Mozilla 1.5 Beta Released

asa writes "Today mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.5 Beta, available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This beta release features lots of bugfixes, the inclusion of a spellchecker for Messenger and Composer, and lots of minor feature improvements to Navigator, Messenger, Composer and Chatzilla. More information is available at the Mozilla Release Notes."

Comments

Thunderbird

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

When does the mail client fork?

Re:Thunderbird

[quantum bit]

When it gets a version number a little higher than 0.1.

Re:Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use it though, 0.1 means nothing to me, since it's based on near current Mozilla code.

Re:Thunderbird

[Senator_B]

Version 0.2 was just released for windows today. here's a story on it

Re:Thunderbird

[Disevidence]

0.2 Release Candidate is out.

Re:Thunderbird

[Penguin2]

Whenever it creates a child process

Re:Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

Version 0.2 was just released for windows today

Actually, it was a release candidate for 0.2. Anyhow, 0.2 is certainly close.

Re:Thunderbird

[MrJones]

The sad, sad news is that Firebird and Thunderbird will not made it into 1.5 :-(

In the new roadmap they clearly specified that Firebird in Thunderbird must have been included in 1.5, but then, they patched the roadmap to say that 1.5 will be the standard AppSuite.

I was having high hopes on 1.5, but now, is just another release for me. Meantime, I using Firebird every day and will start using Thunderbird too soon. Since MailNews is my primary mailreader, I want it more support in Thunderbird from mozilla developers before I switch.

Re:Thunderbird

[jonadab]

> The sad, sad news is that Firebird and Thunderbird will not made
> it into 1.5 :-(

If you've been testing Firebird and Thunderbird this is good news.
They're not ready. Firebird is getting there, and hopefully will
be ready to replace Navigator by 1.6 time, but SeaMonkey really
can't be put out to pasture if only Navigator has been adequately
replaced. Thunderbird... well, it still needs a lot of work.
Also, Sunbird needs to be working before SeaMonkey can be dropped.

Actually, Firebird has most of the features Navigator has, *if* you
install a metric tonne of Extensions. (This is a major issue,
however; it takes considerably longer and *many* times more
clicking to download and install all those extensions as compared
to just downloading and installing the entire SeaMonkey suite. A
solution needs to be worked out wherein many extensions can be
downloaded and installed in one go.) Even with all of the
extensions, though, FB is still missing a couple of very major
features, like the DOM inspector (which is dogfood, or should
be -- it's painful to do any work on themes without it; it's quite
handy for web development also).

Re:Thunderbird

[BuhSnarf]

Actually, Firebird has most of the features Navigator has, *if* you
install a metric tonne of Extensions.

Personally, I think that's how it should stay. Keep the browser lean and let people modify it to install whichever extensions they want. I have only one extension and that's not something that's an absolute must. I *personally* don't want it to end up as bloated as Navigator was/is.

Re:Thunderbird

[mlefevre]

Although it was something they had hoped for, they didn't "clearly specify" that it "must" be included in 1.5. You can look at the document history for the roadmap using the link at the bottom of the page.

The original (April 2nd) version of the 1.4-and-beyond roadmap said:
"We're only pointing the way here. The detailed plan of attack should be developed in the newsgroups and via Bugzilla. Whether we'll be able to switch to Phoenix by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone remains to be seen."

That text was then updated in July to read:
"It's clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone. Instead, we expect Mozilla 1.5 to coincide with Mozilla Firebird 0.7. But we intend to implement the new application architecture in the next several milestones, till most of the community is won over to the new apps."

Re:Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

DOM Inspector? You mean, like this: http://www.mozilla.gr.jp/~mal/inspector-mozfb-ahm. xpi

I have zero experience running this though, so don't complain if it blows up in your face.

Re:Thunderbird

[cheekyboy]

Well, Firebird can import IE bookmarks, but it CANNOT IMPORT , ie in the menu by default , mozilla bookmarks, how lame is that.!!!

surely it could show those in the tree.

tsk tsk!!

Re:Thunderbird

[thesolo]

Actually, Firebird has most of the features Navigator has, *if* you install a metric tonne of Extensions. (This is a major issue, however; it takes considerably longer and *many* times more clicking to download and install all those extensions as compared to just downloading and installing the entire SeaMonkey suite. A solution needs to be worked out wherein many extensions can be downloaded and installed in one go.) Even with all of the extensions, though, FB is still missing a couple of very major features, like the DOM inspector (which is dogfood, or should be -- it's painful to do any work on themes without it; it's quite handy for web development also).

But that is precisely why extensions exist. So that you don't have to have all of those features installed. I run Firebird every day, and I only install 2 extensions: Tabbrowser Preferences and Nuke Image. That's all I need to make Firebird fit the way I browse the web. Do I need the hundreds of other things found in the Seakmonkey releases? Not at all. And I'm sure other people don't either.

The point of extensions is so that Mozilla.org can ship a small, lean browser, and then the user can customize it however they want. Seamonkey, on the other hand, gives you everything you could possibly ever want and more, including the kitchen sink (literally, in Moz 1.3+).

Now then, possibly having some sort of queue for extensions where you select the ones you want installed, then click one button, that would be very cool. However, I'm not sure how much work it would take to deliver that type of functionality.

Lastly, the DOM inspector is available as an XPI add-on for existing Firebird installations here: http://www.mozilla.gr.jp/~mal/inspector-mozfb-ahm. xpi, and more information about the DOM inspector as an XPI component can be found here: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3 216.

Re:Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but the point is that there should be an easy way to install all of the extensions (in one shot) to bring to the same functionality as Navigator.

Re:Thunderbird

[jonadab]

> Personally, I think that's how it should stay. Keep the browser
> lean and let people modify it to install whichever extensions
> they want.

Fine, but I should be able to install a bunch of them at one go.
This nonsense about spending fourty-five minutes installing thirty
individual extensions one-by-one, answering 2-3 dialog boxes for
*each* of them (and needing to read these boxes, since the question
about which directory to install into has the yes/no backwards for
about half of them) is for the birds (harhar).

I want one button I can click to install them all, and one dialog
to answer for *all* of them whether to install in my profile or
globally. Then if I want I can disable two or three of the
misguided ones (like the one that turns the alt attribute for
img elements into an abbrev tag like in Netscape 4).

People who only want one or two extensions should still be able
to install them individually, of course.

Re:Thunderbird

[jonadab]

> But that is precisely why extensions exist. So that you don't
> have to have all of those features installed.

The problem is not with the fact that the extensions are optional.
The problem is that the install process for them is far too
cumbersome for people who want most of them. I had to spend
over half an hour installing them at home (dialup), and half
that time at work. That's time I had to be actively involved
with the install process, because there were regular dialogs to
answer new install links to click. It ought to be possible to
check some checkboxes for which ones to install, click a couple
of buttons and then *do something else* while it happens.

speed

[Illissius]

What they really need to work on is the speed and the bloat. You might not notice it if you're used to IE, but after using Opera ever since I've found out about it, having to endure something as slow as Mozilla causes me large varieties of pain which may or may not include the physical kind.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but Mozilla's JavaScript abilities are far superior to Opera's. Or at least the version of Opera I used was not that good.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried Mozilla Firebird? http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/

Re:speed

[OzRoy]

What you need to do is download Firebird, and Thunderbird.

They were both created to work on the speed and bloat. They are both stand alone applications, and both faster than Mozilla. Firebird is fast enough that it starts up almost as fast as IE for me.

I use them both as my browser and email client 100%. Yes there are a couple bugs still, but nothing really major.

Eventually they are going to take over from the Mozilla suite.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

This can only be a troll. IE is still the fastest browser on Windows followed closely by FIrebird.

Re:speed

[Joe Tie.]

I know this is flying in the face of most peoples experience, but I haven't found much difference between most aspects of mozilla and firebird in quite some time. At one point phoenix seemed to move quite a bit faster on my machine, but around 1.4 I gave mozilla another try and didn't see much of a difference anymore. Pages load and display at the same speed, the gui in both react at the same speed, they both use about the same amount of memory...firebird seemed to start faster, and that was about the biggest difference I could find.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

Personally I find pages load faster in Firebird than Mozilla OR IE, I can actually see the difference on something as simple as the google front page.

The biggest difference for me though is that Mozilla at some random time interval... usually after a window had been open a couple hours although sometimes sooner, would seem to bog the system severely on window or linux... even if you killed of Moz and it's processes things would be bogged severly until the next reboot.

If I used konqueror this didn't happen at all so I knew it was Moz. Until I found firebird there wasn't really any viable browser for me. For some reason this doesn't occur with firebird even though it seems to mostly be a trimmed up Moz, something they don't include must be the source of the problem.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

actually IE loads faster, Firebird browses faster. We've actually compared them on non-cashed and cached pages. Firebird really crushes IE on cached page loading. Really odd since IE has lower level IP hooks and is integrated at a lower level of the system to boost it's performance.

We didn't look at what webservers the pages we tested were running on though. There aren't too many IIS servers out there compared with *nix and I know IE and IIS break http standards to implement speed hacks on page loading in IE and slow it down in other browsers.

The difference was remarkable, even a page as clean as google actually chopped a second or so off when rendered in firebird.

Re:speed

[hdparm]

Troll or not, it is not faster than Opera.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Firebird is horrid, slow and clunky.
Thunderbird is the slowest e-mail client I have on my system right now. (Trying to find one that I like to use permanently(Eudora, The Bat!, PocoMail, Thunderbird, Pegasus, etc)).

Wake me when Moz/Firebird/Thunderbird aren't horrifically slow. I only have a Cel-366Mhz, speed is everything.

Re:speed

[meekjt]

I agree that there is not much speed difference between mozilla and firebird/thunderbird. One thing I like about using firebird/thunderbird is that they run in separate processes. If one crashes or one needs to be restarted for some reason, they do not effect each other. I am also looking forward to the mozilla calendar becoming its own application.

Re:speed

[critter_hunter]

And the last time I used Konqueror, it sucked major ass and couldn't render basic CSS correctly. Ooooh! What does that say about Konq now? NOTHING!

Opera's Javascript implementation has been good for years. The problem is more with doing actual scripting in JavaScript. Internet Explorer and Mozilla both have very different "API"s for DOM scripting. Opera 6 was pretty poor in that regard - didn't render much. Opera 7 renders about 90%, maybe more, of either Mozilla or Internet Explorer's JavaScript, depending on which browser string you send (identify as Internet Explorer and pretty much every IE-specific pages render perfectly)

When identifying as Opera, usually only the most IE-centric pages won't render.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

Either you are a troll, or browsers perform significantly different with a slow processor.

My Athlon 2500 and Pentium4 2.6ghz systems run Moz/Firebird/Thunderbird significantly faster than any other browser/e-mail client except Opera, Mutt and of course Lynx and Pico.

Re:speed

[edwdig]

Actually, if you use both Firebird and Thunderbird, you're increasing the bloat. They both include their own seperate copies of the Gecko core libraries.

If you only use Mozilla for the browser, or only for email, then there isn't a significant difference in memory usage between Mozilla and *bird. *bird will use a little less memory though due to all the features removed from the UI. If you use Mozilla for both browsing and email, then you're actually going to get a large increase in memory usage by using *bird, as you will have seperate copies of the Gecko core for each app.

Firebird starts a little faster than Mozilla, but not as fast as Mozilla with preload turned on. Thunderbird starts noticably slower than Mozilla. Once the apps are started, they all run

The big difference between Mozilla and *bird is the design of the interface. The Mozilla UI is modeled after the Netscape 4.x interface. *bird is modeled after Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. You're also going to need to install a lot of extensions to get all the functionality out of *bird as you can out of Mozilla.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

We didn't look at what webservers the pages we tested were running on though. There aren't too many IIS servers out there compared with *nix and I know IE and IIS break http standards to implement speed hacks on page loading in IE and slow it down in other browsers.

Wow, what bullshit!

Re:speed

[critter_hunter]

I should mention: currently, some heavy JavaScript runs pretty slowly on Opera as compared to Moz (note: last I checked, you need to have Opera identify as Moz in order for the site to entreat you to that heavy JavaScript - browser detection means Opera gets lumped with Internet Explorer). Anyway, that slowness is purportedly getting fixed in the upcoming 7.20 release

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla Mail is actually snappier than Thunderbird, so much so that I still use Firebird with Mozilla Mail. So yeah, I would agree with you at this stage in development, though Thunderbird is getting faster though...

Re:speed

[toddestan]

IE is only the fastest because it cheats by loading itself up when Windows boots up, so when you click on the icon the browser instantly appears. Of course, by having it load up like tha a means longer boot time, and a more sluggish system by having all that crap in memory (not really an issue with 2+ Ghz processors with 512MB of ram, but try comparing IE-free Windows 95 vs. 98 on a P133 with 24MB of ram and it's very obvious.)

Once it's loaded up though, IE is not that fast loading and rendering pages. Opera 7 easily smokes it.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of trolls, if you haven't actually tried Mozilla * on a sub Ghz machine, you qualify.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends -- Mozilla is fast with some things and dead slow with others.

I have an (autogenerated) page with a 5 MB table, and IE is an order of magnitude faster than Mozilla, read from disk. Mozilla is also creepy slow with some DOM operations, like adding 100 items to a Select.

Re:speed

[mixmasta]

Agreed. I couldn't tell any difference either.

Also, since I keep mozilla open all the time it isn't too important how long it takes to load.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

The only qualification I made was to my statement:

> "Either you are a troll, or browsers perform significantly different with a slow processor."

I have not tried Mozilla on a sub Ghz machine, nor do I intend to. Some of us like to keep current with the times... my THREE previous machines were faster than 1ghz.

Re:speed

[Disevidence]

He said 366mhz. I know this might sound hard for you to grasp the concept of, but your anecdotes of testing on 2.5ghz systems do nothing to alter his, or anyone else's opinions.

Re:speed

[westyvw]

What computer do you work on? I notice the speed of my connection, never the browser. (I have 1.5 down here and 2.5 at work so its plenty fast). I think with todays computers whats there to talk about browser speed?

Re:speed

[westyvw]

AGAIN I say: What the hell computer are you using? Google? a second off? Hell google renders in LESS then a second on my computers. All my rendering is a factor of my line speed certainly not my browser.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

What they really need to work on is the speed and the bloat.

The word bloat has been overused to the point of meaninglessness by this point. Can we all just agree to stop using it?

• Have you attempted to quantify or understand the performance problems that you've seen with mozilla?
• I'm guessing you think the performance problem is a result of the "bloat", but what "bloat" exactly do you think is the cause?
• Do you have any evidence that this performance problem is actually caused by what you think it is?

Etc., etc. Just saying "this application is bloated" without being more precise is useless.

Too many people launch into elaborate time-consuming attempts to make their software "faster" without doing any actual analysis of the problem or the likelihood of their effort having any effect. (Witness the ludicrous amounts of time people will spend recompiling every last package on their system without bothering to spend even a moment to measure the (almost certainly miniscule, possibly even negative) effect.)

Sloppy thinking of the "oh, it's the bloat" form causes more problems than it solves.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

aye, it'd take one hell of a table to get it up to 5mb if it weren't autogenerated. With autogenerated crap code it's hard telling how it would render in a browser that actually expects real html and scripting languages.

Take a look at two identitcal pages, one produced in frontpage, one produced in publisher, one hand-coded, and one produced with the built in mozilla editor.

the largest of all will be the publisher output, pretty much everytime. If you actually break this code down and analyze it (should take a few hours for a simple single page) you'll never quite figure out how it manages to render... or how a table of twenty links can result in 1mb of html and CSS and vbscript!

Frontpage will do significantly better than publisher with the same page. Although you'll still never figure out how it renders at least the output will be more like 100k.

Moz generator will do better than either, it will produce real code, crappily formatted and with about the same uneeded junk you'd expect if you wrote the app to generate the code yourself. This should be under 15k

hand coded you'll end up with something about 1-2k max, it will render lightning fast (compared with the other options at least).

Somehow I suspect what we'll find if we look at how these things render is that firebird will win on the real pages that actually have correct code that has some logical excuse for rendering. Frontpage and publisher output will load faster in IE than firebird (although that garbage won't load fast in ANYTHING).

Re:speed

[oogoliegoogolie]

Ah, someone with a similar experience. I always seem to get tempted by the 'Mozilla is bloated and slow, Firebird is lightning fast' posts so I check out Firebird every few months but it never gives me any compelling reason to switch from Mozilla. Maybe on a PII or PIII machine Firebird may be faster, but with a 2GHz with 1GB ram the speed differences are imperceptible.

Yet, I haven't tried Firebird in linux for a while so I may give it another shot.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

*sigh... read my response to the AC above you, maybe it'll help you learn to read properly.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

no the speed at which the code and images arrive to your pc is a factor of your line speed. The speed at which that information appears (renders) is a factor of your pc hardware, and your browser.

Simply rendering other elements first so that a page "appears" before loading images and how the loading of those images is handled impacts this.

Of course once a page has been viewed recently your line speed isn't an issue at all, since the page is loading from your hard drive or the local network proxy cache.

I can write you a 20line webpage that will take 10 minutes to render on a 3ghz p4 in IE. HTML renders quickly, CSS is a little slower, javascript much slower, and vbscript DEFINATELY renders more slowly than any of the rest. Take a list of links, surround it in table code that impacts the layout of the links not the slightest, and it will slow the page render time.

Yes to trim the load speed by a second in the case of google requires a cleaner and faster implementation of alot of things, network communication is one of them.

Obviously a webpage will load faster on linux where it is pulled into memory rather than paged, a page your refreshing will be faster even if cache is turned off in IE because of sloppy memory handling. There are alot of factors involved, a seond is a very short period of time and I seriously doubt you have pages loading in less than that. Even google.

Now when we were "formally" checking these page loads it was over a t1 link and we also tested over 56k dialup. Remember, a page is fully loaded when ALL the content has been rendered, not when you can see enough of it to proceed.

Re:speed

[Coneasfast]

i believe the reason why mozilla, firebird, etc are slow is because they use XUL ui, which is slow. They want firebird to be faster but they won't save much more than memory if they don't hit the core of the problem.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Close but no cigar.

There is at least one significant/major/painful and ugly bug.

Specifically, it doesn't play nicely with Acrobat. (100% CPU use and/or crashing when you close a document viewed through acrobat).

Admittedly it has yet to be proven whether the bug's in Acrobat or FireBird.

Having said that, I love Firebird, and only use IE when I need to access non-standard (ie MSIE proprietary) websites.

Re:speed

[Jerk City Troll]

It seems that everytime Mozilla comes up in the news here at Slashdot, clueless posters come in and start complaining about Mozilla's speed. Mozilla is not just a browser (and other utils like a mailer and so forth). Mozilla is built as an application platform. Yes, it's much more.

Basically, with XUL and JavaScript, Mozilla provides a facility very similar to Java on the client. You can build a complete set of applications with Mozill as the foundation. O'Reilly has a book on the subject that goes into further detail.

If you think back a while ago, Slashdot even ran a story about OEone which has built a complete desktop environment on top of Mozilla.

For what Mozilla actually does under the hood (and considering the application you interact with is itself built on this framework) it's surprisingly fast. And small to boot. You see, Mozilla embodies the original Netscape philosophy of creating an application platform in the browser. This is one of the reasons Microsoft was scared and so eager to kill them off. It would be another Java, but a Java that didn't require developers to create applications.

But I digress. I am sure every Mozilla related story on Slashdot will produce an army of people like you complaining abbout speed. Of course, how old of a computer do you have? I have never understood how anyone can consider Mozilla slow (unless you're dealing with the milestone releases which were full of debug code).

Re:speed

[Disevidence]

I assure you, I am thoroughly well trained in both the arts of reading and relevance. The latter you seem to be lacking.

I wasn't pointing out that your wrong in saying that x works better than y on a 2.5ghz system. Its just that you anecdote was completely incomparable, and therefore uncalled for.

And as for the argument that they should get with the times (or something similar to that), not everyone can afford or even need a newer system.

So if someone goes on about Mozilla in a near 2.5ghz environment, go right ahead with your view, as its perfectly valid. When someone is talking about a Celeron 366mhz, unless you can offer evidence that is comparable to that, its better advised to not offer an opinion. Your welcome to of course. But no-one would regard it if you did.

Re:speed

[OzRoy]

You can still use the -turbo option with Firebird.

However it isn't really supported as one of the goals of Firebird is to optimise it's startup times so that this sort of feature isn't needed.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, programs do perform "significantly different" (who are you? steve jobs?) with a slow processor. They run slower. When things run slower, performance issues are easier to identify. Kindergarten is now dismissed.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

You don't understand, this is about Firebird/Thunderbird IN GENERAL, not the performance on a Celeron 366 in particular. The AC demeaned Firebird/Thunderbird's performance, then mentioned right at the tail end of his post that he had an obsolete processor, the performance of which is no interest to Slashdotters in general.

Now, it is certainly possible that Firebird/Thunderbird run slow in comparison to other browsers/e-mail clients on a Celeron 366. This strikes me as very strange, but I do not claim to know for sure.

What I do know is that because of the strangeness of his comment there is a reasonably large chance it was a troll.

Who the hell is interested in discussing a Celeron 366mhz anyway? ten or twelve days ago at work I put eight fully functional Celeron 533's in a dumpster because no one would take them, not even the local school.

Re:speed

[shellbeach]

What you need to do is download Firebird, and Thunderbird .... Eventually they are going to take over from the Mozilla suite.

I thought that the "takeover" was supposed to be from Mozilla 1.5 onwards?? I see no mention of this in the 1.5b release notes, yet the roadmap still states (point 3):

1. Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items. [my emphasis]

Does anyone know what's happened with this? How come 1.5b still seems (judging from the release notes - I haven't downloaded it) to be a monolithic application? Or has has Mozilla now switched to Firebird and Thunderbird and just not said anything?

Re:speed

[westyvw]

I am in complete agreement with your post and thats what I am talking about. Using a 100 Megabit connection to directly connect to web pages on our intranet that I HAVE NOT seen before, I can see NO difference between Mozilla and Opera, and a slightly (albeit VERY slightly) slower rendering with IE.

