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Mozilla 1.5 Alpha Available
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla.org released Mozilla v1.5 alpha today, with flavors available for Linux,
Mac OS X, and Windows. Some of the new features include Composer enhancements, Chatzilla logging, multiple tab window closing confirmation, and quicksearch support in about:config. A more detailed rough changelog is also available. In a somewhat related note, Mozilla 1.4 has been downloaded over a half million times in the past 3 weeks (not counting mirrors)."
Isnt 1.5 and forward supposed to be based on Firebird and not Mozilla? I didnt see that change anywhere in the simple release notes...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Does camino have a future? No releases have been made since 0.7, quite some time ago. Should MacOS X users switch to Mozilla, or Firebird.
ObSafariSucks
I think I speak for all blissfully ignorant Internet Explorer users when I say...
whoopty-freakin-doo...
will mozilla ever put MNG support back in?
Some of the new features include Composer enhancements, Chatzilla logging, multiple tab window closing confirmation, and quicksearch support in about:config.
Oh thank Dog.
This is my only gripe about tabbed browsing, as it makes life annoying for people who are switching over from IE and haven't used a tabbed browser before. I can't count the number of times I've absent-mindedly clicked on the closing X in the window bar as opposed to the lower X for the tabs...
Now, if only they could fix the issue with multi-language support in Moz 1.4 Win32. Every time I go to a Japanese website I get a notification telling me that I need to install a language pack, but so far as I can tell, I've done this. The popup doesn't say exactly where to go to configure this in Preferences, and as far as I can tell, I've done set it up already (Preferences -> Navigator -> Languages), and it's not doing anything. So, either the language support is broken, or the instructions/setup procedure are non-intuitive.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
At least if you just want the browser, Mozilla Firebird seems already much better than Mozilla.
I have been using a recent nightly build of Mozilla Firebird as my primary browser, and it has been very stable and already feels much more polished than Mozilla.
Small things like the Ctrl-Enter shortcut and automatic mouse scrolling make Mozilla Firebird feel more like a polished product than Moziila does.
That's odd, according to the half million download report, the Windows version is by far the most popular, with 71.5% of downloads. Speaking for myself, a Mozilla/Windows user, I use Mozilla because it works better and has more features. It's also not plagued by countless security issues.
Yes, it does need an IRC client. I managed to convince the IT staff at work to install mozilla on my computer, boasting of the integrated mail client, etc...now I can feed my IRC addiction at all hours. ...although what this says about my company's IT staff is rather depressing.
If they could get Chatzilla and Mail in the main tabbed interface it would roxorz IMO.
I'm running Moz 1.4 on a PIII/500 laptop. It's about the same speed in Windows as IE6, and in Linux it's a bit faster (except at getting it initially fired up, of course). If moz is bogging down on your machine there's something wrong.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The problem that I've had with every version of Mozilla I've seen so far is that I can't tell when I have new email under Linux. Under Netscape 4.8, when new mail arrives the mail client icon on the KDE Kicker panel changes so I can see that I have mail even if the mail client is iconified. In Mozilla 1.x or Netscape 7.1 this does not happen, so I can't tell when new mail arrives if the browser and mail client are iconified or covered by other windows. I realize there is an option in preferences for audio notification, but it doesn't seem to work and I really don't want to annoy everyone in my office ever time I get email anyway.
Is there some simple work-around that I don't know about? Are there any plans to fix this? I've raised this issue on mozillazine.org and reported it to Netscape (a few weeks before AOL killed Netscape), but it seems to get no attention. This is a total showstopper for me. Someone please rescue me from having to use Netscape 4.8 for email...
It's not just transparency, it's partial transparency across multiple channels as well. A PNG is far more than the glorified GIF that people make it out to be. I don't know what the parent poster was complaining about but "extremely broken" is a gross overstatement. Buggy, yes, but many things in Mozilla are still pretty quirky - I wouldn't call CSS support extremely broken just because Mozilla still completely fucks up a file upload field whenever you attempt to control it with CSS - it's just another bug (that hasn't been fixed)
Well, I have a 1.4GHz Athlon with 512 MBs of RAM, and Mozilla seems fine to me. I guess it's that last 100 MHz that really makes a difference... :)
Actually, the latest 1.4 was really speedy, relative to 1.3 at least. I admit that mozilla is one of the slower browsers, but every release is faster than the previous one, in my experience anyway. I haven't tried this one yet, but I'm about to.
