib, that to use with xprint, and the other to use with Gtk. The first two come with all the libraries you need, we tested it on our boxes and it worked. The second doesn't, you need these files from $URL-fu. Use whichever one gives you the widgets you like best.")

I hate to admit it, but it's the one thing about the "release early, release often" part of the Open Source model that doesn't work well - dependencies/documentation. If you're building it yourself from source, great. But if you're trying to quickly address the needs of a user who just want to run the damn code, the model fails.

> That said, you're supposed to type: ./mozilla

Me == teh suxor ;-) I figured the run-mozilla.sh script was there to prevent me from cd-ing down to ./mozilla-the-directory and running ./mozilla-the-shell-script-that-calls-mozilla-bin.

I will give credit where it's due - the Win32 installer is fantastic, and likewise the Linux setup.

Just an FYI

[Tailhook]

Uninstall whatever Mozilla version you have, delete Program Files/mozilla.org, reboot, then install 1.4.

Works fine now.

Dep's and Doc's in an open/closed world

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, documenting dependencies is a royal pain.

Worse is dealing with incompatibilities.

I'm fairly certain that the instructions for packagers tell people to mention dependencies and such, but people might not read them, especially if they've been packaging for a while or this is there first package, or really if they're packaging.

The problem with open source is:

1. documentation

2. getting people to write it

3. getting people to read it

4. making sure it's remotely current

5. see 1.

Release notes and dependencies fall under the documentation category. The more platforms, the more releases, the more people, the more compilers, the more users, the more complicated it gets.

It should be pretty obvious why MS wants to go to the model where you get a new IE w/ a new OS, and the next computer you get is either an XBox or a media center or a tablet pc. Fewer platforms, fewer combinations, ... all lead to a much easier to support and harder to mess up system.

on finding loaded libraries, the hunt for MSHTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Required tools:

process explorer http://www.sysinternals.com

dependency walker http://www.dependencywalker.com

cost: $0.

OK, so what are these tools? and why should anyone care?

Well, dependency walker will let you find out what libraries an application is trying to use (both statically linked libraries and dynamically loaded libraries - if you use the profile option).

Process Explorer will let you see various handles, including handles to dlls. It will also let you attach dependency walker to a process of your choice.

OK, so you can select any application you can see and find out if it loaded MSHTML.

Now you have all the tools you need to find out if anything loaded MSHTML.

Re:on finding loaded libraries, the hunt for MSHTM

[The Bungi]

I know that, dude. I'm not asking how to do it, I'm asking if he was willing to back up his claims by doing it himself.

Hallejujah! Iframes don't suck anymore!!!

[UserGoogol]

In prior versions, for a moment while iframes had new content loaded into them, the screen was black. Very distracting for websites which use iframes.

NO LONGER!!

Re:YES! tsarkon reports for great justice

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck the juicy chunky brown vaginal discharges from a festering infected pussy you piece of fucking shit.

And next time you are fucking a crusty pussy dog and pick the scabs off and let the puss run to make it oh so smooth and human-girl like, dont tell anyone about it - its sick.

Ever noticed....

[Anonymous Coward]

...how the "find text as you type" "feature" is a good way to lock up mozilla for long periods of time? You've got to wonder whether they give a rat's ass whether the program is stable or not.

Thank you All!!!!!!!

[ej0c]

I dunno where the best place to post this would be, but much thanks go to everyone who brought Mozilla to this state!!

Witht the 1.4RC2 release, Moz will send hypertext (including links) to recipients listed on web page mailto: links! This was a huge block to Moz being a useful client.

Of course, there are many other wonderful improvements, greater stability, and I guess tighter code.

The team should get some national award!!!