My point is that ever since I have been using 1 Ghrz processors (and up) I really cant tell any difference in rendering speed as mentioned above. The pages just pop at you. Even complicated pages just go POP and they are there.

My point is, are you using slow computers or what?

Re:speed

[primus_sucks]

I just downloaded and installed firedbird. Just one complaint. How about when I say "open link in new tab" that it switch to the fucking tab instead of having to click on it?????

Re:speed

[Disevidence]

He mentioned that he found it slow, on his 366mhz. You compared with 2.5ghz. Im not discussing whether he was a troll, or his viewpoint was wrong, or anything. Im saying its fairly pointless to respond to someone saying its slow for him on his 366hmz, by saying, "Hey, its fine on my 2.5ghz rig". Im not saying your wrong in your view either.

Im saying its pointless to respond. Just like i spose i can't believe im wasting my time trying to explain this to you.

Im certainly interested in discussing a Celeron 366hmz. I find if programmers build programs with low-end computers in mind, the programs are more lightweight and more efficient, in General. Just because you see no point to the low-end discussion, doesn't mean everyone does.

And I would of loved to get my hands on a free Celeron 533. A old, slow box is always good for mucking around and messing with.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry I wasn't more clear -- It's a 3rd party HTML Converter program (dtSearch) that's working off a gigantic Excel spreadsheet published by the US Govt. It's NOT an authoring environment.

I only brought it up because Mozilla's performance is so terrible, *in this case*: IE renders it in 30 seconds, Mozilla in 5 minutes or more. (It looks like Moz is resizing the table cells every time a new row is rendered, while IE only bothers when the row is visible in the window.)

Re:speed

[drinkypoo]

I went to thunderbird so that I could have links in my email pop up in crazy browser (sorry about popup, it's relatively harmless, just an ad for the commercial version) instead of having to browse with mozilla because in my experience IE just plain works better on windows. Plus, opening a new tab (another instance of IE, really) in crazybrowser is fast, unless some other OS operation is blocking it, but those operations block new mozilla windows/tabs too. But my experience is identical to yours; thunderbird doesn't feel any faster than mozilla mail, except that it starts (a little) faster.

Re:speed

[connsmythe96]

One thing I found out recently is that the tabbrowser extension plugin for Firebird comes with a very serious performance hit. I used to install that immediately every time I installed firebird and I just thought Firebird was slow. Then someone told me he thought Firebird was faster than IE and I was thinking "what??". So I uninstalled the tabbrowser extension and sure enough, firebird is an extremely fast browser. You may want to check if you have that installed.

The problem I had with the extension is that every page came with a 2-4 second hang in which the entire UI stopped responding. This was a SERIOUSLY annoying problem, and I was almost to the point of switching to IE when I found out what was causing it. *whew* :)

Re:speed

[AceMarkE]

Tools > Options > Advanced > Uncheck "Open links in background"

Mark Erikson

Re:speed

[SuperLiquidSex]

Where does one go to get these? I always have a use for another computer, if not for me for a friend who's just getting on the net. I can't believe people just throw them away, it seems such a waste.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

Well I do not think it was pointless to respond. At the very least I was indicating to a less wary reader that it was a possible troll.

As for comparing relative performance on a 2.5ghz to a 366mhz, I think it is entirely valid.

If you take two well coded programs, A and B, and run them on both a slow and fast processor, the relative performance of the two programs to each other will be comparable at least 95% of the time.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

I asked most of the employees, but most were so glad to finally be rid of the clunkers at work and had no interest in taking one hume.

I asked the school, and they are well stocked with Pentium III's.

Sometimes I will give old systems to kids at the local slum, but no one was interested.

To bad we do not have a Goodwill in town....

Re:speed

[buttahead]

iwish i had know about the 533 celerons as well... imagine a beowulf... you know.

but I think he was trying to say that CPU speed isn't important. the relative performance is the key. the statement application a always starts fater than application b should translate well across cpu speeds.

the part i think he may not have though about... other optimizations between a 366mhz and a 2.5ghz have altered the relative speeds. app b may start faster on the newer machine because of optimizations in recent CPU versions.

Re:speed

[Stonent1]

Honestly what can you do in Moz, that you can't do in firebird?

Re:speed

[Eisenstein]

You could try the optimized builds for Firebird. I use one for my P4 at home and another for my P3 at work, and both are much faster (responding) than the vanilla-Firebird.

Re:speed

[Jugalator]

What you need to do is download Firebird, and Thunderbird.

As a Phoenix user since Phoenix 0.2 up to 0.5, I thought its speed was amazing in the first few versions when compared to Mozilla, and almost IE speed. But then I checked what Opera 7 with its rewritten rendering engine was all about, and it completely blew me away. It was pretty much IE speed, and seemed faster at rendering pages than both IE and a Gecko-based browser. It has several innovative features Mozilla has just ripped off (mouse gestures, tabbed browsing), and still more that no browser have yet to rip off. In a sense, Opera has been a major contributor to next-generation browser innovation. Yes, you get a banner in the tool bar if you don't pay and it's commercial software, but commercial software isn't always bad.

I don't know why Thunderbird still hasn't become the fastest browser without competition, even though it's one of the main purposes with the project. I have a feeling one of the reasons is because they must maintain reasonable cross-platform support by a platform-neutral GUI that's kinda bloated. XUL, XCOM etc. does no good for that browser speed-wise.

Re:speed

[jhdsl]

Read mail, check addressbook, compose HTML?

Re:speed

[Fizzlewhiff]

How about when I say "open link in new tab" that it switch to the fucking tab instead of having to click on it?????

I wouldn't like that. Then I wouldn't be able to queue up all the Fark boobies links.

Re:speed

[AvantLegion]

If Opera's rendering wasn't quite so sloppy, I would switch to it in a heartbeat.

Hopefully newer versions will tighten things up.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest issues here is that Mozilla's memory access patterns SUCK. Whenever it's paged out as an inactive application, like any decent modern OS will do, it spends rediculous amounts of time paging half of it back in as it faults pages in silly patterns.

I've never, ever seen any other application behave so horribly. I have no idea how the Mozilla guys managed this one.

Re:speed

[Disevidence]

Your not comparing a Pentium 4 2.6ghz to a Pentium 4 366mhz, so clock speed is not the only thing we have to worry about.

But lets just agree to disagree. I think programs may vary from high end to low end, and you obviously don't accept my viewpoint (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Re:speed

[Moonshadow]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

Popup? What popup? ;)

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

mozilla's javascript is very slow. loading a 100kb array from a local .js file take like 5 to 10 sec on a 500MHz machine. It's only the time for loading the file.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, if you use javascript to manage your UI, at least try to make the javascript engine run fast! Is it too hard to see it? javascript is no comparison to perl, python. Maybe it will run faster if it change it name to pavascript.

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 7 isn't really fast any more either. Opera 6 was fast..

Re:speed

[jonadab]

> Agreed. I couldn't tell any difference either.

The difference is, FireBird has a smaller memory footprint than
SeaMonkey. As such, if you have a marginal amount of RAM, FireBird
may fit without swapping where SeaMonkey doesn't. This will
result in a significant perceived performance improvement. If you
have plenty of RAM, however, SeaMonkey will use more of it (and maybe
take a bit longer to start the application initially), but apart from
that the rendering speed will be the same -- they are both using
Gecko, after all.

> Also, since I keep mozilla open all the time it isn't too
> important how long it takes to load.

Indeed. I haven't restarted my browser since the big power outage,
and that's pretty typical for me. Often I'll leave it running from
the day I install it until the day I install the next version. It's
too much of a pain to simultaneously bring everything I was doing to
a close all at once. The ability to bookmark tabsets helps somewhat
with that, but you still lose your place, any sessions, forms you
were filling out, and so on. I'm tempted to skip 1.5 and wait for
the next version, just because I don't feel like restarting my
browser again yet...

Re:speed

[jonadab]

> I have not tried Mozilla on a sub Ghz machine, nor do I intend to.
> Some of us like to keep current with the times... my THREE previous
> machines were faster than 1ghz.

I recently (this past spring) upgraded. Previously I was using a
PentiumII/233, and now it's a Pentium4/2.somethingGHz with the 800
MHz FSB. I've noticed very significant performance improvements
for some applications -- ifile, for example -- and for games.
Mozilla, however, performs pretty much exactly the same. This is
probably because I had my PII/233 maxed out on 512MB of RAM, which
was enough to make Mozilla happy. Browsing the web uses a lot more
RAM than CPU. Also, my internet connection hasn't changed, nor
has my hard drive changed. My RAM is now DDR, supposedly faster
than the SDRAM I had before, but that doesn't seem to make as much
difference.

Now, a while back when I added RAM to my PII/233 to bring it from
192 to 512MB, I did notice major performance improvements for
Mozilla at that time. I conclude that RAM is a major factor for
Mozilla performance, and CPU isn't. There are other major factors
besides RAM; your internet connection obviously would be one;
CPU speed doesn't seem to be, though.

Re:speed

[jonadab]

> actually IE loads faster, Firebird browses faster

IE loads significant parts of itself at system start time, so it
has less to load when you launch it. Mozilla (SeaMonkey) used to
have an equivalent feature, but circa 1.0 it was tworked (to improve
stability; apparently there were a number of memory-handling bugs
that could be worked around by forcing a reload of everything) and
hasn't really worked properly since. Firebird has AFAIK never had
this feature; I don't know whether there are any plans to add it.

Re:speed

[aldoman]

Try the latest Release candidate on windows. They changed the build flags when compiling it, and it is at least 100% faster on my machine (used too take 5 seconds too load, now takes 2) and it's also 2mb smaller.

Re:speed

[aldoman]

This is because it saves every tab entry too the HDD. I noticed this too, but there is a settinging in 'advanced'. Can't remember what exactly it's called, but it's something like 'Tab Crash Restoration'. Turn it off and you'll be back too fast firebird again...

Re:speed

[aldoman]

Not anymore, its broken* and the firebird people don't want too fix it. In the latest nightlies, which means that 0.7 will probably be b0rked too.

Re:speed

[Minna Kirai]

Mozilla is built as an application platform.

A well known fact which demonstrates a major design flaw.

The programmers were supposed to write a browser, but they decided to toss in an applicatin platform too.

To complain that their over-ambition degraded the performance of the web-browser that was the primary goal is completely valid. The extra work also held back release of usuable betas by almost two years.

Re:speed

[seanmeister]

Honestly what can you do in Moz, that you can't do in firebird?

Inspect the DOM of pages and XUL interface components - FB doesn't include Mozilla's excellent DOM inspector!

Re:speed

[Dog and Pony]

Doesn't really fly in my face, but I do disagree. Sitting an some AMD 1800 thingy, with only 256 MB memory. I do agree that pages display at about the same rate and such, the biggest problem is memory footprint, and especially when Mozilla gets swapped out (and that is very common).

I also like the leightweight of FireBird in other senses, it just does the bare minimum, does it well, and then I choose extensions instead. It is not the be-all, end-all, at least not yet, but it is indeed much more comfortable to use than the whole Mozilla package.

If I hauled my butt down to the store and got some more memory, maybe not. At least not as much.

Thunderbird OTOH is extremely impressive for being a 0.1 - but it isn't really faster. In this case, I just like to have a separate mail client that actually is not there when I don't use it. But, I just tried the thunderbird nightly (just installed it in another dir, so the real was still there just in case...). Thunderbird 0.2 is coming up anytime now, so the nightly was said to be very close to it. And this one is lots faster, with less memory footprint! Otherwise, I didn't notice a lot of difference, but now Thunderbird feels swift and fast too.

But I guess it all boils down to if you have the resources, and most importantly, if you want it all in one package or if you (like me) rather have several apps doing thier own little task. Philosophy, I guess. :)

For me, the offspring are the way to go. But Mozilla is good too, so I don't blame people for sticking to that... after all, that is what I used before and was happy with.

Re:speed

[blibbleblobble]

"the largest of all will be the publisher output, pretty much everytime"

But hand-coded HTML is so old-fashioned, now that Microsoft Word has interweb features built-in! It's really easy to publish things, and the files come out at about 30-40 times the size of the equivalent 'basic' html, so they must be better.

Re:speed

[Gherald]

Of course the comparison was a generalization. I am assuming my 2.6 ghz has a proportional amount of more memory than his 366mhz (1GB as compared to.. 128mb at the most?).

Its all not very relevant though, one cannot complain Firebird/Thunderbird are by nature slower than other programs if one is using something as measly and obsolete as a 366mhz.

Re:speed

[darkmeridian]

I found this out the hard way as well. I was running a video processing app for the first time and it seemed to be really slow. Then I opened up the list of processes and found that Moz was taking up 99% of the processing power. I killed off that process and the system immediately quickened. I never had another such problem, so I have no idea what caused this instance. However, it is a legitimate issue that should be resolved.

Re:speed

[theTerribleRobbo]

...And they end up with the emacs of the browser world?

Re:speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just sweep the problem under the rug and forget about it.

Re:speed

[leifm]

I use Mozilla daily builds at work for 95% of my browsing. My work box is XP/P4 2.2Ghz/512/80GB. I figure that's a fairly low end box by today's standards. I have no complaints at all about Mozilla's speed. It starts quickly (I don't use quick launch), it doesn't crash much, it renders almost everything correctly. Firebird does seem a bit quicker, but it renders a fair amount of things incorrectly, and tends to crash a bit more than Moz. At any rate I don't get where the speed complaints come from.

Re:speed

[OoSync]

My experiences are somewhat different, as may be my usage pattern. First, I've noticed on sites with Flash animations or lots of graphics, Firbird tends to be *slower* than Mozilla. This is slower in gui responsiveness (hitting the close tab button or switching tabs or opening a menu) and page rendering. Next, startup time: I have none. My usage is to keep the browser open for as long as possible as I'm always using it (webmail, slashdot, google, etc. all day long). I never close the browser unless I absolutely have to. I figure any amount of load time on my applications is acceptable as long as they stay open, noncrashed, for days or weeks at a time. There simply is no load time, and Mozilla and Firebird are both good for this. Oh, BTW, OpenOffice is also like this for me. I used Calc to grade papers and commonly kept it open for weeks at a time. Finally, the thing that's more important for these usage patterns is memory, physical and virtual as the penalty for swapping in and out an unused process is sometimes noticeable enough to be equivalent to "load time".

Re:speed

[SilentMajority]

Is this true for Windows too? Gecko engine is compiled into the firebird and thunderbird's EXE files?!?!?!?

If so, then the gecko engine should be moved to a DLL so that it can be shared by multiple applications without taking up so much extra memory for each new application that uses it. Who knows how many other applications will make use of the gecko engine in the future.

Re:speed

[ecloud]

On Solaris here's what happens when I run top:

7241 rutledge 8 58 0 107M 81M sleep 105:52 14.86% MozillaFirebird ....
3897 olsen 1 58 0 38M 25M sleep 61:52 0.00% .netscape.bin

Now granted I probably have more tabs open than olsen has windows, but MozillaFirebird is ALWAYS the top process when I run top. Always. And the memory usage is always the highest of any app too, even right after starting it up.

We used to complain about Netscape 4.x being inefficient but Firebird is much worse. I keep using it though, mostly because it doesn't crash. Netscape used to unceremoniously disappear quite often, or sometimes it sucked up all CPU time and became unresponsive, but Firebird becomes unresponsive much more often, and then recovers after half a minute or so.

On Windows, IE is much faster and smaller than Mozilla. You can really see this on one 200MHz box we have at work; IE is quite snappy but Mozilla almost brings the system to its knees.

Re:speed

[mixmasta]

There are other reasons to use mozilla, for instance the lack of security holes you could drive an aircraft carrier through.

I did try crazy browser once, and generally liked it. It was fast, as is IE. The prob was that it didn't look right on my high res monitor with large fonts, and something else I can't remember now. I sent in a bug request or two but it hasn't been updated in like a year and a half....

So, I'm back to mozilla and happy.

Re:speed

[Illissius]

> Of course, how old of a computer do you have? Pretty damn old. AMD K6-2 350 MHz 256MB RAM, to be exact. Dialup, too. :( (I plan on getting a new computer pretty soon, and broadband as soon as - meaning, the nanosecond - it becomes available around here.) And for the record, I actually tried Firebird, not Mozilla, and it was quite noticeably slower than Opera 7.x (and didn't have close to as many features, quite a lot if not most of which have become indispensable for me - I could list them all here, but it would seem mildly trollish). This is explained somewhat by the application platform stuff, but as a previous post put it, the point of a web browser isn't for it to be an application platform - this is similar to how the point of a cow isn't for it to be a goat. Or if it is, then at least it shouldn't pretend otherwise and instead actually do something to cause people to *notice* the application platform part of it. As is, it's just a web browser which is noticeably slower for a reason which isn't (noticeable).

Re:speed

[Stonent1]

Oh well I have Thunderbird and Firebird, so I've got mostly everything.

Re:speed

[Zontar The Mindless]

Opera's Javascript implementation has been good for years. The problem is more with doing actual scripting in JavaScript. Internet Explorer and Mozilla both have very different "API"s for DOM scripting. Opera 6 was pretty poor in that regard - didn't render much. Opera 7 renders about 90%, maybe more, of either Mozilla or Internet Explorer's JavaScript, depending on which browser string you send (identify as Internet Explorer and pretty much every IE-specific pages render perfectly)

When identifying as Opera, usually only the most IE-centric pages won't render.

Opera's JS console sucks ass. It's actually worse than MSIE's.

The problem, however, is not so much writing JS for Opera as it is the crap scripts that get written in general.

Read this next sentence very carefully: Clientside scripting should NOT depend on UA strings -- you should do object detection, which can't be fooled by UA spoofing in the first place. The browser either supports the required object/method/property, or it doesn't. ID'ing Mozilla as MSIE won't fix scripts that depend upon document.all, for example. Clueful scripters that actually think about what they're doing do NOT write "Mozilla JavaScript" or "MSIE JavaScript" -- they write to DOM in which case about 90% of cross-browser problems vanish. (Except for MSIE's crap event model and a few other things here and there, which Opera unfortunately tends to copy.)

These things being said, I happen to like Opera a great deal. It's fast and it's CSS support kicks butt. Not as good as Mozilla's, but very nearly so (although you'd think it'd be BETTER than anyone else's since Hakon Lie runs the company -- figure that one out, I can't).

My one big beef with it is that it doesn't support a big chunk of CSS-DOM -- no document.styleSheets collection. And neither getComputedStyle() nor the MSIE pseudo-equivalents seem to work, either. Working around these issues is a major pain in the ass for the kind of stuff I've been doing lately, which involves a lot of changing style rules on the fly. It means I have to restrict myself to working with style rules written inside STYLE elements and work with their contents using string methods and regexps -- and I can't use linked stylesheets at all if I want this stuff to work with Opera. This is pretty silly, since this defeats the raison d'etre for using stylesheets in the first bloody place.

Opera's still way ahead of MSIE in actual CSS support, tho.

(The preceding message brought to you by The Campaign to End User-Agent Spoofing and User-Agent Detection.)

Off-road

[Henry V .009]

The roadmap has previously stated that 1.5 would mark the begining of the switch to Firebird. Doesn't look like we're going to get it until 1.6 at the earliest.

Re:Off-road

[quasi_steller]

I guess I don't really expect the switch to Firebird to happen as soon as was planned before AOL dropped Netscape/Mozilla. I'm just glad I get to use Firebird now, tho' I am looking forward to the integration of Firebird into the main browser.

Re:Off-road

[lordcorusa]

I have been using the latest Firebird and I really like it. However I am glad that they haven't switched official Mozilla to it yet, because it is still a bit too flaky for regular people to use.

For example, I had to patch Firebird's startup script with a patch from bugzilla just to get it to open a second window when I tried to open a second Firebird process, and that doesn't work over a network.

But for hacker use, Firebird is great and it shows great promise for Mozilla's future.

Re:Off-road

[RickHunter]

I use Firebird regularly, and I think its far, far better than regular Mozilla. The bookmarks sidebar, for example, is something I find myself using all the time. And I never use sidebars or drag-and-drop, but this is just so convenient that its hard not to. The Extension mechanism's also cool, especially since it allows you to install Extensions in your profile directory. And the interface is just generally consistant.

But you're right, its far too buggy for ordinary use. There's the startup script problem, for one. Though strangely enough, if you startup Firebird and then invoke Mozilla's startup script, you'll get a new Firebird window instead of the "profile in use" dialog. And I've had a number of mysterious crashes, including one that convinced GTK+ that my theme had bright blue as its text color.

Re:Off-road

[shaitand]

I was under the impression that the difference was that firebird was actually intended to be used as a web browser and mozilla is not supposed to actually be used to browse the web... it's just supposed to be the core technology which is to be used in web browsers?

Re:Off-road

[Anonymous Coward]

This changed when mozilla broke away from AOL. They decided that the change over would occur later, 1.6 at the earliest.

Re:Off-road

[Palin]

No, Gecko is the 'core technology'. Mozilla is the 'all-in-one' Web Browser/Email/Chat/Etc/Etc/Etc client that was meant to replace the Netscape 'Suite', called Communicator.

For Firebird and Mozilla use the Gecko rendering engine, along with Galeon and a few other 'browsers'.

Re:Off-road

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd use it if they'd incorporate some of the better UI aspects of Galeon. Stuff like close buttons on individual tabs, auto-scroll (makes it great for hands-free surfing ;), quick-download clicking, and other niceties.

Re:Off-road

[Planesdragon]

You're thinking of Gecko, the rendering engine that's behind Mozilla, Firebird, et al.

Mozilla has always intended to be a browser suite--it's the OSS version of Netscape, after all. Mozilla.org has meant for the tech to be taken and used everywhere, but Mozilla-the-browser is still a logical first project, and, as this release shows, it's very much a valid and valuable one.

to recap:

Mozilla.org is the company.

Gecko is the HTML rendering engine.

Mozilla-the-suite is a Netscape Communicator replacement.

Firebird, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are de-bloated standalone apps, based on Gecko and other Mozilla.org projects.