This is my one feature request: Draggable tabs. There is no way to rearrange the order that the tabs are displayed in - you should be able to drag them left and right in the browser window. Once you open a tab, you are stuck with its position relative to your other tabs. Doesn't seem hard to do, and it's been in bugzilla for years.
I have to say Mozilla/Firebird has really grown onto me. At work i have to use IE and what bugs me is that while Mozilla has evolved fast IE has been standing still. Things like popup kill, tabs, privacy and cookie management etc, i just cant be without them now that im used to them. Today Mozilla is the best browser out there without a doubt.
To the Mozilla decelopers and Netscape/AOL, thank you!
HTTP/1.1 400
I agree that something needs to be done to make this more mainstream. At the office I installed it on the machines but when I checked back a week later people were still using IE6. Then somebody asked me how to 'play' Mozilla.. That's when I renamed all the 'Mozilla' icons to 'Internet'. It's worked like a charm. I've even got a few folks using Open Office this way.
I've been doing a fair amount of mucking around in Mozilla Composer lately and, while it's okay for writing first-approximation Web pages, I've found the UI to be really inconvenient for some things.
The thing likes to pollute the document with line breaks (<BR>) everywhere, which is darned annoying. Creation and maintenance of directory lists (<DL> <DT> <DD>) is really finicky -- do things in the wrong sequence and the formatting will be ruined. I find myself making constant trips to the source window, fixing up broken or unnecessary HTML. It also offers no help at all in composing and previewing style sheets.
I'd really like Composer to be a good WYSIWYG HTML editor, but it seems to be sorely lacking. Is it just me? Is there some Secret Book of Composer Power Usage Tips that I haven't found yet, or does it really fall as short as I think it does?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I still don't see roaming. There needs to be a final monolithic version (ie, not Firebird/Thunderbird) that supports roaming. That way companies who are still stuck on Netscape 4.79 for its roaming capabilities can migrate to a newer engine.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
At least it looks like people are working on the issue now
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199 64
Even if they did include yEnc support, I'd probably continue to use Xnews (free newsreader with yEnc support) instead, though. I'd prefer to use Xnews b/c it's a stand-alone news reader... that's all it does & it's good at what it does.
Many of these "suite" programs loose sight of what users want and fail to impliment changes quickly. They're busy on the browser part, so they slack off on the newsgroup part w/ yEnc.. or maybe slack off on some other part in favor of another. I think Firebird is an excellent browser & with a little work, it'll be the best one out there... in part because that's all it does. Seperate projects with seperate teams helps keep focus on important features. One part of the "suite" doesn't suffer because people are focusing on another part because they give that other part higher priority. Outlook Express (MS's mail reader) has newsgroup capability bolted on -- but, it's crappy & it'll stay crappy because Microsoft, the monster with many heads, doesn't have any reason to make improving newsgroup reading a priority... so, they'll probably impliment yEnc sometime after hell freezes over... or there's an official RFC for it whichever comes first... lol. Unfortunately, many suites suffer from the high priority of one portion which makes the suite little more than one cool application with lots of other crappy ones bolted on that are hardly worth using.
That's not to say that all suites suffer from this problem... or that Mozilla as a whole is necessarily suffering from it. I hear Chatzilla is pretty neat, but I haven't bothered with it as I have a stand-alone IRC client that I'm happy with (MIRC). Still, I think dropping the ball on yEnc support, the most popular encoding method on usenet, is akin to dropping the entire newsgroup reader b/c attempting to download anything would be useless without either native yEnc support or a plugin like Yproxy.
Just my 2 cents
The main reason of this slowness is Mozilla's inability to "renice" plugins.
Try opening a page with 15 flash applets in IE, and the same page in Mozilla and you'll know how crucial this feature is.
We need to put this as a high priority bugfix.
Despite CRAM-MD5 being finally fixed, the amazingly obtuse way Mozilla handles secure IMAP is still there: You either use plain, unencrypted IMAP on port 143, or you use IMAPS over 993.
There's no STARTTLS support (on port 143) yet, which renders Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird useless in some ultra-paranoid corporate settings...
What really bugs me about composer is that when you view the HTML source it is in mono-colour text. How hard can it be to use the same scheme as the "view page source" window when you are examining a webpage.
The different colours make identifing the code much easier
Opera is an alternative, standards compliant browser with a geeky/nerdy user base. Why should it not be interesting for a site which has "news for nerd. Stuff that matters"? It's a nerd's browser, so it's definitely relevant for nerds.
Clever signature text goes here.