Re:Off-road

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confusing Gecko and Mozilla. Gecko is the layout engine (if you like, it's the "content frame" inside your web browser). Mozilla is the combination of the navigator (web browser), mail & news, composer etc, in the same way as Netscape is. Mozilla-Firebird is (will be) the navigator itself (which uses Gecko), Thunderbird is (will be) the mail & news.

Re:Off-road

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, according to original Mozilla propaganda, he is correct.

Mozilla -> Core Technology Demo.
Netscape & 3rd Parties -> Actual Browsers.

That's what They said, even if nobody believed it.

What difference does (did) it make? Not a lot. Netscape got more QA, basically. Also, Netscape used to release "0 Day" security fixes, while Mozilla made people wait for the next milestone. That should change now, however.

Re:Off-road

[Fnkmaster]

Too buggy for ordinary use? Hmm, I've been using Phoenix as my primary browser for almost 5 months now, and since 0.6.1 came out and they fixed the autocomplete bug, I can use it without getting frustrated. I only use IE on a few sites, and I don't remember the last time I started up Mozilla (AKA The Beast).

Re:Off-road

[RickHunter]

I've had a few mysterious crashes since then. But there's still the problem of the startup scripts, and a few other little things like that.

Dont you mean...

[fredistheking]

1.49999999999?

Great, but..

[Gherald]

Who cares?

Firebird is where the action is, and by the time corporations get around to switching to 1.5 final, Fire/Thunderbird 1.0 will be the default Mozilla browser/e-mail clients anyway.

Re:Great, but..

[Malc]

I care. Fire/Thunderbird might be where the action is... but I don't want action. I want a stable application that's fully featured. Last time I tried Firebird -- which is presumably more mature than Thunderbird -- I find it irritating and lacking some of the features that Mozilla 1.4 professes. Actually, come to think of it, I might not care about Mozilla 1.5 after all unless it provides a really compelling reason to upgrade from 1.4. I shall stick with that for as long as it takes, it's pretty stable.

Re:Great, but..

[Gherald]

> come to think of it, I might not care about Mozilla 1.5 after all unless it provides a really compelling reason to upgrade from 1.4.

Exactly! You have the same mindset as corporations. By the time people like you think it is worth upgrading from 1.4 they will not be moving to 1.5, because it won't be the latest stable build.

Instead, you and them will be going directly to 1.6 or 2.0, which will incorporate Thunder/Firebird.

My point is: No one will ever care about 1.5

Re:Great, but..

[pierre.ch]

which 1.5b features do you miss? Mozilla Firebird is beta software. We are currently making a list to include stuff we'll evaluate and eventually add to Mozilla Firebird 1.0.

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Firebird is where the action is

Uh, yeah, so why haven't we seen a new version since 0.6.1, which was released, what, six years ago?

Re:Great, but..

[Read Icculus]

Others have argued the same point I'm about to make and were dubbed "Trolls" for some reason - but for me, one of the most annoying differences between Mozilla and Firebird is the extra search bar in addition to the "location bar". An extra text entry field just for searches doesn't make sense to me, especially when Mozilla has search capabilities integrated into it's one text entry field. The Mozilla search bar is just so finely done that I dislike using another setup for searching and entering URLs. Of course I think both browsers are great and I use them both, but that is the "feature" I find lacking in Firebird.

Re:Great, but..

[RickHunter]

I'm the exact opposite. I found the way Mozilla handled the search bar to be annoying. I'd hit down, or have my mouse in the wrong place when I hit enter, and Mozilla would whisk me off to google instead of the URL I'd just typed in. Firebird separates the two, which means I don't have to think about that, and allows me to easily select what kind of search I want to do.

Re:Great, but..

[shaitand]

Actually you can do the same with the url bar in firebird and there are extensions which give you the ability to run the extra bar off. You did check out the extensions right... there is everything from simple gui user agent setting changes to a tetris game for firebird.

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of the lame ass search box and convince Google to create a search bar for it like they have for IE. If they won't, beg them to let you create one that works exactly like it. That widget is the only reason why I still use IE.

Re:Great, but..

[Gherald]

> Uh, yeah, so why haven't we seen a new version since 0.6.1, which was released, what, six years ago?

I wouldn't call exactly 30 days ago "six years."

Re:Great, but..

[rosie_bhjp]

you mean this?

Re:Great, but..

[edwdig]

The one reason I care about 1.5 is it'll have a fix for the GDI leaks that have been in Mozilla since 1.3. It's not an issue if you're using an NT based Windows, but if you're using 9x it's a big deal.

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you need to beg for permission? The Toolbar doesn't do anything except send HTTP requests to Google.

I thought the whole point of Mozilla was to be super-extensible, so I'm kinda surprised that someone didn't copy the Google years ago.

Re:Great, but..

[rmohr02]

The Mozilla marketing mailing list has pretty much decided that we aren't going to push for anything until we get a suite of individual applications.

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that supposed to mean?

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

> one of the most annoying differences between Mozilla and Firebird is the extra search bar in addition to the "location bar"

AFAIK Opera was the first to introduce it, and Firebird copied it for good reason.

People who argue about this like you get modded "Troll" because you are idiots. The vast majority of users find the search box EXTREMELY usefull.

Get with the program!!

Re:Great, but..

[cjpez]

I certainly do. There are a number of things that I simply loathe about Firebird. About once every three months or so I try to give it another whirl, but I always end up shutting it down in disgust because of the way it behaves. Mozilla is my perfect browser right now, and since I'm not expecting the Firebird team to suddenly conform to MY expectations as to how a browser should work, I'll continue to care about future Moz releases. Blah blah blah etc etc etc...

Re:Great, but..

[Gherald]

I think you are in the minorty here because the two choices most people will make seem pretty clear to me:

a) Participate in the Firebird project, whether it be using, developing, testing, or making suggestions.

b) Stick it out with the stable 1.4 and upgrade to 1.6 or 2.0 later.

Re:Great, but..

[rlowe69]

Fire/Thunderbird might be where the action is... but I don't want action. I want a stable application that's fully featured.

Actually, Mozilla tends to be where new development goes ... at least up until now. For example, I've been waiting for NTLM authentication in Firebird for about 4 months now ... Firebird still hasn't completely caught up to the 1.5 Mozilla branch yet.

Presumably Firebird will be the main development trunk, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe by the Firebird 0.7 release.

Re:Great, but..

[Read Icculus]

The point is that you can do the exact same things with the location bar in Mozilla as you can with the Firebird search bar. Search keywords, (I've got google mapped to g... etc.), and searching using your favorite search engine. Sure in Mozilla you have to hit the down key in addition to just "enter", but just use the keywords to search if you are used to hitting enter. Just MO guy.

Re:Great, but..

[advid]

It's really easy to get rid of the search bar, actually. Just right-click on the toolbar and click "Customize...". Then drag the search bar off the toolbar and into the customize box.

At that point you can set up bookmark keywords for google (the whole "g [keyword]" thing), and get more or less exactly the browser experience as you would from Mozilla.

For that matter you can enter the following code in the user.js file in your profile directory to make non-url text in the location bar use regular google search instead of "I'm feeling lucky":

user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");

And there you have it. Simple, no?

Re:Great, but..

[AntiOrganic]

What are you talking about? Firebird has had NTLM support for months.

Re:Great, but..

[gl4ss]

just fyi, and fei, there's addons for firebird that pretty much cover all the 'missing' features(the list below) and installing them is easy, click click restart browser done.

** * AdBlock Aggreg8 All-in-One Gestures Alternate Stylesheet Switcher Autoscroll Autohide Toolbox (True Fullscreen) Autoform Autocomplete Disabler BlogThis BlockFall Bookmark Links Checker Browser Uptime Bugxula Calendar (for windows) Cards Chatzilla Checky ChromEdit Close Other Tabs Compact Menu Compact Menu Copy Image CTC Diggler Digger Download Sort Download Statusbar Fb Window Icon Adder Find in this Selectbox Flash Click To View Fullscreen Kiosk Gnusto GoHome Google Bar GoTo GoUp Hide Searchbar Javascript Console Status Java (for Windows) Java (for Others) Language Menu Leech Linky Link Visitor LinkIt Link Toolbar List Toolbars Live HTTP Headers Macro Editor Minesweeper MNG Support (for windows) Mouse Gestures MozFBRH MozEX Mozilla Amazon Browser (MAB) Msnmsgr NavButtons NeedleSearch NewsMonster Next/Prev Image Nuke Image Ook Paste IP Paste and Go PNH Developers' Toolbar Popup ALT Attributes Preferential PrefButtons Quick Tools QuickPrefs QuickNote RadialContext RSS Reader Panel SearchThis! Slashzilla SmoothWheel Spiderzilla (for Windows) Spiderzilla (for Linux) Statusbar Clock StumbleUpon StyleSelector SuperScroll Tabbrowser Preferences Tabbrowser Extensions Tab Downloader Tab Scroller Tagzilla Text Zoom Text / Plain Text Links Themer This Window Things They Left Out Tipbar Trivial User Agent Toolbar Widget User Agent Switcher Venkman Web Developer x xKiosk **

Re:Great, but..

[rlowe69]

What are you talking about? Firebird has had NTLM support for months.

My firewall at work disagrees with you. I can get past it just fine with Mozilla but not with Firebird 0.6.1 or the latest nightly build. There is nothing in Firebird preferences for NTLM either.

Re:Great, but..

[AntiOrganic]

The web hosting company I work for uses Rodopi as its management system. It requires NTLM authentication, and it works fine in Firebird, whereas Opera will report that the authentication method is unsupported. The dialog itself is missing a "domain" input, but "DOMAIN\user" syntax works 100% correctly.

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

The above extensions can be found at
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://www.mozdev.org/>http://www.mozdev.org /</a>
</p>

Re:Great, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh! Didn't format as html! :-)

Re:Great, but..

[rlowe69]

I get that dialog with Mozilla but not with Firebird.

Re:Great, but..

[rmohr02]

They aren't going to market anything to end-users and corporations until a suite of individual applications is ready.

Re:Great, but..

[lmfr]

I miss the mozilla toolbar, that allowed me to turn off/on images, proxy and other things with only one click of the mouse.

I also miss the advanced tools: allow cookies from this site, etc.

Regards

Re:Great, but..

[AntiOrganic]

Wow, you're right. Oddly enough, this is one of those features that seems to be present in the Windows version, and not *n?x.

I've only used Opera on Linux because this 500 MHz PoS can't run Firebird quickly enough.

Beta with bugfixes??

[maliabu]

i apologize for my ignorance, but why is it still in beta if it's meant to fix bugs? wouldn't it be more appropriate to have a bugfixed stable version for innocent users to use immediately and smoothly, and a beta for enthusiastic ones with new features?

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[be-fan]

Huh? It features lots of bugfixes over the alpha version that led up to the beta. It is not yet stable enough for regular people to use. If you want stable, then use the stable 1.4 release!

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[marvin2k]

Um...there is a bugfixed stable version for innocent users out there. It's called 1.4.

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what the terms usually mean:

alpha- features are still missing but we want to get this out to early adopters because they love all sorts of new, whizzy features and don't mind crashes.

beta- all features are in, but there are probably still bugs, and it would help us a lot to have a ton of people pound on this and tell us what breaks for them.

So, there's no notion of stable betas, as you implied. Users who need stability and few bugs shouldn't use betas (I'm a developer and know what the hell is going on, and *I* don't use betas). People who need stability should wait for the full release; that's what a full release is for.

Tongue in cheek:
Alpha: your publisher says that your schedule says that you should make an alpha release by this date.

Beta: your publisher says that your schedule says that you should make a beta release by this date.

Gold master: your publisher says that your schedule says that you should make a gold master release by this date.

(Sorry, I can't say I agree that it should be this way, but some of us live in the real world.)

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why 1.5 is called testing release. For a stable build, users should download 1.4.

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[glwtta]

Dude, you don't get the entire concept of "beta" do you?

When you fix bugs, you always (always!) introduce new bugs; you release a beta to find and fix the new bugs (and to see if the bug fixes really fixed the old bugs) before you give it to the users.

Good

[SpineZ]

I'm glad to see that they are still making headway with Mozilla. However, I recently installed MozillaFirebird, and I won't be looking back anytime soon. I suggest you give it a try. Also, check out MozillaThunderbird for your mail needs.

http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/
http://mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

Re:Good

[rmohr02]

Also, see why people are switching to Mozilla Firebird.

Re:Good

[NFN_NLN]

Huh, well mainly use Mozilla for the popup blocker.. so I tried it and I'm not going back!

Re:Good

[error502]

Google Toolbar 2.0 includes an excellent pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer. You can download it here.

Re:Good

[mantera]

i have used firebird ever since it started, ever since its first release or even prerelease, and while it has moved on a lot over the milestones, i have been prefering the good ol' dear mozilla over firebird ever since firbired 0.5 and mozilla 1.3. Things that put me off using firebird for the time being are lack of a a true ala mozilla sidebar with sidebar tabs, lack of those folding twisties on toolbars so i can easily access them yet reclaim my precious pixels, mozilla's fullscreen view is still better and more reliable than firebird, and this perhaps annoys me more than any; recently firebird seems to have been becoming too much of an IE! Not to say firebird is bad, kudos to all the guys for the work they're doing, and previous i have enjoyed using firebird, it's just that recently i've appreciated mozilla even more.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Tycho, from Penny Arcade, recent review of thunderbird.

I mentioned on Friday that I've been trying out Thunderbird, Mozilla's standalone mail client, because I'd heard that it had quite the adaptive spam filter. It does have that, and it works as well as advertised - but I hate absolutely everything else about it. The software I'm using is version .2 or some shit, so my attempting to use it for serious daily tasks is like making a fetus the President of the United States. Mails constantly come in blank, or stripped of the time stamp. Sometimes, mails arrive from the future. Sometimes it follows its rules for deleting spam, and sometimes, hey! Here's a bunch of mail about dicks.

Re:Good

[RLiegh]

Isn't it true that the google toolbar also reports where you visit to google, however?

Re:Good

[Vargasan]

That sounds just about right.
He just forgot to mention EVERYTHING going so slow that it makes eating hot flowing lava enjoyable.

Re:Good

[error502]

There are two versions of the Google Toolbar. One has "Advanced Features" and one doesn't. The one with them, however, reports the sites you visit back to Google.

I don't actually know what those "Advanced Features" are as I have the version that doesn't report back. I can't imagine why anyone would want to install it, however.

Both versions block pop-ups.

Re:Good

[Malcontent]

Why install two programs when one will do. For me I prefer a one package install that gives me email (imap over SSL rocks!) browsing and an occational IRC chat. Too bad the jabber client looks like it's been abandoned.

If Mozilla picked up the jabber client again and made it easy to deploy to a hundred users at once they would have a great corporate tool on their hands.

Re:Good

[SpineZ]

Because more time than not, the application-specific programs (not suites) do the job better and more reliable.

Re:Good

[oogoliegoogolie]

I don't see anything unique to Firebird there; in fact, Mozilla had those features for quite some time now. But either are quite an improvement over IE.

Re:Good

[Malcontent]

Maybe. But as I said my prefered email client is mozilla and so it my prefered browser. I don't do IRC all that much so the mozilla IRC client is good enough.

They had a functional jabber client too bad it's not beeing actively developed.

I believe two things stand in the way of mozilla domination.

1) IM integration.
2) Network install with the ability to override user prefs and install plug ins for all users in one shot.

Make that happen and you'll see corporations start to migrate to mozilla wholesale.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[sbszine]

I thought Netscape killed it off because they were buying AOL.

From memory what happened is that AOL laid off the Netscape developers who were working on Moz. A non-profit foundation was set up to fund continued development and AOL made the first donation ($1 million). Red Hat, Sun etc have also donated to the foundation, but they still need a lot more $ from users if the pace of development is to be maintained.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[OzRoy]

Netscape/AOL is no longer supporting Mozilla, but Mozilla still exists.

The Mozilla Foundation has been set up to manage the project. It's a non profit organisation so you can make a donation to them if you wish.

Also a lot of the developers who worked for Netscape and on the Mozilla project are continuing to work on mozilla still.

Neded feechor.

[Anonymous Coward]

A speelchacker for any tects entery.

Re:Neded feechor.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3665

Spell checker

[doomy]

It says the spell checker comes for Messenger and Composer, now woulnd't it be a great idea to use the spellchecker functionality within the browser as well? Such as within forms? Maybe someone should request this a a feature. I for one would use it :)

Re:Spell checker

[Swaffs]

That's a good idea. Maybe we could even get Malda to use it.

Re:Spell checker

[Malc]

Search Bugzilla. I'm pretty sure that this enhancement was requested some time ago.

Re:Spell checker

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, doomy, mattdm, malc, maserati -- some really low ID'd /.ers posting on one thread.. never seen this before... VA linux stock go negative?

Re:Spell checker

[pipingguy]

Why should a spell checker be a priority? Is it intended for non-native English speakers?

I beleive that spell checkers are the equivalent to changing your grades by hacking into the school's computer.

It takes about 4 seconds to type a possible misspelt word into an online big dic to check its meaning and correct sequence of letters. They even suggest alternate, widely-understood arrangements of the letters in case your spelling of "fish" begins with a "p".

Or are all the brilliant Slashdot spelling apologists so involved and busy that they can't take the time to check stuff.

"This sentence contains exactly threee erors."

Re:Spell checker

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but it takes on the average of 20 seconds for me to load a regular web page. To type something in a form and submit (on a busy site) sometimes takes from 15 seconds to 45 seconds, once it returns my query, it would then try loading a buch of flash adverts and or popups. Based on all this, by the time I really know that phish is really spelt as fish, I've already wasted 5 mins. Might as well run a local spell checker that queries ispell.

time ispell phishy_stuff.txt
real 0m0.015s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0/000s

In other words, your flambait is not logically feasable.

Re:Spell checker

[Malcontent]

Mozilla spellchecker.

1) Set google as your default search engine.
2) Type message
3) Hit preview on slashdot.
4) Hightlight suspicious word.
5) right click and do the google search on the word.
6) C & P the right spelling. ...

Profit!!

Seriously though it would be cool to have it.

Re:Spell checker

[RealityShunt]

Schwing! LOL!

Spelchekr? We don ned no stinkin spelchecr!

realityshunt

Re:Spell checker

[Wordsmith]

you WERE trolling, right?
You wrote "beleive" instead of "believe."

Re:Spell checker

[hikerhat]

No doubt. There's no reason every text box widget from all the major frameworks shouldn't have spell check built in. Someday I might get my shit together and try and implement it.

Re:Spell checker

[Planesdragon]

It takes about 4 seconds to type a possible misspelt word into an online big dic to check its meaning and correct sequence of letters. They even suggest alternate, widely-understood arrangements of the letters in case your spelling of "fish" begins with a "p".

Have you ever, for any reason, handed anything you've written to ANYONE to check it over?

I don't need a spellchecker to tell me how to spell words I can see are mis-spelt. I need one to pick up the mis-spellings that I don't notice. You'd be surprised how hard it is to review 100,000 words to find spelling errors by hand... and you have to cut a corner off of your geek card if you can't appreciate how much more efficient the proofreading of those 100,000 words will be if the proofreader can work with a spell-checking program, in addition to their own skills.

Re:Spell checker

[bsharitt]

Yeah that's one of the things I really like about Safari.

Re:Spell checker

[buttahead]

i would have modded it funny.. but then again... many trolls are funny. there is some overlap there... leading to the conclusion that the mod-terms should be updated.

Re:Spell checker

[Anonymous Coward]

you looking for a big dic?

Re:Spell checker

[pipingguy]

http://www.urban75.com/Mag/troll.html

I note that the above site doesn't appear to have been updated in a while (or is that, "awhile"?) but it's still relevant.

Some errors can legitimately be explained by the, "I-was-typing-so-fast-and-made-mistakes-because-I' m-so smart/cool-ADD-disabled-and-don't-have-time-to-che ck" phenomenon, but mostly it's just laziness.

One thing I've noticed about the best Slashdot comments (+5, where I read) is the care taken with the structure and spelling.

However, some people intentionally misspell things trolling for corrections.

Re:Spell checker

[pipingguy]

Any good proofreader already knows the words s/he commonly misspells, right?

Re:Spell checker

[andi75]

That's a good idea. Maybe we could even get Malda to use it.

No such luck. Rob Malda uses Internet Explorer.

Re:Spell checker

[Planesdragon]

Any good proofreader already knows the words s/he commonly misspells, right?

Yes. And if they're that common, they'll set the misspellings to "autocorrect" to save their time--or they'll just do a find/replace.

But what about the words the proofreader doesn't misspell commonly? Or when they check someone _else_'s work?

Re:Spell checker

[pipingguy]

But what about the words the proofreader doesn't misspell commonly? Or when they check someone _else_'s work?

I see your first point. I assume that people that read a lot (offline) sort of "zone in" on spellings that "don't look right" and then check.

Same thing would apply regarding reviewing someone else's work if they're using Evelyn Woodski's Spd rdng tchnqus (old SNL skit).

Also, check out the latest Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

Thunderbird 0.2 RC1 is available now (for Windows, other builds should follow shortly). It's had a good size reduction and speed increase.

Re:Also, check out the latest Thunderbird

[Dog and Pony]

Tried it out last night, and the speedup was really noticeable. Didn't toy around with it too much, so I'm not sure if there was any new features as well. But speed and memory was indeed improved...

is the image resize still active?

[Comsn]

its a horrible 'feature' that needs to be disabled by default.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

so you have to click one extra time to view your pr0n pics @ full size, jeez

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're an idiot, aren't you?

The parent has a valid point of complaint. Automatic image resizing often distorts the image being loaded to a terrible degree, requiring an additional click to view the image properly.

Whether or not that should be turned on or off by default is cause for a debate, I'm sure. But rather than bring valid arguments to the party, you just whine like a spoiled child.

I think the funniest part is how you whine about ease-of-use UI, yet totally disregard the additional click that image resizing causes for many people.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[shepd]

>Oh no, wait! it's actually brilliant!

You would say spending 5 minutes downloading images that are resized to the point they may as well have been enlarged thumbnails is brilliant?

Sorry, I don't agree.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

So turn it off you fucking idiot.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried clicking on the image after its done downloading? It resizes back to full size.... click again to toggle back to the shrunken mode that lets the entire picture fit in a browser window.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[thumperward]

I'm sorry, what?

No, seriously... what?

Auto image resizing just makes images opened in windows by themselves resize to fit the window if too big. Left-clicking will return to image to its true size. What the hell is this "thumbnail" nonsense? Aren't you aware that clicking the image will restore it?

- Chris

Re:is the image resize still active?

[shepd]

>Aren't you aware that clicking the image will restore it?

Sure I am, but clicking the image should shrink it, not "restore" it. The image should be the standard pixel:pixel size by default. That only makes sense.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[thumperward]

Why does that make sense? Seriously? There are very few occasions I can think of when I have needed to see an image created at a stupidly-high resolution (i.e. above 800x600) in my browser window at full size. Is there a single example you can give me which would show me why it is more convenient to have to scroll to get to the bottom of a large image than to just get the whole thing at about 80% of full-size? I really don't get why people hate this feature, it's literally the best thing added to Mozilla since the Firebird split.

- Chris

Re:is the image resize still active?

[shepd]

>Is there a single example you can give me which would show me why it is more convenient to have to scroll to get to the bottom of a large image than to just get the whole thing at about 80% of full-size?

Sure.

Why don't you view my store's map on at 640x480.

That applies for a lot of other pictures that include text, as well.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[FryGuy1013]

browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing = false

viola.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[thumperward]

Still looks like a map to me. I can read the important text.

Whereas if I turn OFF image resizing, I can't even see the store!

Well, that's a useability improvement.

- Chris

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree, the image resize is confusing for many users and anonoying for others.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[MenTaLguY]

I don't think it would be so bad if it used some sort of averaging/interpolation.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[jroller]

Why can't it just show you the full resolution image by default, and let the user scale to Fit if they choose by clicking on it after it loads?

This would seem much simpler than either always scaling to fit (ugly) by default, or not having the option at all.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Phroggy]

I really don't get why people hate this feature, it's literally the best thing added to Mozilla since the Firebird split.

Because IE 6 does it, and we all hate Microsoft.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

viola.

You mean "voila". Check here for a viola.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Dog and Pony]

viola.

It does not pay to fiddle around when posting to slashdot. ;-)

Re:is the image resize still active?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about if most of the large images you look at are screenshots, and moz's scaling algorithm makes all the text unreadable because it's optimized for speed, not image quality? That's a single example.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[cheekyboy]

1. its interpolation resizing is crap!, not like photoshop, its hardly perfect.

2. when you have massive porn images, you might want to zoom in to the good bits!!!!

3. why cant i resize/zoom a whole webpage like ACROBAT, ie resize all fonts by X percent, and resize all images X percent at the same time too.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[cheekyboy]

And its trivial to make it resize FAST, since windows has built in APIs to do it FAST!

And duh.... nvidia chipsets do it fast!!

mozzie, get a clue.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[penthouseplayah]

3. why cant i resize/zoom a whole webpage like ACROBAT, ie resize all fonts by X percent, and resize all images X percent at the same time too.
Well, that would be cool with a zoom feature, but here we are discussing image resizing. only "pictures-only" will be resized.

If a webpage wants a picture at full scale, they should just write pretty simple html to do that.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[bakert]

Scans of text. I scan a 20-page document every week and put it online. If I OCR and check spelling it takes forever (dark text on dark background). If I just scan and stick it up as images it takes 5-10 mins.

Resizing makes it unreadable. Novice users get confused and think its their resolution or the website's fault or similar.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[yingjie]

are these prefs fully documented somewhere?

i sometimes (and most casual users, i assume) get turned off by how much of it you need to do to turn on/off some features -- there's something to be said about easily accessed options in a nice friendly GUI.

also, "viola"?? the plant, or the instrument?

Re:is the image resize still active?

[darkmeridian]

The image resize in IE resizes the graphics to fit better with the text. This doesn't matter for most people, but I have a laptop with a 1900 X 1200 resolution LCD. The icons get really small if rendered in real-size. IE enlarge these icons to match the size of columns, etc.

If only Moz did the same.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[FryGuy1013]

you can type about:config in the url bar to get them all. Most preferences were removed to make the configuration dialogs less confusing actually.

And viola the instrument.

And they call this an upgrade?

[MediaBoy77]

From the release notes:
The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2. If you're using these binaries then popular plug-ins like RealPlayer, compiled with previous versions of GCC, will not work. See bug 213234 and 158385.

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.

I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[metamatic]

As opposed to Windows, where downloading a new version of Internet Explorer (6.0) broke every single plugin because Microsoft decided to do so to force people to use ActiveX?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[JanusFury]

Every single plugin that used ancient, hardly DOM-aware if DOM-aware at all, netscape plugin APIs?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Disevidence]

Do you want them to upgrade, or just add new features with the old bloat?

Seriously.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[rmohr02]

I disagree. This is a classic examply of why people should use Debian (or Debian-based distros) and only install software via apt. Then they can be assured the software will work (except for rare circumstances with packages under testing).

I doubt RealPlayer is available in the official apt repositories, but there are probably other plugins that fit this example and are in the repositories.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[imnoteddy]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

Until Linux gets more stable, not changing libraries willy-nilly, it is still just a hobbyist's OS.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[foonf]

Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.

Actually, while it may break RealPlayer (which AFAIK hasn't been updated in ages), this is actually absolutely necessary in order to use the latest Flash and JRE plugins, which being targeted to the latest version of Red Hat, are compiled with that gcc 3.2.

This is just moving in the direction that every distribution has been going in for some time. Basically all Linux Mozilla binaries in regular use, aside from those provided by mozilla.org, have been compiled with this for quite a while, because it is the standard compiler on every distribution. It is very sensible for mozilla to make this switch, since every distribution is using gcc 3.2 as its compiler anyway, and it is what proprietary plugin makers should be targeting.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[earlytime]

OTOH,

You're more likely to expect broken compatibility with a point release, as opposed to an incremental release. But your point is valid, most software vendors have sacrificed compatibility for various reasons when users least expect it.

The difference with UNIX(TM)-ish tool-based OSS (vs monolithic software packages) is that because of the decentralized nature of development, point releases are unlikely to be coordinated into a convenient upgrade. At any given moment, one package or another is moving up to a non-compatible release. Depending on which package it is, this can be a real pain in the ass.

The solution is dependency-checking package systems like rpm. If plug-in developers stopped using the old netscape (drop it in the plugin folder) install method, and started using packages with dependencies, that would solve alot of these kind of problems.

Wouldn't this be nice???:
root$ rpm -Uvh mozilla-1.4.i686.rpm
mozilla-1.4 requires:
adobe-acrobat-6.0
plugger-5.0
streaming-porn-1.1
download and install required packages from foo-foo linux ftp server (y/n)?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[tzanger]

Any distro will accomplish that. Hell even my personal favourite, Slackware, will do it, and IMO better than Debian or RH or SuSE, since the packages are far simpler and you don't have to fight the goddamned distro about dependencies.

Debian stable will probably work, but Moz 1.5 will make it there in, oh, 5 years? Testing and unstable are both worse than running no package manager at all, since you're trusting the packager until you need to break it to get something to work, at which point you're then running two package managers: dpkg and what's in your head.

No thanks. Give me Slackware and so long as you only [install|remove|upgrade]pkg you will never fall astray. Ever. And you get to use all the software, not just what someone's willing to maintain for you for free.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[kcbrown]

Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.

I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.

If they're going to break plugin compatibility, I'd rather they broke it properly.

The plugin "architecture" (or perhaps it's just the implementation. See below) as it exists right now is horribly broken. This is proven whenever a plugin causes the browser to crash. That should never happen, and it shouldn't matter whether or not the plugin itself is broken: the plugin architecture should insulate the browser from the misdeeds of any plugin.

If that means turning Gecko into a "window manager" so that it can provide plugins a Gecko-managed area in which to draw, so be it. But under no circumstances should the plugin ever have access to the browser's memory space. Instead, the plugin architecture should define an API through which plugins must perform all interactions with the outside world, and all plugins should run in their own address space.

And the same goes for Java. Java should never cause the browser to hang, no matter what the applet is doing.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[ttrafford]

I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.

I'm fairly sure if they were worried about widespread adoption they wouldn't have the "not for end-users" warning firmly affixed.

Besides, the GCC 3.2 ABI changes effect everything, not just Mozilla. They broke compatibility badly this once, with the idea that they would never have to do it again.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

Ah, yes, slashdot post template #58:

Insert name of open-source project here's

• incorrect support for Big Hairy Standard #5789
• lack of a driver for the $5 acme throbulator I picked up at that yard sale last week
• inability to interoperate with my neighbor's lawn mower

is the classic example of why

• Mozilla will never win back its browser share
• Linux is not quite ready for prime time on the desktop
• Evil will triump over the world

If the developers don't solve this problem for me tommorow,

• we will all become slaves of Redmond
• BSD will die
• I will taunt you again

Don't forget to also file a bugzilla bug and starting a long flame war on their developer's mailing list! They love it when you do that.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's actually the fix.

ActiveX (COM) will continue to work no matter what compiler someone used. Expect Unix developers to discover this idea in 2008.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[alph0ns3]

It's called "use your distribution's packages"

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[rmohr02]

I've never had problems with dependencies under Debian, nor have I had to break apt. And I haven't had a problem not finding software in the official apt repositories, but if I did, there are plenty of other repositories I can use.

Debian does have a slow release cycle, but I've found testing and unstable to be very reliable.

Also, Debian stable will always work--there just aren't as many new applications for it.

Finally, I haven't used Slackware's (or SuSE's) package manager. I'll try it sometime, but I can't see how it's better than apt. I do believe Slack's package management it's better than RedHat's--it would have to try pretty hard to be worse.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[nihilogos]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

It's a beta. The whole point of a betas is to find problems like this.

It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.

I recommend you stick with Windows.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but why should this happen? i know why it does happen, but why should it?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[foonf]

yeah, but why should this happen? i know why it does happen, but why should it?

Well, its pretty simple. gcc had some standards-compliance and performance issues. In order to address them, they made some changes which broke binary compatibility with older versions. Every linux distribution switches to the newer version, because, well, its better. Most third-party binary packages, like Mozilla, also switch to match the evolving standard Linux platform. This is overwhelmingly positive, except for some barely-maintained proprietary software whose developers can't manage to recompile it every few years to keep up with the times.

It would be a major impediment to the development of the platform if it was required to keep the kind of binary compatibility that would be necessary to keep ancient proprietary plugins working. What if the last release of RealPlayer was compiled with gcc 2.7, or required libc5, or used a.out libraries? Would you expect Mozilla to base their releases on those ancient technologies? I hope not. If you really want to use realplayer, you can compile Mozilla with gcc 2.95 yourself, but for the overwhelming majority of users, keeping up with modern standards makes the most sense (even if proprietary plugins are most important, it is much more likely that Real will eventually rebuild their plugin with a modern compiler, than Java or Flash will be recompiled with an older one).

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[IM6100]

According to some defintions, Linux isn't an "operating system" at all. It's just a kernal that various people have incorporated into Operating Systems, that are often referred to as 'Linux distributions.'

As such, there are many, many permutations of combinations of libraries out there running on machines that people claim to be running 'The Linux Operating System.'

And Linux will remain the basis of hobbyist's OSes. I would hate for that to ever end. It also can and is rolled out by some distributors as a formal OS, and they do a pretty good job of it.

The mistake is pretending it's all one OS.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

A well designed API?

That doesn't scratch anybody's itch, now, does it??

(sorry for being so cynical)

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, just tell us which CORBA ORB to use and we'll get right on it. :)

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Chuck Chunder]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop

Not at all. There are distro vendors happy to take care of all this shit for you. I know that whatever I pull from Ximian is just going to work

In fact getting Mozilla + Realplayer + Java + Acrobat + Flash is easier on Ximian Desktop than it is on Windows as everything can be be installed in one easy update.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Feztaa]

What? A piece of BETA software is less than PERFECT? Oh my Ghod!

You're perfectly welcome to continue using Mozilla 1.4 until there is a new real plugin that is compatible with mozilla 1.5BETA.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[glwtta]

Ok, so you did seem to realize that this is a beta release, your argument being that if this isn't fixed by the time it goes out of beta that will be a problem.

Well, fuck, I hope the next version of Windows has internet access, otherwise that will be a huge hurdle.

And it's not like the people who would be troubled by this upgrade with every release - they are still running 1.2.1, or whatever their more geeky friend installed for them. (nor should they, really)

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[pe1chl]

This just demonstrates that the plugin interface is broken.

The problem of interfacing GCC 2.95 compiled code to GCC 3.x compiled code should be fixed, preferably once for all cases (it also affects kernel modules, for example) and if that is not possible it should be fixed inside Mozilla or in a "shim" plugin.

And while that is done, a new interface should be defined that does not depend on things like this, and the plugin coders should be motivated to move to that new interface.

Do you think the providers of binary-only plugins will be helping is for much longer when we lock them out at arbitrary moments and require them to spend work on building a new distribution package? As it is now, the percentage of plugins supported on Linux is already relatively small. Moves like this are certainly not going to make it better.

What if Real or Adobe decide that this is it and no GCC 3.x compilation of their product will be brought out? Will Mozilla step back to GCC 2.95, will they fix the problem, or will they just kill their browser product by saying "sorry guys, no more Acrobat PDF viewing!"???

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[pe1chl]

The problem is known. It does not need to be found through a beta.

What makes you think this will be fixed before the final version will be released? The bug reports seem to consider it a fact of life, not a problem somebody is actively working on.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[pe1chl]

That would be nice, but there you also assume that whenever you make a change to the binary interface, providers of binary-only plugins will quickly line up to make their new plugin available.

When that method would have been used, you would just not be able to install the new Mozilla beta now, because dependencies that cannot be solved would exist.

Sure that prevents unfortunate mistakes, but it does not solve the underlying problem.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

And while that is done, a new interface should be defined that does not depend on things like this, and the plugin coders should be motivated to move to that new interface.

See Microsoft COM, and numerous copies in the open source world. Binary interface standards that are compiler-independent. Very tiny amount of runtime overhead.

I agree that if you are in the business of breaking eggs, you'd better come up with a damn fine omelet.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Well all open soruce plug-in is no problem since you can compile them with the new compiler - however propriotory plugin-in are a big problem.

It shows why using free software is better than closed software.

Mozilla is free software so if you want you can still compile it yourself using the old compiler.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[FooBarWidget]

This has got nothing to do with the plugin interface. This is a C++ Application Binary Interface issue. This problem only affects C++ applications (Mozilla is written in C++). The past few GCC versions broke C++ ABI in order to be standards compliant.

This has no large effect on most Linux software since they're open source. Most distributions are already fully compiled with GCC 3.2. Sun's JRE is already compiled with GCC 3.2. The *only* plugin I know that hasn't, is RealPlayer. Real should recompile their plugin and get over with it.

"What if Real or Adobe decide that this is it and no GCC 3.x compilation of their product will be brought out? Will Mozilla step back to GCC 2.95, will they fix the problem,"

They'd be fools to not bring out GCC 3.2 versions of their products. It's extremely trival: a recompile is all that's needed. Or in case your code isn't standards compliant (GCC 3.2 is more strict), just fix your code. All of this takes at most a few days. Sun and Real can have a new version ready in less than a week.

WinXP broke Easy CD Creator. Are you going to tell Microsoft to put back the MS-DOS cruft in XP just to make Easy CD Creator work? Or should Adaptec port their software to XP instead?

"or will they just kill their browser product by saying "sorry guys, no more Acrobat PDF viewing!"???"

This wouldn't be a bad idea at all. Replace Adobe's PDF plugin with an open source PDF plugin and viola.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[twaltari]

Yes, technically the reason is C++ ABI but as the original poster pointed out, using C++ ABI as the plugin interface is the problem, not the fact that gcc folks tend to break their backwards compatibility every now and then. As someone else already mentioned a compiler (or preferably programming language) independent binary interface should be introduced (COM is a well known example of such). I thought Mozilla is already heavily based on compiler independent binary interfaces (XPCOM) so what's the case with plug-ins?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[timothy]

Anagram: "Eric Raymond" - "I decry a norm"

Or, Eric S. Raymong, "I descry a norm."

timothy

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[cheekyboy]

just shows you that they were too stupid to make sure the problem was fixed in 3.0 gcc, why wait for 3.2?

maybe they should have had a 'use old 3.x format' option somewhere....

what does this really fix any way thats NEEDED?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Or, Eric S. Raymong, "I descry a norm."

Wouldn't that be "I gescry a norm"?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[ottffssent]

Can someone explain to me why different compiler versions is a problem?

I assumed (perhaps naively) that the plugin architecture was something along the lines of Moz forwarding a chunk of data (a Shockwave file, Realaudio, whatever) to a plugin, and taking the output and putting it somewhere appropriate (screen, /dev/dsp, whatever).

So, can someone with more programming experience than I explain this to me?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[pe1chl]

I agree that it is sometimes required to improve an interface and that it is not always practical to keep compatability, but I think it is too often waved away with a simple "just recompile".
This happened with a couple of C library changes as well, and I think there is not only a C++ change in this case, because the compiler version change affects the kernel and loadable kernel modules as well. Maybe that is a different issue, as the kernel is written in C.

Open source advocates tend to ignore the fact that some parts of some people's systems are not open source. When I decide to buy a piece of hardware from a manufacturer who is the only one that supports Linux and supports it using a binary-only driver, I can decide to go with that solution. Then I don't like it when arbitrary changes to interfaces break the module, as the manufacturer may no longer be around or may no longer be supporting Linux.
Same for browser plugins.

So whenever possible it would be preferred when existing modules or plugins continue to work, maybe not with the functionality of newly written or recompiled ones.
Sure a balance always has to be found.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[FooBarWidget]

"because the compiler version change affects the kernel and loadable kernel modules as well."

That's because the kernel is an extremely low-level piece of software and uses all kinds of extensions in GCC. The slightest change could potentially break something.

"Open source advocates tend to ignore the fact that some parts of some people's systems are not open source. When I decide to buy a piece of hardware from a manufacturer who is the only one that supports Linux and supports it using a binary-only driver, I can decide to go with that solution. Then I don't like it when arbitrary changes to interfaces break the module, as the manufacturer may no longer be around or may no longer be supporting Linux."

Then stick to your old kernel. Nobody forces you to upgrade. There are servers out there that are still running on Linux 2.0.
And if your manufacturer has gone out of business or doesn't support Linux anymore, it would be a far better idea to either buy new hardware or find an open source driver.

I think it's perfectly acceptable to break things when it only requires a recompile.
1) The Linux userbase is still small. We can break things in order to improve, without affecting too many people. When Linux becomes popular we can't do this as often before. So fix things while we still can.
2) Nobody is forcing you to upgrade.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[pe1chl]

In the case of hardware, for certain classes of hardware there is not much choice when one wants to use Linux. People are happy that even a single manufacturer wants to support Linux. The driver may be very complex and contain lots of proprietary code. E.g. a PCI ADSL card.
One can use these in a router, and may want to move on to a new kernel to have more advanced networking features.

In the case of Mozilla, the situation is even more complicated. One wants to install the new version of Mozilla to see if the IMAP code is improved, then finds that a plugin no longer works.
"Then don't upgrade" is often not practical.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Feztaa]

Or, Eric S. Raymond, "I descry a norm."

Depends what you think the 'norm' is... I considered the closed source development model to be the 'norm', which ESR decries.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.. does anyone even use RealPlayer?

Actually this is one step closer to getting rid of them.

Most annoying software ever.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[timothy]

Depends what you think the 'norm' is... I considered the closed source development model to be the 'norm', which ESR decries."

Well, he both descries (perceives) and decries the norm (of closed source development) while extolling open source development ;)

The S is a good variable at any rate ;) Two true anagrams, IMO.

timothy

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[Feztaa]

Ah, ok. I was thinking that "descries" meant "supports" (crappy dictionary). Yeah, I guess that works too.

Wow

[digital bath]

I'd never bothered to go out and find a different browser than IE before. However, after looking around the mozilla site for a bit, I found firebird. I haven't even tried mozilla 1.5 yet, but I did just download firebird - and let me tell you, 1.35 minutes later, I love it. I feel kind of stupid for not doing this earlier.

From now on, I'm going to make sure that the sites I design are firebird-compliant. Along that line, are there any good places to look for mozilla/mozilla firebird's CSS2 compliance?

I'll try mozilla 1.5 here soon, too. Mozilla - you may have just found yourself a convert.

Re:Wow

[GiMP]

"Along that line, are there any good places to look for mozilla/mozilla firebird's CSS2 compliance?"

Very good.. if you don't realize already, IE is terrible with CSS2. Nothing (yet) beats gecko's (mozilla renderer) CSS 1/2 compliance.

The most complete list I'm currently aware of is at macedition check it out here

Re:Wow

[Disevidence]

If your only looking for a browser, there is no really no special need to download Mozilla, Firebird should work well by itself, as it has a much smaller footprint and load time.

Re:Wow

[GiMP]

For those too afraid or lazy to click,
Mozilla 1.4 kicks butt, followed by Opera, and KHTML (safari).

IE 5.5 for MacOS, MSN for MacOS X, and IE6 (windows) seem to be nearly on par with CSS2 support; however, if I had to judge I'd say that the support ranks with MSN on top, followed by IE 5.5 and finally IE 6.

Omniweb and iCab were at the bottom of the barrel. Simply bad. This page does not reflect the fact that Omniweb will start using the KHTML engine so it should have idential support to that of Safari in the near future.

Re:Wow

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Congratulations for giving Moz/Firebird a try. The best advice I can give for making cross-browser scripting:

forget about document.all
instead use getElementByID()

Despite the funky capitialization, it's the key to making cross browser DHTML. I think you'll find that Mozilla supports at least as much of the CSS2 spec that IE does. The main problem is IE's box model, which can be worked around. Unless you're pushing the envelope, CSS compatibility shouldn't be a problem. If you really need a cross reference, I recommend Osborne's CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference.

Re:Wow

[Gherald]

> Nothing (yet) beats gecko's (mozilla renderer) CSS 1/2 compliance.

I thought KHTML was the current reigning champion in this regard?

Re:Wow

[GiMP]

I don't personally think so after both browsing pages and writing pages for both. I think it is fairly known that KHTML is not nearly as advanced as Gecko; however, it is certainly MUCH faster.

Once KHTML has matured into a sweet beautiful woman, Mozilla will look like a fat, ugly, homeless man. Unfortunately, right now Mozilla is a fat, rich guy and KHTML is still a teenager with a promising future.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the windows port works out well...

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of funky capitalization, YOU FAIL IT.

It's .getElementById()

Re:Wow

[Why Should I]

roger that, was just about to post the same reply

Re:Wow

[holloway]

See arstechnica.com - they did a review of MacOSX browsers in which Safari (khtml) did well, but not as well as Mozilla for compliance.

Re:Wow

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Well, ex-cuuu-se me! You bring pedantic to a whole new level.

Re:Wow

[Nailer]

let me tell you, 1.35 minutes later, I love it. I feel kind of stupid for not doing this earlier.

What, clicking something?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should try coding in VBScript. Much less pedantic than a JavaScript interpreter.

Re:Wow

[KidSock]

Is there an API reference of some kind for this? Or are we supposed to just look at the DOM spec on the W3C site?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Great reference here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/re ference/objects.asp :)

Re:Wow

[Jugalator]

Nothing (yet) beats gecko's (mozilla renderer) CSS 1/2 compliance.

I've found this site useful in the past, and it has the following list for CSS2 compatibility:

Opera 7: 43.5 points
Mozilla: 39 points
Konqueror/Safari: 31 points
Opera 5 & 6: 30.5 points
Explorer 5 Mac: 29 points
Explorer 6: 22.5 points
Explorer 5.5 Windows: 21 points
Explorer 5 Windows: 21 points
Explorer 4 Windows: 16.5 points
Explorer 4 Mac: 12.5 points
iCab: 7 points
Netscape 4: 6 points
Omniweb: 6 points

Re:Wow

[Wolfbone]

While designing your standards compliant sites if you have netscape/mozilla a really useful sidebar to have is the devedge multibar. Along the same lines, here's an interesting site about css design.

Re:Wow

[digital bath]

Not really - mis-capitalization will break most (if not all) javascript interpreters, so details like that are actually rather important.

Re:Wow

[trats]

Nothing (yet) beats gecko's (mozilla renderer) CSS 1/2 compliance.

The most complete list I'm currently aware of is at macedition check it out here

I did a quick tally from that table and Opera is the champion with only 11 "Not OK's" compared to Mozilla's 14.

Re:Wow

[mlefevre]

One of the reasons that Mozilla doesn't score a few points higher is that some of his "CSS2" tests are actually taken from the draft CSS3 specs. Mozilla intentionally doesn't implement draft CSS3 stuff using the proposed CSS3 names. Opera does, which means if the proposal changes before it becomes standard, then Opera will then be in a position of having to choose between breaking compatibility with their previous version and following the standard.

The CSS3 parts of the test are:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/box.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/display.html #i nlineblock

Also, he seems to be comparing Opera 7.0 and Mozilla 1.1 - both browsers have moved forward since the site was written.

Re:Wow

[GiMP]

I just counted them and Mozilla has 6 'not ok' and Opera has 7 'not ok' tags. Opera has less incomplete/buggy/quirky properties. Opera may be winning by a hair.

It appears that they are pretty evenly matched. It would be wonderful to see how well Mozilla 1.5 fairs against Opera; I'd imagine that many of those incomplete/buggy properties are now fixed in 1.5.

Re:Wow

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

You're absolutely right, and I overreacted when the AC flamed me for my typing error.

Judging by some of the other responders on this thread who also have trouble with this function name, I think this proves that "camel case" notation is counterproductive for a case-sensitive language like Javascript.

Re:Wow

[trats]

And I know many of those incomplete/buggy properties have been fixed between 7.0 and 7.2.

Is this the new release based on phoenix

[Billly Gates]

I was told that Mozilla's next project with 2.x would be free of any legacy and bloated netscape code. It would be fast and efficient. Something that is needed for older systems to compete agaisnt IE.

Re:Is this the new release based on phoenix

[mlk]

Opera

Re:Is this the new release based on phoenix

[edwdig]

They ditched the legacy code years ago. Netscape 5.0 was almost ready to go into beta when they decided the code totally blew, and releasing a 5.0 off that code base would piss off more people than it would make happy, so they went full on with the rewrite to create what Mozilla is today.

Re:Is this the new release based on phoenix

[afidel]

Mozilla surpased IE a couple years ago when it incorporated tabbed browsing, configurable popup blocking, configurable cookie blocking, configurable image blocking, etc. Modern versions of IE are just as resource intensive, although you may not realize it because of the way Windows reports resource usage. Besides Mozilla has been free of Netscape code since the fist Milestone builds, they scrapped all that code 9 months into the Mozilla project.

Re:Is this the new release based on phoenix

[jesser]

Mozilla 1.5b is not based on Phoenix (which was renamed to Mozilla Firebird). Mozilla 1.5b is still the old Seamonkey suite. I don't know when mozilla.org will declare fb+tb to be its main products or whether fb+tb will inherit seamonkey's version numbering when that happens.

In the meantime, development on Mozilla Firebird is still active. Recent Firebird nightlies have been great and 0.7 will probably be released within a week.

I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

... which is booting in less than a century on my PII-266 / 96M of ram.

I don't want to spit in the soup, I think Moz rocks the boat, but apart from the oh-so-welcome stability issues, it's more or less functionally equivalent to Netscape Communicator 4.7 to me (yes I know about popup blocking and cookie control, but I did that with Junkbuster before and it worked just fine too).

Unfortunately, Mozilla is one of the two key software pieces I use (the other one being KDE) that contribute to making my otherwise perfectly working laptop more and more unusable as they mature. Too bad ...

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[dracocat]

which is booting in less than a century on my PII-266 / 96M of ram.

Here, this one might work better for you.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[thumperward]

Firebird? Galeon? Epiphany? Is software meant to stay usable on a P-266 for its entire lifetime?

Go buy a packet of Raisin Wheats, dude. They're giving away Athlon XPs in every packet just now. Oh, and they actually changed the formula of the cereal from wheat-wrapped raisins to sticks of special edible DDR RAM because it's cheaper to produce.

- Chris

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[damiam]

I've got a PII-266 with 64MB of RAM. Firebird starts up in about 10 seconds (on Windows 95), after which it is quite speedy, responsive, and usable. If you're still using vanilla Mozilla, I suggest you try Firebird. If that's still too slow, switch to Dillo or Opera and Fluxbox instead of KDE.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Well, how about you buy ne the raisin wheats then, if it's so cheap?

I'll tell you what : Microsoft and hardware vendors have managed to convince people that computers have a finite lifetime because there's a universal intangible rule that says software gets more and more bloated. And Linux people, in true I-copy-Microsoft, are doing exactly the same thing. It's pathetic.

I'd like that big projects like Moz or KDE be modular in terms of speed vs. functionalities : if I have a powerful machine, I'll want the super 3D web-o-matic, and if I run it on an old machine, I have an option to do without and I can stay at a level of niceties and support corresponding to the speed of the machine. Is that unreasonable? It should be easier to downgrade than the reverse.

You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Tuqui]

I use Firebird in a 133Mz. It's OK. It takes few seconds (5-7) to startup but once up it is enought to surf most of the time. Java and Flash is disabled indeed.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[fupeg]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 348.491
...

Startup time < 5s

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Waffle Iron]

I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can.

Well, judging from the "Buy It Now" prices on ebay, your "investment" has depreciated to the $39 range. I have a couple similar systems, but instead of punishing myself by continuing to use them interactively with today's software, I use them for cheap offline backup storage. Every week or so: turn on, boot, rsync, turn off.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[thumperward]

Right. And who, exactly, is *forcing* you to upgrade your browser?

Stick with Netscape 3. So it won't display modern pages properly - tough. At least it's fast. In order to make it a better browser, and easier to hack in the future, its requirements have increased. Firebird loads faster on my machine (by about thirty seconds, if memory serves) now than Netscape did in 1996 on whatever mechanical adding device I was using to access the web at the time. It's also a far more capable application.

Computer parts are cheaper than groceries. If you want to get your money's worth out of parts that should quite rightly be put to better use elsewhere than a modern desktop machine then that's fine, but whining about it when upgrading costs less than a night on the tiles is silly. Intel conspiracies my foot.

- Chris

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[afidel]

I ran Mozilla for several years on a couple P2-300 systems, both had 192MB though. It was plenty fast, I just used the quicklaunch feature and rarely closed Mozilla. See if you can't upgrade the ram (if it takes standard SO-Dimm's it will be dirt cheap) and I think you will find Mozilla much more pleasent.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Home computers have only been here for 15-20 years. The internet for 10.

Consider the first 15-20 years of cars to this. We're just in a maturing market. It'll happen.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[The Revolutionary]

"You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can."

And so you would say, "car is to software" as "gas is to hardware"? I don't know that this is what you are saying. Obviously we need to continue to purchase gas if we want to continue using our car.

It seems to me what you are asking is, "After 5 years would you want to have to stop using a product because of changes in your environment beyond your control?"

Of course the answer is, "No," but I fail to see how this is equivalent to the situation with computer hardware and software. You are certainly able to continue using your existing hardware and software as long as you like.

It might be unreasonable to expect a 5-disc CD changer and GPS navigation in your 5 year old car unless you are willing to pay for the upgrade.

Hey, I'm not a rich man either. I happen to have just gone through the upgrade cycle about a year ago though, so I am not "feeling it" yet. I upgrade once every 4 to 6 years.

I think the case is that enough people are able to afford the upgrades that for a project with limited resources, done on a volunteer basis, there just isn't going to be any interest in supporting older platforms. Everyone wants to move ahead. If you want or need to stay behind, you will have to find an alternative solution.

What's wrong with:

browser: Links, w3m (tables and images), Mozilla 1.0, Dillo, or Opera

window manager: Window Maker, Flux Box, or Oroborus

Emacs/Vim and LaTeX, or GNU TeXmacs for word processing

I've used all of these tools except for Opera, and I find them to be perfectly reasonable.

But if you want the latest and greatest visually, then yes, you are going to have to upgrade.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[teslatug]

Al, is that you: "Where'd you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?"

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Malcontent]

"PII-266 / 96M of ram."

Imagine if everybody wrote software with this limitation in mind. I am so glad software developers are not holding back developing cool software just to please the 1% of users on ancient machines.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[m1foley]

A happy compromise between Lynx and Mozilla is a browser called Dillo. It lacks the features of Mozilla, but the binary is 300k and it's disgustingly fast.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[MagPulse]

Do you know how old this argument is? How many thousands of times it's been posted on Slashdot?

If you don't realize how complicated software is compared to gasoline, how about letting the software industry decide how best to serve you, the user, who happens to dictate what we create?

We can produce more apps that do more things you want to do in less time for less money if you give us more hardware. That's because more hardware lets us use things like managed code, higher level languages, and more abstraction to get your product to you quicker and with fewer bugs. Call it bloat, but we know the people who buy software also buy the hardware to keep up, instead of spending their money on expensive overworked teams trying to create a 100 million LOC program with no OOP, no abstraction, and optimized code everywhere (which is less readable, harder to understand, and is harder to debug). We're glad you're happy with your PII, but we're not going to give up the freedom and flexibility today's hardware gives us.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I had one of those in 1997... cost damn near $5000, what with the SCSI adapter, RIVA 128, the 2x caddy loading CDR and whatnot. I still use the monitor today... with my Athlon XP 2500 that I tossed together for a tenth the price.

Face it, you are using a 6 year old computer. Don't expect it to run bleeding edge software.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[wintered]

What a stupid analogy.

Are you saying that you were happy with your machine and software when you bought it, but are now only happy with your machine?

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[COBOL the Barbarian]

If you don't want to upgrade your hardware, don't upgrade your software either.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[LordMyren]

web browsing hasnt evolved much since the pentium 100 was a new born baby. css2 is the most recent milestone, aside from the oodles of streaming porn, neither of which should be insufferable under a pentium 133 or better (assuming your normal postage stamp grade 320 x 240 video).

there's no reason for a browser to require twice the processor it used to, if you disable cpu intensive options. just because computers are fast as all getout does not mean we should start accepting shitty code that takes three times the machine to run, just because its "better" (mouse gestures and tabbing... thats about it really for me).

96 mb of ram is a metric f-ton if your doing anything reasonable (ie: not kde or xp). pentium 266 should be nothing to sneeze at, not by a long shot, especially for web browsing. i rememeber advising people they didnt need a 350mhz for just web browsing, its overkill, hell, i remember telling that to my parents last month. they hardily agree and are pleased as punch with my old dp 366. many embedded system style applications are running even less ram; you want to tell them to upgrade?

apps obsoleting hardware that used to do the same task fine is bullshit, no matter how you dice it. people shouldnt have to move over to make way for progress. on the flip side, i understand "dont upgrade if it aint broke", but i simply dont see new browsers having any excuse to use worlds of resources to do the same mundane web browsing. its reasonable to expect we get the latest compliant browsers for our old machines and have them still run fine, so long as we dont start breaking out the auto-smooth scroll while anti-aliase zooming all tabs context menu option.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[LordMyren]

modularity is not good enough.

software should not run features that are not asked for. "convenience" features should be disablable.

its understandable that some apps require large amounts of computational power, no matter what. but when your talking about something thats remain virtually unchanged in the past nine years aside from css2, there is no need to up the requisit power level.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[IM6100]

It's really embarassing that people turn ugly and hostile when somebody brings up something that was a strong criticism of Microsoft and a virtue of Linux and OSS not that long ago.

Bloat is bad. Software can and should converge. That means, as software technology gets better, it should become more bug-free and more optimized, and should run faster. We should be able to put the latest Linux distribution on the same 486 boxes we ran Slackware 3.2 on and have the option of it running faster and better.

However, so many people in the OSS community have become addicted to the exhaust fumes from chasing the tailpipe of Microsoft's Gee-Wizmobile that we're contaminated with the same sort of arrogant 'get new hardware, buster' comments that used to come from Microsoft zealots with every new bloated Windows release.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Anonymous Coward]

YOu get really hostile and offended at the notion that someone might want to run your code on yesterdays hardware, huh?

You smell like a lazy programmer.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[IM6100]

Imagine the problem at the landfills if everybody thought like you do.... All that nice hardware piling up. Instead, many people, most people, in fact, get along with what they have. For 95% of what people do with computers, and that includes (consuming) multimedia, a Pentium Pro 200 with the full load of RAM the motherboard can take would suffice.

Although they'd have to 'suffer' with less distracting eye-candy and 'themeable bullshit.'

Hot-dog gamers should go out and buy a console. Your upgrade-for-the-sake-of-upgrade dicksize lan parties are tiresome.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[antiMStroll]

I'll go out on a limb here and guess the developers are no longer targeting that level of hardware. Kind of a dead end. But damn, I'm impressed you get acceptable performance out that notebook running KDE. My P2-366 /192 spends too much time in swap using Fluxbox.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect? You guys flamed MS Bloat for years, but when you went and tried to do it yourself it runs at least twice as slow as MS's stuff ever did. DOH!

Go fix it or buy a new $700 Athlon? Not a hard choice.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[LordMyren]

is a reasonable (continually improving) css2 compliance too much to ask for vaguely old computers (pentium 2 -- "old"... rrriigghhhtt)? its not like its that computationally expensive, but since its new technology users on old machines can just 'suck it'?

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[isorox]

But how much memory?

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Anonymous Coward]

it's more or less functionally equivalent to Netscape Communicator 4.7 to me

Netscape 4.x is badly engineered. It has major problems with CSS. As more and more sites start using CSS, you are just going to be left with plain, unstyled pages at best, and pages that crash your browser at worst.

Try Opera.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[hackmare]

What else do you upgrade at the same yearly cost as you upgrade your PC? Does your employer or client ask you to use the latest generation? Do you have a 19" flat screen at work? Do you re-paint your entire house every year? Change the furniture? Get a new degree?

Do you REALLY think that you should be REQUIRED to have a (say,) 2+GHz machine to effectively use a KDE desktop, as you seem to be implying?

Have you considered how many people are using 500MHz or less machines? All my machines are under 800MHz. I contract for big clients with lots of hardware, and I have never worked with a 1G+ box on the desktop.

Of course fast boxes are available everywhere. It's inevitable that the next laptop I buy will be in the 2-3GHz speed due to product offering. But very few professionals I see at my courses are using anything fast or interesting, and I only know 1 developer using a 1GHz+ laptop.

You should not need to replace your hardware annually.

To illustrate my point, here's another way to look at it:

Have you considered that the concept that a $2K machine needs to be updated yearly is essentially a tax? How loudly would you whine if your tax authority raised taxes by $200 per year (the probable pre-income-tax cost of your box per year) in exchange with providing you a new computer every year? Hey, they could even force software vendors to be universally compatible. Maybe I'm onto something here.
Think of it as a basic service like schools... Would you find it acceptable, then, to require that machines be a bit slower, and only have to pay the tax premium every 2 years?

Right. Of course you would.

Ten years ago, SGI CAD/Animation boxes were the leading edge and gave superbe video graphics and quality on less than 200MHz or so CPU and 100Mb ram even though they had a much weaker graphics card than I have in my laptop now. So what happened? How is it that today, my 500MHz /300Mb Thinkpad is borderline able to render a Moz page that 10 years ago rendered superbly (and instantly) on that SGI box? When I ask myself what additional functionality the new tools have that the old tools didn't, I am blocked thinking of the MS Office paperclip, transparent icons and screens, and fun 3-d effects on my GUIs. Wow. What an improvement on my life.

Now, back to Moz... I totally agree that Moz suffers badly from bloat. In some ways it's understandable that it's so fat. It competes with IE, not Amaya or Konqueror.

Luckily, Firebird will (hopefully) take care of some of that. And until then, there's always KDE (although I admit I use Moz1.5b with SVG).

But until then, take it easy on the small-pc users. My favorite laptop is a TP240 ultra portable. At 266MHz, it suffers on advanced graphics tasks. That's really a shame because it has no 'value' but is invaluable to me, and I can't find anything 'better' (read more suited to my travel/usability needs).

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you're doing it to yourself. Running KDE on a pII is pointless. All the features that make KDE worthwhile need to be turned off on a system that slow (except for the kioslaves, which admittedly are handy). Replace it with windowmaker (my favourite, and I'm using it on a pII myself) or some other lightweight desktop environment / window manager. I used to have a 486 DX4/100 laptop with 20 megs of ram, and it ran fine with a minimal debian system, a custom stripped-down kernel, pwm (an entire window manager with themeability and dockapp support in less than 200k) and opera. Opera is great for low-end systems, though it's UI is a bit too annoying for me to use it often. But that's just personal preference.

My guess is you're probably also running all kinds of stuff you don't need. It would help taking a long hard look at the output of pstree and seeing what of that stuff can either be removed or consolidated into inetd (on a laptop sshd is a perfect candidate for inetd-ization, since it's ok if you have to wait a few seconds for it to launch on connect). Or, if you don't run any services, you can completely remove inetd (even better).

Frankly, 96 megs of ram IS more than enough. Even to run mozilla (or at least firebird, since it launches faster). You just have to cut the rest of your linux system down to a size where it allows you to load mozilla without paging.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[MagPulse]

Laziness is widely recognized as a desirable trait in programmers. We want to get the most done in the least time. And I must've read a few hundred posts similar to the parent before I let that post go.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Overly Critical Guy]

4 seconds is still too long.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Spunk]

My hardware specs are similar to yours. Oddly enough, I find Moz on Windows to be reasonable, but on Linux I just can't stand the wait. :(

Yeah yeah, I know. Use Firebird...

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[duggy_92127]

You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can.

I actually agree with you, but a couple points of interest:

• Cars cost 20 or more times what a new computer costs, so the analogy doesn't quite hold.
• The average ownership of a car in America lasts just over three years. People do trade in their cars to lease/buy a new one every 3 to 5 years.

Doug

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[WNight]

If you want to stick with old hardware, stick with old programs. I'm stuck using a P2-233 at work with 96mb of ram, much the same as what you've got, and I don't bitch because it runs WinXP and Mandrake9.1 badly because I don't try. I run Redhat 7.3 and Win98SE on it. Both were made when this machine was current and they are reasonably fast.

Mozilla does a hell of a lot more than NS4.7, if you think it's only cookies and popups you're either not a developer, or you've never actually used Mozilla. If you want this extra functionality, you have to have the hardware to run it, if you don't, stick with NS4.7 on your P2-266.

Or, run one of the just-Gecko in a native interface versions of Mozilla, like K-Meleon. I can't remember what the Linux project to do this is, but then I went out and bought an $800 Canadian computer with an XP2500+ and half a gig of ram so that my compiles take 1/20th (honestly) the time they used to. (This is my home machine, the one at work is a dog.) Also, I can play games made in this century.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Malcontent]

"server-dev@james.apache.org"

Your machine is going to end up in the landfill sooner or later.

"All that nice hardware piling up."

It's not that nice.

" Instead, many people, most people, in fact, get along with what they have. "

Not really. Most people upgrade. Everybody I know does.

"or 95% of what people do with computers, and that includes (consuming) multimedia, a Pentium Pro 200 with the full load of RAM the motherboard can take would suffice."

A pentium 200 with 96 meg of ram is wholly inadequate to consume multimedia.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Crispy Critters]

"I don't want to spit in the soup, I think Moz rocks the boat, but apart from the oh-so-welcome stability issues, it's more or less functionally equivalent to Netscape Communicator 4.7 to me"

This may be true for you, but I think that you are an exception, and I use moz on a P200 with 64M of RAM. Two examples: First is rendering tables. Netscape 4 had awful problems with some large tables, such that scrolling such a page induced a slow, screen-flashing nightmare. Moz is significantly faster at rendering some things than Netscape. Another is CSS. If I want to make even trivial use of standard CSS in writing a web page, I can't do it primarily testing with Netscape 4. (And image blocking on selected sites is incredibly nice. Amazing how many sites like Slate serve their ads from a different server.) There are many real improvements over NS4, not just fluff.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[WNight]

Ahhh, that's the problem. Jealousy.

Listen, your machine worked fine when you got it. Consider the hardware and software a unit. Don't upgrade the software until you upgrade the hardware and it'll work fine until the day it dies. Don't try to drag everyone down to your level because you can't understand that adding features slows things down.

Just don't whine about people writing new software that does new things. Mozilla has a ton of functionality like tabbed browsing, real-time cookie viewing, the DOM viewer, a password manager, a white/black list for popups and images, and a ton more. Its interface is also written in XUL and script, which means it can be easily extended. I've got five or ten extra tools in my context menu (depending on work/home) and a ton of references in the sidebar. Stuff that I'd have had to run a whole seperate program for if I couldn't load it as a browser pluggin. CCS are another file to load and parse, and a more complex layout that takes longer to render.

I really can't imagine how I got by with older browsers. While I'm sure Mozilla is bloated, in the sense that everything not done in hand-tuned assembly is, it'll never be as fast as a well-tuned NS4.7 era browser because it does so much more.

But, they should make it do so much more, and run faster, on a slower machine, because you don't want to upgrade.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[IM6100]

Acutally, Mozilla does so many irrelevant things that many people could never imagine needing or wanting to do. The 'themes' bloat is an example of this that adds significant overhead for no particular purpose.

It's almost like the 'compile a kernal, because you can, and you don't know what else to do to keep the machine busy' syndrome that some adopters of Linux fall into.

I don't get the 'jealosy' part. I don't look at idiot motorheads in their chromed-out whizzy-cars and feel jealously. I shrug and just think of them as 'tools' and/or people with a different obsession than mine.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Repugnant_Shit]

I'd seriously give Opera a try on a slower system like yours. It's pretty snappy, even on my Mom's old 450.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[WNight]

Themes have no use? Hah. I'm not into glitz at all, so I choose a nice small theme that keeps all the buttons but doesn't take up half the screen. Anything that gives me more usable screen.

You just can't understand that things you don't want aren't always bloat.

Mozilla does things that make it hard to imagine having to browse in IE or an old Netscape.

Sure, much of it could be done with add-on programs, but when I ran junk-buster I'd have to right-click and get the URL of banners, then edit the config file, etc. With Moz I simply right-click and select "Block images from this server".

I *could* install a seperate DOM viewer program to view a web page, but that's the real definition of bloat. It'd have to have its own parsing/rendering engine, and UI. This capability is inherent in displaying a webpage, why reinvent the wheel?

I could open a new browser window, which would get tossed in the OS-sorted (as opposed to application sorted) bar at the bottom of the screen, open a bookmark, and then paste a URL into it to check the HTML compliance. Or, in Moz I could right-click and select 'Check page for compliance at W3C". Let moz handle the new tab, the cut and paste, everything.

I could open up Bugzilla, scroll down, enter a bug #, and click "Find". Or, I could use bookmark keywords so I can type ctrl-t, b Num to open a bug report.

I could run a web proxy and capture the setting of session cookies, or I could simply go into the Cookie viewer and see exactly what the cookies are, including the session cookies that other browsers don't give you any way of seeing.

But yeah, none of that is needed. I should probably be developing web apps in Notepad.

How about, if you aren't a developer and will never use anything more advanced than the "back" button, you can go download IE and do everything manually. I'll pay a couple of extra dollars so that I can use powerful apps that make my work go much faster.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[hackmare]

Here we go again with the old hardware thing.

Pray tell, what is old hardware? 1 year old? 2? 5? Older than yours? I work on a 64-cpu x 400MHz Sun E10000 with 64G of ram. That's the biggest, fastest sun box there is. But that's a server, and it doesn't count. The desktop is a 600MHz thinkpad. And it's not 'old hardware'. But I resent having to dedicate 40M of ram to a web page rendering app that shows essentially the same content as in '95 at 20x the footprint cost. You'd think it was written in Java.

Of course you're right: "Mozilla does a hell of a lot more than NS4.7".

But how much of that hell of a lot is *useful*? And does it really take 40Mb to render a 1024 x 1280 screen at 16 bit colour depth? I'd really love to see a codebase usage plot based on my user behaviour just to see how much of Moz I actually ever invoke.

What Moz needs to be is a web browser with CSS, SLL, and scripting support. The IRC, mail, etc. functionality is chaff for a great many people. If you want to play with the bells and whistles, why not select that for loading on demand or something like that?

" if you think it's only cookies and popups you're either not a developer,..."

wrong. I think I know what I'm talking about.

".... or you've never actually used Mozilla"

wrong again. And I still know what I'm talking about.

You should check people out before you run your mouth like that.

". If you want this extra functionality, you have to have the hardware to run it"

I'm not sure what extra functionality you're talking about that Moz is offering. plugin support? yes it's important but not critical. I don't use anything in Moz that wasn't imperfectly (read buggy) implemented in NS4 or IE4. All that Moz has really done for me since NS4 is add standards compliance, css, and a tighter javascript support. The rest was already there that I can see.

The fact of the matter is that there is no choice but to upgrade versions of moz. Clearly, being the Esteemed Perl Developer that you are, you don't need to be reminded of the importance of keeping your browser up to date in order to minimize clientside exploits.

So no, I don't want to 'stay with my old NS4.7'. And yes, I think that the majority of the bells and whistles on Moz are useless. Moz is an html (and xml) rendering tool. It doesn't need to also make coffee. But even the Moz team have noticed that their code base is overly bloated and that they need to trim off the neat-but-barely-used chunks. That's what they're doing with firebird, isn't it?

That said, don't take my comments as slagging the Moz team in any way. The quality of the Moz 1 release is top, and I am very much looking forward to their (bloatware) implementation of native SVG. But I also think that it's time that they start listening to the low-horsepower people and stop growing the footprint.

Ronan.

And no, my vic 20's not that old either...

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[WNight]

It's old if it was made before the software was. Do you understand that? If you want to run Quake 3, a Pentium is old. If you want to run Doom, a Pentium rocks.

You obviously want to run Mozilla, so your P2-266 is old.

I stand by my statement that you aren't a developer if all you think Mozilla does, over Netscape 4.7, is popup stopping and cookie viewing. You seriously must not have looked at the DOM browser, the pluggins you can get, the sidebar, or any of that. Hell, the cookie viewer alone is worth going to Mozilla for, just for trying to debug oddball session-cookie problems.

As to your, "stop growing the codebase", they've done that. Mozilla 1.0 had been exactly the same size since release. Netscape 4.7 hasn't added a single byte since it came out. They've been creating new version, with new features, and those run very well on modern hardware.

You really need to get over your fixation on a specific ammount of ram. Why don't you complain that nothing will run on your Vic-20 in its 4k of ram? A single 512MB DIMM costs less today than the 64MB I bought with my P1, so why should I care that programs want more?

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[hackmare]

I'm sorry. I seem to have offended you somehow enough to try to geek-bait me by questioning my technical credentials. :-) (ironic smugness)

As a software professional who's been coding since 1980 at the age of 12, and who's been programming professionally since 1993, I don't appreciate your flame attempt inter-mingled within your apparent attempt to have an intellingent conversation. if you want to check out someone's credentials, look them up on google and at perlmonks. I was probably programming when you were in diapers. :-)) (humour)

You mention cookie debugging as a clear benefit of Moz over older/other browsers. This is exactly the type of bloat I mean. In order to simplify a couple of developers' lives, we toss this code into the code base and force the entire client base to lug it around in memory evey time it's loaded? This is fundamentally flawed and a poster child for bloatware.

A web browser is for browsing http 1.0 and 1.1 protocol text strings and their content. It needs to support plugins in order to handle mimetypes it doesn't understand. There are a couple of cool standards that it helps it it supports like xml, xlink, and css. dtd's are a good idea to know about too. A few image processors will help. Say gif, jpeg, and png.

The browser that does this best, with the smallest code base and with the smalles ram footprint, is the best browser. Maybe speed is also an issue here but I'll ignore it for the sake of the discussion.

The rest of the functionality of the app has no place in the main code trunk and should be bundlable on demand or on compile time, but should not be forced down peoples' throats like MS bundles IE into Win.

If Moz followed this basic concept, then it might get a larger user base than under-25 males who happen to have a 2GHz box.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[WNight]

I question, if you wish to see it that way, your developer credentials because your claims don't make sense. While you are older than me, it's not by more than a few years, and we both started coding in the Apple 2 era. Not that it matters, John Carmack's our age too and he's a bit better than either of us, I'll bet.

You also don't understand bundling. You aren't given Mozilla, with your OS, and with it set as a default browser that pops up any time you select any local or remote HTML content. You have to seek it out and install it, if you want what it comes with and have a machine that runs it well. MS's handling of IE is completely unrelated.

Further, your definition of browser is flawed. That what *you* want. If you don't want Mozilla, don't use it, but don't whine that they should target a five year old computer. Other people want pretty much exactly what Mozilla comes with. Features are added to it by the same people who are going to use it. I'm very happy with almost every feature it has. Even the ones I rarely use, like the IRC client, aren't really bloat. They're XUL apps, essentially freebies that doesn't get loaded into RAM unless wanted, that you have the capability for once you have a sufficiently expandable interface which is required for the easy customizability of the browser itself.

I'm sorry that you want computers advance slowly to protect you investment but they don't. Your computer is less than an eighth the speed of current machines, with a similarly small ammount of RAM. It's obsolete and you prove it by whining about modern software. If you were running a firewall and mail server on a 486, it wouldn't be obsolete, it'd be fitting its niche perfectly. If you try to use a P2-266 for modern apps, it's obsolete.

Off Topic: Disappearing Future Story

[moral kiosk]

I know this is offtopic, but I think it's reasonable since the actual article disappeared. There was a "From the future' article about the Linux supercomputer at PNNL, but now it's gone. Here's a link:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/08/03082 7070828.htm

Was it a repeat?

Re:Off Topic: Disappearing Future Story

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, that was a dupe. Its a good thing the editors dont even have to do their jobs anymore... just let the slashdot nerd subscriber sheep tell them when a story is a dupe

Re:Off Topic: Disappearing Future Story

[Anonymous Coward]

yes indeedily doodily

I care

[cloudless.net]

...because some Mozilla code and features will be incorporated into Firebird.

Multi Computer Bookmark Management

[Yazheirx]

On a related note companion for mozilla has been released in version 0.3.5a. It allows Yahoo bookmarks to be used in mozilla. It is still a little spotty and is best used by eliminating all your yahoo bookmarks and adding them one at a time. Do not add folders more than 3 levels deep.

This is the last bit most of my coworkers need to switch from IE to Mozilla. Next I try to move them to Linux.

Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Chess_the_cat]

I've installed Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and all the rest but I always end up going back to IE because I can't give up my Google Toolbar. And as for spellcheckers, ieSpell checks any webpage for spelling including form fields like the comment box I'm typing in now.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[rushfan]

I know how you feel, I used to be the same way until I started using Firebird... (the next generation Moz, or so I hear after 1.6 now)

It has the google search thing (not the same as the google toobar), but it's pretty nice...

New Mozilla's are always cool.. Check out Firebird if you haven't yet.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[jrockway]

How about this google bar?

http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[CyberMatt]

Googlebar extension for mozilla, mozilla-based browsers:

Clickie:
http://googlebar.mozdev.org

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[TheClam]

You're welcome. Have fun with Firebird.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting. Thank you.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude-

Why? I don't know about Netscape, but Opera and Firebird definitely have Google built next to the URI field, so it doesn't eat up the screen real estate (yes, you can move it but hell it's just another add-on to an already bloated prog and it self-updates itself--I don't like that feature). Realistically, the only reason I still use IE is for sites that suck and won't load in other browsers and the only reason I can fathom anybody keeping the toolbar is to check the PR for their site.

THAT'S a feature request for Opera/Firebird/Moz: Mimic the Googlebar http requests to display the PR for current page (Helpful for SEOs!).

P.S. Could your comment have anything to do with your homepage being microsoft.com?

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Ambush]

You obviously haven't yet found the GoogleBar for Mozilla/Firebird.

From memory, it has more features than the original (IE version) had. Absolutely mandatory for anyone moving from IE to Moz.

cheers!

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Malcontent]

Here is a neat mozilla trick.

1) Set google as your default search.

2) Highlight any word on a page and right click.

3) Choose web search for "Word I Just Highlighted"

Voila a google search.

BTW moz1.5 has a spell checker and 1.4 users can install one here

Mozilla has so many ways to have fun there is never any need to use IE. Have you played around with profiles yet?

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[rmohr02]

YOu have about 20 replies mentioning the Googlebar. However, what features of the IE Google Toolbar do you miss?

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[glsunder]

Mozilla also has a nice search feature where you can highlight text, then right click on it and search for that text. It also has a search button which searches for whatever is typed in the address bar. Through preferences, you can change the search type to google, as well as numerous others.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Fizzlewhiff]

I just installed it in Firebird and it works great. Although having all the results in Spanish threw me for a loop I was able to figure out how to change the default location from Nicaragua to the USA.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Toutatis]

Is there a way to do that search in the same window or a new tab rather than in a new window?

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[isorox]

Well thats all fine, but whats wrong with typing your search into the address bar and clicking "search"?

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[isorox]

TRouble is it opens in a new window - not a new tab. Only way to change it, that I know of, invloved hackign the source and recompiling.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Spunk]

Not yet.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1331 17 (linking from slashdot is disabled)

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Tarqwak]

yes there is:

$mozinstalldir/chrome/comm.jar/content/ communicator/contentAreaContextOverlay.xul
contentAreaContextOverlay.xul.diff:

--- contentAreaContextOverlay.xul 2003-04-25 02:21:32.000000000 +0300
+++ contentAreaContextOverlay.xul 2003-08-03 11:04:53.000000000 +0300
@@ -170,7 +170,7 @@
<menuseparator id="context-sep-selectall"/>
<menuitem id="context-searchselect"
accesskey="&search.accesskey;"
- oncommand="OpenSearch('internet', false, gContextMenu.searchSelected(), true);"/>
+ oncommand="OpenSearch('internet', false, gContextMenu.searchSelected(), false);"/>
<menuseparator id="frame-sep"/>
<menu id="frame" label="&thisFrameMenu.label;" accesskey="&thisFrameMenu.accesskey;">
<menupopup id="frame_popup">

$mozinstalldir/chrome/comm.jar/content/navigator/ navigator.js
navigator.js.diff:

--- navigator.js 2003-07-19 10:58:42.000000000 +0300
+++ navigator.js 2003-08-03 11:16:46.000000000 +0300
@@ -1045,7 +1045,7 @@
}

if (!newWindowFlag)
- loadURI(defaultSearchURL);
+ openNewTabWith( defaultSearchURL, true, false );
else
window.open(defaultSearchURL, "_blank");
}

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[revividus]

Firebird actually has a search field built in to its toolbar (you can remove it if you really want to), which can use either Google or dmoz -- it wouldn't surprise me if you could get it to use other search engines/directories, too, though I've never tried to find out how as I've never had to use any others.

On windows machines I used to flip back and forth between moz and IE. Then I became psuedo-dependent on tabbed browsing. Avant is an IE based browser that offers a passable (read: if my boss demanded I remove Firebird from my work machine, I would use Avant) version of tabbed browsing, but it seems a bit crufty to me.

If you ever begin trying to develop web pages with CSS, moz/firebird begins to stand head and shoulders above and beyond IE.

Let's not take Mozilla for granted...

[miknight]

We really need to support and look after the Mozilla project, for obvious reasons. IE's market share is huge and is tying people to Windows. Opera is fantastic but, as IE, not OSS.

Mozilla (+derivatives) is our only full featured OSS browser. Many people keep complaining about it's lack of speed, or large number of bugs - but in some ways, this is besides the point. It's amazing it has gotten this far and fortunately it looks like it has enough steam to keep going well into the future.

Let's not take it for granted.

Re:Let's not take Mozilla for granted...

[exhilaration]

Mozilla (+derivatives) is our only full featured OSS browser.

What about Konqueror? I think it's a pretty kickass browser.

Re:Let's not take Mozilla for granted...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

As a matter of fact I just donated $100 to the Mozilla foundation.

Re:Let's not take Mozilla for granted...

[angle_slam]

IE's market share is huge and is tying people to Windows.

I think you got things backwards here. You make it seem like the reason people don't use OS X or Linux is because of IE. Wrong. The reason IE's market share is huge is because of Windows. I don't think people give a crap what browser they use. IE is there, it works, and they don't need to download anything. Therefore they use it.

Re:Let's not take Mozilla for granted...

[miknight]

Sorry yes, I suppose I was thinking more of those web sites that 'require' IE5+... Also that whole thing about 'no more standalone IE'.

Also yes, forgot about Konqueror - although not much of an alternative for Windows users... are there plans for a port?

Even with the Konqueror in the picture, I personally view Mozilla as a bit of a flagship for OSS.

related to bug #85799

[mattdm]

Check Bugzilla #85799 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85799 -- direct bugzilla links from /. not allowed), a RFE to make form textareas able to act like more powerful text editors. A spellchecker could definitely be part of that.

Re:related to bug #85799

[Maserati]

I'm voting for that !

Re:related to bug #85799

[rsborg]

Check Bugzilla #85799 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85799 -- direct bugzilla links from /. not allowed), a RFE to make form textareas able to act like more powerful text editors. A spellchecker could definitely be part of that.

Just voted for this one.

Please, anyone who's interested, vote for your most desired bugs/enhancements, using bugzilla!

A question...

[dark-br]

So what does this story have to do with Apple!?

If you guys are gonna run a mac site you need to run Apple stories!

(for the humor impaired, that was tongue in cheek)

Re: A question...

[error502]

So what does this story have to do with Apple!?

Mozilla runs on Mac OS X. Duh! Here's even a friendly link to download it!

Re: A question...

[nazsco]

It was just to try to break the number of categories record. They've got 3 times the text size on that one.

Re: A question...

[Down Yonda]

DUH.......so does Safari..I switched from IE...why would I Mozilla anytime soon?

Re: A question...

[error502]

Because it's not as ugly as Safari is? I'm not a fan of that whole brushed metal feeling. I used a beta of OS X 10.3, and now the brushed metal is even harder to escape. :-/

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[marvin2k]

Netscape/AOL is no longer supporting Mozilla, but Mozilla still exists.

This isn't correct. From the press release:

"To help launch the new organization, America Online has pledged $2 million in cash to the Mozilla Foundation over the next two years. AOL will also contribute additional resources through equipment, domain names and trademarks, and related intellectual property, as well as providing some transitional assistance for key personnel as they move into the new organization."

Looks like AOL is still supporting Mozilla quite a bit. In my eyes this is a good thing for the whole Mozilla project (Firebird, Thunderbird, etc.) as it gives the team more freedom to operate. I can't live without Mozilla Firebird anymore ;)

Well, they finally did it...

[Saeger]

They broke the orbit theme! :) It kind of worked in 1.5a, except for the reload animation missing.

Of course I'm joking - I can wait for a compatible version of the Orbit theme to be released, and in the meantime the default Modern theme looks almost as good.

Everytime a mozilla milestone is released the only two mods I bother installing without fail are the orbit theme, and the mouse gestures that Opera got me addicted to.

--

Re:Well, they finally did it...

[Anonymous Coward]

bluezilla is the best theme. very zen. very calming. the psychology of color blue is a great stress reliever.

Re:Well, they finally did it...

[LordMyren]

can i get an amen?

the only other thing i must have is tabbrowser extensions, to tweak the tab bar behavior. gives you the rocker too (with long spikey hair and a sweet ass twelve string... j/k). lets you use the mouse scroll to change tab windows.

has a number of other opera finess touches too.

The amusing part

[Overly Critical Guy]

Here's the amusing part: if it were a Microsoft product that did this, hordes of Slashbots would post hundreds of "+5" posts decrying the evil antics and poor design. But it's standard procedure when it comes to major Linux apps, and nobody bats an eye.

Every single time someone writes one of those annoying "here's what's wrong with Windows" posts, I have to laugh because of much, much worse stuff like this.

Re:The amusing part

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the amusing part is your post came directly after metamatic's outlining exactly how "a Microsoft product that did this", did just this. Score -1 for the Microbot.

Re:The amusing part

[deek]

• if it were a Microsoft product that did this, hordes of Slashbots would post hundreds of "+5" posts decrying the evil antics and poor design. But it's standard procedure when it comes to major Linux apps, and nobody bats an eye.

And here's the reason why: because with Linux, we can actually do something about it! We have the source code, and we can then compile it with an older version of gcc.

With Microsoft, you can do nothing! You have no access to the source, and cannot change things if you don't agree with their direction. Now THAT is evil!

Furthermore, the real evil lies with the fact that RealPlayer don't have a gcc 3.2 version of their plugin (I assume). Hopefully they will release a new version of the plugin, and this will be OK.

Lastly, have a closer look at the release notes ... it says "The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2.". Note the phrase "distributed by mozilla.org". Therefore, if it's distributed by your favourite distribution, things should be OK, as your distribution will assure operability with things like RealPlayer.

Your complaint is a non-event. Please post something a little more constructive in future.

Re:The amusing part

[njchick]

Slashbots don't post at +5. They post at +2 at best. They are moderated up to +5 by zealots with modpoints. The "deficit moderation" used on Slashdot discourages moderators from moderating comments down because most people prefer to encourage good posters rather than to punish stupid or uninformed posters.

If we had separate "plus points" and "minus points", those +5 comments would go down really quickly.

Slashdot can be improved, but I doubt that the editors want more intelligent discussion here. Just keep in mind that +5 moderation doesn't make a comment an official point of view of the community.

Re:The amusing part

[russellh]

Here's the amusing part: if it were a Microsoft product that did this, hordes of Slashbots would post hundreds of "+5" posts decrying the evil antics and poor design. But it's standard procedure when it comes to major Linux apps, and nobody bats an eye.

Hey Overly Critical Guy, I was going to write a nice, well thought-out response but then I thought, so what?

so my response is: so what?

Re:The amusing part

[Anonymous Coward]

Please Moderators, spend your mod points wisely, not on Trolls like the Parent.

Re:The amusing part

[BRSQUIRRL]

Read the parent a bit more carefully: "it's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption" (emphasis mine). To the "widespread" masses, which includes my mom (hehe), recompiling your browser to fix a compatibility problem with a plug-in is not something that they can and/or are willing to learn to do.

Re:The amusing part

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no access to the source, and cannot change things if you don't agree with their direction. Now THAT is evil!

First of all, this really isn't directly related to source code availablity.

Second, in this case it's just the opposite. The closed-source model forces vendors to maintain binary compatibility at pain of death. For browser and other plugins, that's a good thing.

In the real world, not everyone decides to switch compilers at the exact same time. Not everyone CAN use GCC 3.2, and they also need to support customers with every other current version of GCC.

Open Sourcers like to say "Use The Source", but in reality that's an engineering shortcut borne out of a student userbase that reinstalls every 6 months. As more corporate users with slowly-moving configs get on board Linux, things will have to change. Support of 10 year old binaries is not an uncommon thing in the business world.

The overall benefits of source code availablity are not an excuse for crappy, fluctuating ABIs.

Re:The amusing part

[RollingThunder]

To the "widespread" masses, which includes my mom (hehe)

Yo mama so fat, she can't even compile her own kernel?

Re:The amusing part

[AvantLegion]

One problem doesn't make the other a non-problem.

Being forced to differentiate between binaries distributed by Mozilla.org and those distributed by one's Linux distro of choice is a Bad Thing, as it's one more arcane thing to worry about for the average end user. For those running Windows, being able to simply hop onto mozilla.org and download the latest browser without having to know a thing about compilers is a Good Thing.

For Linux to have any shot at being a real desktop OS, one stuff's compatibility with other stuff simply can not break with such frequency! Those of us that get down into the guts of Linux/UNIX can deal with it, but if widespread desktop usage is considered a goal, then this cannot be allowed to happen.

Re:The amusing part

[Feztaa]

the real evil lies with the fact that RealPlayer don't have a gcc 3.2 version of their plugin (I assume).

Moreover, if the RealPlayer plugin was open source, we could simply recompile it with gcc 3.2, and this whole thing would be a total nonissue.

Instead, we've got to wait for Real to release a new version of the plugin for us. I see this as a failing of the closed source development model. If everything was open source, there would be no problem here.

Re:The amusing part

[deek]

• To the "widespread" masses, which includes my mom (hehe), recompiling your browser to fix a compatibility problem with a plug-in is not something that they can and/or are willing to learn to do.

Hey, I agree with you. The common computer user should not need to compile anything for their computer.

But the common computer user should also _not_ be using a beta version of Mozilla distributed by mozilla.org. The common computer user can quite happily use the version of Mozilla that is compiled by their distribution. Therefore it's the distributions responsibility to make sure of compatibility.

Re:The amusing part

[deek]

• Open Sourcers like to say "Use The Source", but in reality that's an engineering shortcut borne out of a student userbase that reinstalls every 6 months. As more corporate users with slowly-moving configs get on board Linux, things will have to change. Support of 10 year old binaries is not an uncommon thing in the business world.

Do not underestimate the power of the source, Luke. Lets do a thought experiment ... if you were managing IT for some business, would you prefer to support 10 year old binaries without source, or with source? I know which one I'd prefer. Software companies can come and go, but the source is with you forever. ;)

Having access to the source of some programs has allowed me to track down problems in a few hours, and therefore create a workaround or even fix the problem directly. This has saved my employer days/weeks/months of possibly waiting for some software company to be bothered to track things down. From a business perspective, open source puts the power back into their hands. How can you not want this?

Alas, the closed source model fails in many cases of binary compatibility. Dare I mention the phrase "dll hell"?

Re:The amusing part

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to make it simple:
Use source code to fix bugs or add features -> Good
Use source code because Bevis and Butthead changed your ABI -> Bad

Here's an example: In the bad old days, one would have to "re-link" programs to make configuration changes or whatever. So what did vendors do? They shipped obfuscated source that looked like line noise. All the downsides of compiling source with none of the upsides. Not quite "Open Source(tm)".

If your vendor is delivering source code because they are too lazy to do real engineering, you're eventually in for a world of hurt. End of story.

Re:The amusing part

[ultrabot]

To the "widespread" masses, which includes my mom (hehe)

Now that's sick.

Re:The amusing part

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when was "use the source" born out of the Microsoft userbase that are forced to reinstall every six months? As opposed to the Linux users who start to call you names if you would suggest they REBOOT after only six months.

Re:The amusing part

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't anyone read anymore? It clearly said that only the linux version was affected. This will become an issue just as soon as regular people actually start using linux.

Re:The amusing part

[Innova]

To the "widespread" masses, which includes my mom (hehe), recompiling your browser to fix a compatibility problem with a plug-in is not something that they can and/or are willing to learn to do.

Are the "widespread" masses (including our moms) going to be downloading a beta web browser?

So once again, this goes back to being a non-issue.

Re:The amusing part

[WuphonsReach]

Slashdot is not built around the concept of having meaningful discussion... intead, it's more of a soapbox style system where everyone gets up and shouts a few times.

Why do I say that?

- there's no way to keep track of which comments you've read or haven't read
- which means no easy way to quickly find new comments and gloss over comments that you've already seen
- as a result, I imagine that most people read the article comments once and never check back for new ideas/discussions
- you get notified of replies directly to your post, but can't track a thread
- while you can click to see the parent post, there's no link that would allow you to break a thread out to a new window

Not to mention the fact that if you view comments in Nested, Oldest First mode, with a low threshold (0 or +1), long threads that break across multiple pages are incorrectly displayed. (A 3 page thread will repeat the first 1/3 of the thread across the 3 pages, never displaying the other 2/3 of the comments within the thread.)

color in HR and BR tags?

[Lord Ender]

Changelog: "Gecko now supports setting color for and
."

I may be stupid, but I can't think of any reson to have a colored linebreak. A colored horizontal bar kinda makes sense, but doesn't sound very useful. Nobody uses those these days anyway. But a colored linebreak... thats... someone please explain.

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[nazsco]

There may be a display option that shows the line breaks, like GTK does. I'm still downloading to find out exactly why that's useful (since i'm a mozilla junkie I don't need to find interesting things on the releases note to get the new version) "releases notes ...lemme me see... ahn... no, no crash upon start up. Fine, let's install!"

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[romcabrera]

They are colored in Composer. (The tool for creating webpages) So, you are in fact stupid. =) j.k.

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[Aldric]

So it's just an extra bit of syntax highlighting? Mustn't be much on the new feature list if they even bother to announce this. ;)

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking about features added since alpha here. Alpha is the cycle for feature work, beta is the cycle for stabilization and bugfixing.

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[cgranade]

My site, uses the color attribute of <hr> tags extensively. They are easy and light formatting tools that don't play hell with browsers that don't read them.

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[mlefevre]

It's as weird as it sounds.

I've just found out that the <BR> part of that bug was not actually fixed - the release notes are incorrect (or at least were incorrect - they're being changed to only say "<HR>" and not "<HR> and <BR>")

If the <BR> part had been fixed, it would mean you could use CSS3 to do something like:

br::before { content: "foo"; }
br { color: blue; }

and your CSS-generated content of "foo", inserted before your <br> tag, would appear in blue. Not something you're going to use every day. And you can't yet, because only the <HR> part of the bug was actually fixed. Anyone desperately waiting to style their line breaks will have to wait a bit longer for Mozilla to support it.

It's nothing to do with showing the line breaks in Composer.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[Izanagi]

Actually, AOL donated $2 million!

Macs have done that system-wide...

[Anonymous Coward]

...by default, as part of the operating system, since Mac OS X first shipped in 2001.

You go your open source innovation!

Re:Macs have done that system-wide...

[Anonymous Coward]

In WinIE, everyone should use the excellent IE Spell: http://www.iespell.com/

266 is fast enough.

[repetty]

I have a PII/266. It's fast enough to run Mozilla. But you are WAY short on memory. Your problem is that you are waiting on VM swaps.

--Richard

Re:266 is fast enough.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Oh, Mozilla runs great once it's started, and it even does okay after the disk reads are cached in memory, but it's the initial startup time that sucks. My guess is that it's just bloated code and/or it loads too much stuff for what it does.

Re:266 is fast enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why you need KDE with your 266 machine ? I mean, fluxbox, windowmaker, waimea or others are still actively developed and work _fine_ in old hardware. If you realy like to run the last KDE in your machine you have two options: acept the slow speed in your hardware or contribute with miracle otimizations to the KDE develpers.

Not every software developer like to develop with the same audience in mind. Without doubt the fluxbox team develop their software for an audience like you and your 266Mhz hardware. Why don't give fluxbox a try ?

Re:266 is fast enough.

[repetty]

Actually, since you brought it up...

Who cares how quickly a web browser loads up? You do, but why? Because it crashes? Because your machine locks up?

I start up web browsers on my computers once every couple weeks. Tops. ...even on my laptop, which runs 24/7 but sleeps as needed.

My dad (he's 63) works the same way. He's no hacker, but he doesn't relaunch either--let alone reboot--any more than he has too, which is on the order of weeks.

I should add that all these machines are running Linux or Mac OS X. I'm not qualified to speculate how often or why users need to relaunch web browsers on Windows.

As a read through all the posts on this topic, there's an overwhelming interest in the LEAST IMPORTANT performance characteristic of applications, their startup time. The bigger issue for slow-computer users like myself is the sluggish GUI performance of Mozilla, yet there's not a word about that.

I'm not going to complain too strongly, though. My computer was constructed before there was even a Mozilla web browser to complain about. I'm impressed that it's usable at all.

--Richard

It's hard to win a rigged game.

[SHEENmaster]

MSIE cheats in two ways, first by violating the TCP standard, leaving zombie httpd processes and pretend connections already exist for better performance with IIS.

The former means that you are ALWAYS dealing with the bloat of MSIE, even if you aren't browsing. The latter is invalidated by the effects of most routers. MSIE at work is pathetically slow, and no other browser compares the blinding speed of lynx.

Opera is my current browser, for no particular reason other than its conveniant mail client. It's reasonably faster than mozilla, but chokes on a few sites (ebay.com for one) and loses any semblance of speed.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

and no other browser compares the blinding speed of lynx

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Oh man, that's classic Slashdot.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember that Slashdot story about IE violating some sort of TCP standard. Didn't it turn out to be total bullshit? Hardly the sort of thing you'd want to reference when (attempting) to win an argument, anyway.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[edwdig]

MSIE isn't violating the TCP standard. It's using a feature of HTTP called Keep-Alive. The connections really do exist, even if you're using Apache or any other halfway decent http server.

Mozilla does it too. Check Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking. There's a checkbox for keepalive there.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"MSIE isn't violating the TCP standard. It's using a feature of HTTP called Keep-Alive. The connections really do exist, even if you're using Apache or any other halfway decent http server."

Oops. You didn't bash MS. No +1, Informative for you. No -1, Overrated for him.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Lynx's blazingly fast multi-second (by default) error messages. Is it my imagination or do more recent releases have the delay cut down to 1 second?

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[thumperward]

Except he's wrong. What the parent was going on about is the way IIS -always- ignored usual HTTP handshaking protocol when dealing with IE, saving it a couple of acknowledgements. It's bad enough with Slashbots running around all over the place without people trying to be smart about it.

This is so not working. I'm trying to lose karma on this thread and I'm up 4 already. Can someone mod this offtopic please?

- Chris

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, IE does ignore TCP standards to get ahead. See http://www.mail-archive.com/mozilla-netlib@mozilla .org/msg01571.html for details.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Malcontent]

"no other browser compares the blinding speed of lynx."

Open up preferences in mozilla. Go to appearance->colors and choose "Use my chosen colors, ignoring the colors and background image specified".

Under privacy and security->Images turn off images.

Voila a superfast browser a-la lynx or netscape 3.x but with HTML support.

If you want you can even specify a black background and white text ;)

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[RealityShunt]

If you're on dialup, it's useful. On broadband it really isn't necessary.

Just my 0.02

realityshunt

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Shaklee39]

I don't know what you are talking about, lynx is probably THE slowest browser I have ever tried, even the old netscape 4.x series is faster than lynx.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone interested in IE's TCP handing should this should check out the original slashdot discussion. Good stuff, with a number of people disagreeing that it's a 'cheat'.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[srn_test]

No, it's not.

Everything does HTTP keepalives. IE+IIS does something dodgier at the TCP layer where it doesn't send the FIN-ACK to tear down the connection, and can thus skip the SYN at the beginning of the next connection.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[natmsincome.com]

MSIE actually does break TCP/IP. Here's some links from an old slashdot story.

It's not "HTTP - Keep-Alive" which is similar. The difference is that Keep-Alive doesn't close a connection between files which is fine. IE on the other hand make a request without creating a connection (Like UDP) and at the end doesn't close it. This makes IIS faster (less overhead) but other servers slower as the broswer times out before it gets the page and the server has to time out before it closes the connection.

Why IE Is So Fast ... Sometimes
Article it linked to

Summary:
this isn't the same deal. based on the TCP specs, here is what a server (or client, for that matter) is supposed to do when it wants to close the connection: 1) send FIN 2) wait for ACK 3) wait for FIN 4) send an ACK if the server never receives the FIN in step 3, it assumes that the client wants to keep the connection open for some reason. this is _correct behaviour_ with regards to the TCP spec. if this article is correct, MS is merely exploiting the TCP spec to its advantage. yes, it's dirty and wastes resources, but it works. the thing that bothers me tho, is this is what should be happening on the server end (a non-IIS server, that is): 1) send FIN 2) wait for ACK 3) ok, got ACK, now wait for FIN 4) (after timeout) hmm, no FIN, must have been lost, so we'll resend our FIN 5) client ACKs that FIN, but doesn't send its FIN 6) server thinks the response FIN is lost again, so probably resends its FIN

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[natmsincome.com]

Sorry I missed I point. It only broke it on NT.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[drinkypoo]

I thought that the real problem with IE was the way it handled FTP, not HTTP, which it has in common with (older versions of?) Netscape, namely not closing FTP connections, and instead waiting for them to time out. This is so they don't have to keep authenticating as anonymous, which back in the olden days could take a long time, what with people websurfing over 9600 baud modems and the like. (You don't know fun until you've got a 2400 baud+MNP5 compression SLIP on your Amiga...)

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[rweir]

Um, no, you're either clueless or astro-turfing. IE skips part of the TCP/IP handshaking when connecting to any web server on the off-chance it's a IIS server which is also contains this "feature". So, it wastes time when the other server isn't running IIS because it has to wait for the connection to time out (if the OS on the other end doesn't send a RST back).

Linkage: here .

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I use Lynx (a 2- or 3-year-old Windows build), I find myself hitting keys at random in order to make those super-long error messages dissappear more quickly. It's funny, mashing on your keyboard while using Lynx = faster browsing.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell are you running lynx for it to be so slow?

On every windows and linux system I've ever used, from pentium 200 to p4 2.0 GHz, lynx has always been the fastest HTML renderer of all browsers I've tried.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Jugalator]

And the equivalent procedure in Opera, for users of that one :-)

View -> Styles -> User Mode -> Emulate Text Browser.

... or use ...

View -> Styles -> User Mode -> Nostalgia.

... to get a C64 look & feel. ;-) (for those of us who liked the Contiki look, but want it with better HTML support, hehe)

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. IE hack is not HTTP keepalive. Why does slashbot are now sucking microsoft's dick all day long ?

IE broke TCP/IP to give an unfair advantage to IIS, making other servers looking bad. This is the standard kind of practice from microsoft for ages.

They are using their dominance on the client to push the server side. Which is illegal, as they are a monopoly. But they don't care.

And, what even better, they have some free PR from clueless like you.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is even better:

http://prefbar.mozdev.org

You can configure it to do just that with a few mouse clicks. And then turn it back on again just as easily.

what a long strange trip its been ...

[qoquaq]

mozilla has come a long way. I began with version 0.5 and have used the mozilla browser almost exclusvely at work since. Through the "dog-food" bugs and a few bug reports, it is still my default browser and browser of choice. Mozilla has pushed the web browsing experience forward and it's current feature set is benchmark. It is this feature set which keeps gaining loyal users. Netscape's decision to open Netscape source turned a lot of heads and helped "sell" the concept of open/free software in a corporate setting.

I have sampled firebird and I am very excited on this new direction. It is a shame AOL has sealed a deal with MS. They don't really understand what they have!

Great products like this and the community surrounding them have made me appriciate free software more and more.

Thanks Mozilla

Re:what a long strange trip its been ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, thank you! I ejaculated when I finished reading your post!

Re:what a long strange trip its been ...

[Arandir]

It is a shame AOL has sealed a deal with MS.

Once a corporation reaches a certain size, it's collective intelligence exponentially drops with each new employee, until it reaches that of the flatworm. AOL is no exception.

I'm taking a class with a manager at AOL. He stated last weekend that a new AOL policy (at least in his department) was "anyone using Mozilla will be fired on the spot."

Re:what a long strange trip its been ...

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL's collective intelligence was pretty low to begin with. To wit:

(1) They bought the failed company Netscape.
(2) They jettisoned all the "for profit" products that Netscape owned to Sun and pissed off all the Netscape oldtimers into quitting.
(3) They agreed to a design plan that lead to results that were pretty much useless for their AOL users.
(4) They gave Netscape developers infinite budget to build fabulously over-architected from-scratch software with no firm shipping date for 5 years while all the PHBs focused on suing Microsoft.

You can rip on their sheer stupidity and lack of business sense, but without it, Linux would still be languishing with 3rd rate browsers.

Re:what a long strange trip its been ...

[Anonymous Coward]

mozilla has come a long way. I began with version 0.5 and have used the mozilla browser almost exclusvely at work since

Interesting, as there was no version 0.5:

• Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
• Milestone 18 - Completed October 12, 2000

Re:what a long strange trip its been ...

[Anonymous Coward]

0.5 of the browser? what browser was that exactly?

Mozilla 0.6 was the first standard versioned browser (not to be too confused with Firebird which is now ~0.6.1 and really did have a 0.5).

Prior to 0.6, mozilla releases where milestoned (M1..M18).

w00t!

[MattyCobb]

yay for mozilla! :)

..but when will they make thunderbird able to auto-open links in a new tab instead of having to click something to do that.

Re:w00t!

[nazsco]

about:config

find (with the not-so-new-but-neat filter, that finaly works):
"browser.tabs.opentabfor.anylink" and set to true

Re:w00t!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that should be forced on a user.

But I'd love to see a setting for opening all links in either a) a new window, or b) a new tab.

'course, it would suck for pages that make use of frames, but then, who uses those anymore?

(Except for me. Doh. Still, it'd be a reason for me to get rid of frames, hah! :P)

Re:w00t!

[MattyCobb]

oh i just ment for pages that are set to open in a new window heh. so that wouldnt mess with frames. it'd be like CrazyBrowser but with Mozilla code instead of IE! :)

staying with 1.2 for now

[m_evanchik]

I was running Mozilla 1.2 on win98 for a while because IE6 had gone into 60-second-hang mode every time a form came up.

Tried upgrading to 1.4 but it was constantly crashing, so I went back to 1.2 .

Then again I'm running win 98 because I'm too stupid/addicted-to-games to switch to Linux.

And one of my wife's hard drive died on her Mac, that's what's really pissing me off.

Re:staying with 1.2 for now

[edwdig]

This release should have a fix for the Win98 GDI leaks. That means you won't have UI problems after running it for a long time.

I tried a nightly build a few weeks ago, and the GDI leaks were gone. I went back to 1.4 though, as the mail client was broken in that nightly (couldn't delete messages). Hopefully that's fixed in this release...

Re:staying with 1.2 for now

[phalse phace]

If you're referring to bug 204374, then I hope it is indeed fixed. It is a very annoying bug which has kept me at 1.2. Moving from 1.2 to 1.4 was disastrous. I practically had to restart Mozilla every half hour or so. I'll probably give 1.5 a try though.

As for it being a Win 98 only bug, it's not. The bug appears whether you're running Win 98, 98 SE, ME, 2000, or XP. Many people probably assume it's exclusive to 98 since that's what most people appear to be still running.

Not as exciting, but it's a good thing!

[RichiP]

I used to upgrade everyime a release would be made. In fact, just before 1.4, I would do CVS updates every now and then. Since 1.4 was released, I haven't had that much need to upgrade. I've got a VERY stable browser with all the features that I would use on a day-to-day basis.

I'm glad for the work to add more features, however, so long as they don't fall prey to the bloatware effect. Perhaps I will upgrade one more time, but only out of curiosity because I'm very satisfied with Mozilla 1.4

Re:Not as exciting, but it's a good thing!

[Peyna]

Same here, I used 1.1 for the longest time, just because it worked so well for me. I tried 1.2 and 1.3 but had a few quirky problems with them and stuck with 1.1 up until awhile after 1.4 came out. Unless some new release fixes some bugs that I have problems with or it adds some great new features; I will have no reason to upgrade.

Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[Saint Stephen]

I'm still just building Firebird from CVS the same way I've been building it since 0.5. The build process seems to be the same. I tried a CVS build between 0.6.1 and now, but it was horked. Now I'll go back to building about once a week, it seems stable again.

I like the new features. Are there any important changes I should make to .mozconfig?

export MOZ_PHOENIX=1

mk_add_options MOZ_PHOENIX=1
ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
ac_add_options --disable-composer
ac_add_options --enable-optimize=-O2
ac_add_options --disable-ldap
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
#ac_add_options --enable-extensions=default,-inspector,-irc,-venkm an,-content-packs,-help
ac_add_options --enable-extensions=cookie,wallet,xml-rpc,xmlextra s,p3p,pref,transformiix,universalchardet,typeahead find,webservices
ac_add_options --enable-plaintext-editor-only

ac_add_options --enable-xft
#ac_add_options --enable-svg
ac_add_options --disable-installer
#ac_add_options --without-libIDL

ac_add_options --with-pthreads

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[pryan]

You may want to add

ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --disable-toolkit-xlib
ac_add_options --disable-toolkit-qt

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[TrekkieGod]

This is definitely offtopic, but I run into a lot, and since you posted that information, I figure it's as appropriate as any other time to ask.

I see you have -enable-optimize=-O2. Just about every single program I've compiled has O2 as the default optimization level...any reason not to use O3? I changed some programs to use it, and it didn't cause any problems, so that just added to the confusion.

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[Yosho]

From what I understand, O2 is considered to be the best all-around optimization; O3 generates code that is faster, but the file sizes tend to be larger.

If you want it to be even more optimized, you can use the mcpu or march options for your processor; mcpu generates code optimized for a specific processor that will still run on others, while march generates code that will probably only run on the specified processor (or better). For example:
-O3 -march=pentium4

For a list of supported CPU types, see the GCC man page.

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[jesser]

I think --enable-plaintext-editor-only prevents midas (wysiwyg editing in html forms) from working.

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might try "--enable-optimize "... it seemed to be a smash hit when adopted in the latest Thunderbird (Mail) 0.2 build.

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[Anthracks]

This info is specific to Visual C++ 2002/2003, but it might be relevant to GCC too, I really don't know. Look at the "best practices" portion at the bottom in particular.

You don't get it, do you?

[CanSpice]

I don't mean to sound antagonistic, but you don't get it, do you? You don't understand the ideas and concepts by "standards", do you?

No, you most definitely should not make sites that are Firebird-compliant. Make sites that are STANDARDS-compliant. It's by designing for a specific browser that we got into this morass of browser-specific tags and browser incompatibilities.

Use the standards that exist, and test using Firebird and IE and Opera and Galeon and Safari. But don't design with a specific browser in mind.

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[x mani x]

Well IMHO, you are being antagonistic for no good reason.

A site can be "Firebird-compliant" and be fully "standards-compliant" simultaneously. I'm pretty sure this is obvious.

Furthermore, he/she asked about testing for CSS2 compliance, which I believe implies he/she does "get it" when it comes to standards compliance.

I don't mean to sound antagonistic, but you don't get it, do you? You don't understand the ideas and concepts by "standards", do you?

I'm sure you're a nice guy and all, but this makes you sound like an asshole.

-Mani

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great, but in reality it's impossible for Joe WebDev to:
(1) Track the state of all standards
(2) Interpret them properly
(3) Interpret them in the exact same way Mozilla developers interpreted them.

There's been issues were perfectly standard-compliant code (AFAICT) either crashed Mozilla or just plain didn't work. Maybe it's an issue of interpretation or something that's not fully specified.

Then I check, and the good folks in Bugzilla have already marked it as INVALID, because in their minds Mozilla defines the standard and they have to "Save The Web" blah blah.

Now at this point one has two choices:
1) Don't support Mozilla because they are "wrong".
2) Code to the browser and make it work in Mozilla for our paying Unix customers.

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[grilo]

Well... as a webdeveloper/designer I must say that testing your webapplications/sites with FireBird has got nothing to do with standarts. The (X)HTML// XML/XSLT / CSS code can look clean and validate, and still look a mess when rendered. On the other hand, I must say FireBird is usually more logic when rendering the code. But the parent is right on half of it... don't code for a browser or another. Simply code along with the standarts... if it doesn't work on your favourite browser, I'd say it's time to send a bug report to it's engineers. (For those that design professionaly, customers usually understand the "standarts" point of view and actually like the idea after it's been carefully explained -- Every manager likes to proud himself of having the latest in technology ;)

By the way, this is my first post on Slashdot! :)

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[digital bath]

welcome :)

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[digital bath]

Following those standards might sound great theoretically and all, but the fact is that in the real world how your intended audience sees your webpage is heavily influenced by what browser they're using and how that browser thinks different tags and css codes should be applied. In a perfect world, all browsers would follow the same standard and all webpages would be completly cross-browser-compatible, but we all know that's not what happens :(

In the end, I (and many other web developers) would pick the code that works in the most browsers over the code that perfectly follow the standards (according to how I interpret those standards, of course).

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[krumms]

Make sites that are STANDARDS-compliant.

It's all very noble to rant on about the ideals of using standards. But when it comes down to it, you do what works. It may not be nice, it may not be standards compliant, but if it works - then god damn it, it's good enough.

Besides, I highly doubt the OP was implying 'firebird only' sites.

Re:You don't get it, do you?

[Phroggy]

if it doesn't work on your favourite browser, I'd say it's time to send a bug report to it's engineers.

Meanwhile your site is broken, from the perspective of anyone who uses that browser. Every other site they've noticed recently works fine; why doesn't yours? You must suck.

(For those that design professionaly, customers usually understand the "standarts" point of view and actually like the idea after it's been carefully explained -- Every manager likes to proud himself of having the latest in technology ;)

If by "customers" you mean the people who are paying you to design a site, as opposed to people who are visiting the site because they are or want to be customers of the owner of the site, then this may initially be true (non-technical managers can be persuaded when you make it sound like they have something to gain), but when the latter type of customers start commenting on it, that manager may change his mind.

However, Mozilla supports the standards well enough that coding for the standards and coding for Mozilla are practically the same thing. It's all those other browsers you've got to worry about.

One example: position: fixed; is perfectly valid standards-compliant CSS code, which doesn't work at all in Internet Explorer for Windows. Here is an interesting hack that works around it, making IE behave as though it was using position: fixed. To prevent the hack from breaking other browsers, it uses a proprietary Microsoft tag called a conditional comment, which looks like a standard HTML comment but will be parsed only by Internet Explorer. For IE 6, it also uses an extra comment at the beginning, which causes IE 6 to ignore the doctype declaration and fall back to quirks mode (otherwise the hack wouldn't work). Finally, it takes advantage of a feature that isn't supported in IE 5 for Mac, so that browser (which does support position: fixed) won't attempt to use it because of a major bug that causes mouseovers to completely break (no a:hover style, no hand cursor, no URL in the status bar).

Is this actually standards compliant? Well, technically, it should validate. Is it coding for the browser? Absolutely. Does it really work as well as it claims? I haven't really tested it yet; I was just directed to it this evening. If it does, and if your site design is good to begin with, will 92.8%* of your end users appreciate that you took the time? You bet.

* I'm aware that this statistic can't be accurate, due to user agent spoofing done at both the browser and proxy server level for a variety of reasons including the fact that some web sites still refuse to allow user agents that don't look like IE. Also, this press release was from 9 months ago. Still, it's a significant number of people.

Opera?

[Cyno01]

Uh, opera has a built in search bar that defaults to google and has about a dozen other types of searches built in too. It also has the wand, which is comparable to the google toolbars form filler, which seems to be the only other really useful feature of the toolbar. Thats according to this though, there are probably other features, i use Opera, so i've never tried the google toolbar.

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried the latest version of Opera? 7.2b7 just came out and it's fantastic! The amount of fixes and improvements is incredible. Take it for a spin today!

Re:Opera?

[TheRaven64]

Opera has a very clean user interface, which makes it my browser of choice. There are two features I miss when I use other browsers:

1. Mouse gestures. I know you can get a plug-in for moz to support them, but the thing I like about opera is that I don't need to customize it for it to be comfortable to use.
2. The user mode / author mode button. A lot of web sites *cough* ars technica *cough* use colour schemes that are unreadable, and being able to ignore them at the tough of a button is amazingly useful. In user mode, you can do a lot of things ranging from the userful to the silly. Being able to see structural tags is amazingly useful for debugging. Making the browser look like a C-64 is silly.

Oh, and I have yet to find a site that it doesn't render correctly (although some only work in `identify as IE' mode). It's also the only browser I know of that supports counters in CSS, which makes it trivial to number headings.

MOD PARENT UP!!

[fupeg]

Googlebar kicks ass.

Mozilla migrating to Firebird and Thunderbird

[lplatypus]

A snippet from the mozilla development roadmap:

The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, and ...

So Firebird and Thunderbird are not just alternatives to mozilla, they are the future of mozilla. However it seems that mozilla 1.5 hasn't made much progress towards this switch? I wonder if there will be a long process of morphing mozilla into a less-integrated bird-based suite or whether the switch will be done in an instant, when one day it is declared from on high "Navigator and mozilla mail are no more!"

'Der Spiegel' logs show Mozilla+Netscape at 15%

[Anonymous Coward]

As reported by this story...

According to Der Spiegel (one of Germany's largest general news magazines), Mozilla's usage share may be rising:

> In an article about the latest set of Internet Explorer security flaws, the German newsweekly reports that out of 125 million accesses to their website, 15.1% came from users of Mozilla and Netscape, a notable increase since the releases of Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer usage appears to have declined, with the browser from Redmond now accounting for 83.8% of page requests.

I'm still waiting for...

[TooEasy]

NTLM support on *nix. I've tried to talk our sys admins into using something other than Exchange but they refuse.

Mac problems

[Brad Oliver]

1.5 apparently breaks the Pinstripe theme on the Mac. This is unfortunate, because it's pretty much the only theme out there that makes Mozilla look like it belongs on the Mac. I see other posters raving about Firebird, but unfortunately here again Mac users seem to have trouble - there don't seem to be any nightly (or recent) Mac builds of Firebird, so those of us who don't want to suffer through the build process are out of luck.

Re:Mac problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried Camino? It uses the Mozilla rendering engine with a native Cocoa UI.

Re:Mac problems

[BZ]

1.5b breaks all themes on all platforms that have not been updated to the new skinVersion. The announcement that such an update would be needed was made in June; the announcement that the skinVersion was changed was made in late July. The announcements included pointers to scripts that would auto-update themes as needed, so...

Bug fixes need testing too.

[jabber01]

So there.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. What AOL donated were 2 million AOL CD's, with the stipulation that they would pay the foundation $1 for every new subscriber that they signed up.

I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to install nightlies for the past few days on my Linux box with no success. This release won't install either. It complains about the navigator xpi failing to load. Does this thing actually work for anyone?

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Official Mozilla Response: f u

Mozilla under NT - thumbs up

[ishmaelflood]

I've been using Mozilla 1.3 and 1.4 under NT for 6 months. With the exception of the lack of the googlebar, I can't think of a reason to switch back to IE. I haven't had a single crash in the mail client, and the browser seems at least as stable as IE did. It might close down unexpectedly once a month or so, but will happily restart without a reboot.

I hadn't really thought about this in a while - once the stability and the features are there, you stop noticing the browser.

Oh, one really irritating thing, ctrl shift o for open a new web location. Hate it.

Eh,

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I'm with marc anderseen. So what? Is this going to change the world? Someone please wake me up when we get to that point.

Public schools

[yerricde]

New computers may be inexpensive, but cheap != free. Would Joe Sixpack want his state tax rates raised just to pay for replacing the PCs in all the schools?

Re:Public schools

[IM6100]

Judging from the sweet hardware that's now starting to show up at municipal auctions (i.e. three machines, all >= 400 MHz that I got recently, all three for $10), we're right on schedule with the tax raises.

I am predicting that this is the 'last shakeout' of hardware, though. Regular folk are getting smarter and won't let lazy programmers get away with the bloat much longer. I don't expect to be able to get skid-loads of CPUs for pennies much longer.

MOZILLA IS TRYING TO KILL MNG

[H.G. Pennypacker]

I thought that this is something that requires attention here on slashdot. In the newer releases of mozilla (>v1.4) they have either crippled or eliminated the support for the MNG image format. See bug 18574, and see the furor that this has caused amongst Mozilla users.

You may have noticed that this is the MOST VOTED ON BUG ever in Mozilla but the people in charge are dragging their feet about this one. It is truly shameful. This is the only Free alternative to gif, and provides features that go above and beyond the gif standard. To any quibblers out there who say that patents on gif have expired, they are not entirely correct. Patents still exist in countries outside the US, and so anything that is not completely Free, is just that, not Free.

I wholeheartedly suggest that anyone who cares about open standards and formats get a bugzilla account and vote or post comments on this issue, otherwise Mozilla will kill MNG by either not supporting it or supporting some bastardised version of the standard.

Re:MOZILLA IS TRYING TO KILL MNG

[Alereon]

You completely misrepresent the facts. MNG support was TEMPORARILY removed from Mozilla because it had been without a maintainer for a long span of time, was terribly buggy, and extremely bloated (300KB just for MNG support). The code was no longer viable. The project now has a new maintainer, and will be remerged when repair work has been completed.

For those that really care, the old code is still available for use in the form of an extension.

mail about dicks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not thunderbird's fault if some comments about tycho,gabe and penny arcade leak through.

Difference between cars and computers

[yerricde]

You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software.

Some of the difference here is that while computers-bought-three-years-ago get faster all the time, cars-bought-three-years-ago don't because of the danger to human life posed by a high-speed automotive collision.

how about a spell checker for

[the_2nd_coming]

how about a spell checker for Navigator?

I have gotten very used to Safari checking spelling as I type into a /. form. I am in withdrawls when I am on my windows laptop.

Re:how about a spell checker for

[MediaBoy77]

On your windows laptop, you can use ieSpell.

If you use IE, that is.

http://www.iespell.com/

Re:how about a spell checker for

[the_2nd_coming]

sweet!!! the only thing that this program needs to do now is check as you type.

Oh brother

[Anonvmous Coward]

It's time. Give Mozilla it's own topic. How about mozilla.slashdot.org or altbrowsers.slashdot.org?

I wouldn't mind, but we're not talking about earth-shattering news here. There's more catching up than innovating going on here so why blast everybody about it? If that's not acceptable, then how about giving other browsers some press time too? Opera's a great example. It's ahead of Mozilla UI wise, plus it's the best browser you can get for the Linux based Zaurus, and it works with Symbian so modern cell phones can use it.

C'mon guys, the pro-Mozilla zealousy is nauseating. I know you want IE to have some competition again, heck I want that too, but don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Re:Oh brother

[swtaarrs]

Mozilla has been done catching up to IE for a while now... Maybe my brain's failing me, but I don't think IE has built in Tab browsing, popup blocking, and a whole other list of things Mozilla has.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon guys, the pro-Mozilla zealousy is nauseating.

Seeing the obligatory Opera troll post in every Mozilla thread is equally nausiating. :)

In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is biased towards open-source. Most slashdot readers are mainly interested in open source software. That's why you don't see a front-page post for every slight revision of proprietary programs like Opera, Windows PX, Cuteftp, et al. You are perfectly welcome to start a site called dotslash.org or something and post about opera or whatever you use until your heart's content.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Mozilla has been done catching up to IE for a while now... Maybe my brain's failing me, but I don't think IE has built in Tab browsing, popup blocking, and a whole other list of things Mozilla has."

That doesn't mean they're not still playing catchup. Spell checking? Yeesh.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Seeing the obligatory Opera troll post in every Mozilla thread is equally nausiating. :)"

Give me some credit, at least I mentioned the Zaurus! ;)

"In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is biased towards open-source. Most slashdot readers are mainly interested in open source software."

Maybe I'm just not noticing it, but I'm not seeing "oo there's a new version number!' front page stories about much else than Mozilla. I'll leave the door open by saying that I'm not particularly attuned to it either. I just know that Mozilla is greatly overrated here.

I think Mozilla's open-sourcedness is greatly overrated as well. The important part is does it do browsing well? If the answer is yes, then how come Opera's not up there with it?

In any case, this topic's a bit tired. I can't change Slashdot. They act Open Source is so much better than proprietary closed standards. They don't realize that the pros and cons just shift around, they don't actually grow or decline. "Open Source Software is more secure!" "Closed Source Software has a better, more attuned UI." "Closed source software is buggier than Open Source Software." "Closed Source Software is a for-profit business, meaning they have strong incentive to fix it."

Etc.

I wish things weren't so black and white here. I think that's really what's bugging me, not Mozilla's hype so much.

Re:Oh brother

[The Revolutionary]

"If that's not acceptable, then how about giving other browsers some press time too? Opera's a great example."

Great, so in other words, you are an Opera fan, or Opera developer, and you want Slashdot to advertise for a proprietary software product.

If Opera wants to appear on Slashdot more often, there is a little bar at the top of every page that would be just right for them.

Well, it may have something to do with the fact that Mozilla is a very prominent Open Source project. It ranks up there with OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, GNOME, and KDE.

If you haven't noticed, when it comes to software, Slashdot (and probably the readers too) favors the Free Open Source variety. And why shouldn't they? GNU/Linux and *BSD are open source. Readers who want to hear primarily about proprietary software can certainly find their news in other places; the "Windows Supersite" comes to mind.

And as I recall, don't new Opera releases usually get a front page story? Maybe not beta releases, but then why should they, unless Slashdot starts an advertising service?

"C'mon guys, the pro-Mozilla zealousy is nauseating. I know you want IE to have some competition again, heck I want that too, but don't put all your eggs in one basket."

"Nauseating"? What are you, an Opera developer?

What other "basket" is there?

How exactly are we, developers or otherwise, supposed to, or expected to put our "eggs" in a basket of proprietary software?

What do you suggest, that we offer to do work free of charge for Opera, or maybe just give them, a private company, money just for the hell of it?

Re:Oh brother

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Maybe not beta releases, but then why should they, unless Slashdot starts an advertising service?"

You mean like they do with Mozilla?

"Nauseating"? What are you, an Opera developer?"

Ah yes, the "You like this thing that I'm ill informed about? You must work for them!" debate technique. Has anybody ever won an argument that way? Has anybody ever actually done anything but ruin their credibility that way? Usually this technique is employed when somebody correctly points out that Microsoft has an edge over an OSS project. Strange that it's Opera this time.

"How exactly are we, developers or otherwise, supposed to, or expected to put our "eggs" in a basket of proprietary software?"

Saying "don't put your eggs in one basket" cannot possibly be mistaken for "put your eggs in another basket". Did you even take a moment to read what I said? I was talking about diverisifcation.

"What do you suggest, that we offer to do work free of charge for Opera, or maybe just give them, a private company, money just for the hell of it?"

Heaven forbid the Mozilla Community should feel the need to compete and make a browser that's better for all. No no, it's much easier to pretend that alternatives like Opera don't exist so they can just keep puttering around at their snail's pace.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: I am an opera fag! Fuck me! KHTML is faster, Gecko renders better, but I LOVE PROPRIETEARY SOFTWAREZ!!! ! W00T! I AM IN EVERY MOZILLA TOPIC ON /.!!

Re:Oh brother

[Queuetue]

How long has IE had spell checking?

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

"Heaven forbid the Mozilla Community should feel the need to compete and make a browser that's better for all. "

Your a total fucking idiot. Why the hell sould we support some commercial company when we have a free browser whose mission is to be truly cross platform and free for everyone? Mozilla works for the common good by making a browser that is better for all, and Opera while making a decent browser doesn't . It's as simple as that. The fact that you think otherwise shows how out of touch you are with reality.

Can't understand why we don't all want to shell out cash for a browser or support some company that may go under some day leaving us with nothing?

Again, what a fucking idiot you are.

Re:Oh brother

[bogie]

"If that's not acceptable, then how about giving other browsers some press time too? Opera's a great example. "

Err, no thanks. Perhaps your confusing this site for someplace that puts commercial closed sources products ahead of our own community ones? Gee should Slashdot report on a browser that is being made for the common good and is used by every linux distro or some commercial browser that could go out of business anyday leaving us with nothing?

"C'mon guys, the pro-Mozilla zealousy is nauseating."

You ignorance is nauseating.

Re:Oh brother

[NanoGator]

"How long has IE had spell checking? "

Since 97.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Your a total fucking idiot. "

It's "you're" a fucking idiot, you fucking idiot.

" Why the hell sould we support some commercial company when we have a free browser whose mission is to be truly cross platform and free for everyone? "

Already covered that in my last post, numbnuts.

" It's as simple as that. The fact that you think otherwise shows how out of touch you are with reality."

Opera's out to make money, which is a stronger motivator than "the common good" Star Trek crap you brought up. Besides, Opera's farther ahead than Mozilla UI wise, Mozilla could use the competition.

"Can't understand why we don't all want to shell out cash for a browser or support some company that may go under some day leaving us with nothing?"

If Mozilla improves because of Opera, and it'll have to, then if Opera were to tank we'd still be left with a much better browser.

"Again, what a fucking idiot you are. "

Funny, it's hard to feel like an idiot when the guy calling me it isn't making any effort to understand me.

Re:Oh brother

[hkmwbz]

Oh the zealotry...

I don't think you realize this, but you have Opera to thank for much of the UI innovation right now. Who brought mouse gestures and refined tabbed browsing/combined SDI and MDI to the browser world (Netcaptor might have introduced it, but Opera made it popular and refined it)?

Mozilla borrows heavily from Opera. There is simply no denying it.

So why shouldn't Slashdot ignore Opera? It is simple. Opera is fighting the good fight, with Mozilla. Mozilla even gets a lot of users from Opera! Opera works for open standards - to make the web free and open. The person who created CSS works for Opera!

If Opera dies, another alternative browser will disappear, and that does nothing but to remove the choice. Today, you can actually choose between several browsers.

Wait a while

[Anonymous Coward]

The next time Microsoft updates Windows, Firebird will probably slow down as well.

Note that, on the same hardware, the bogging down that you describe doesn't happen when you run Mozilla under Linux.

To be fair, though, there is an explanation that does not involve sabotage (at least, not directly). In order to give their own applications (IE, Office) an advantage, Microsoft locks portions of the executable code used by those applications into memory. This leaves less memory for everything else, including Mozilla. Thus, after a while, running other programs will cause Mozilla to get paged out to disk. The same thing doesn't happen to IE, because it stays in memory, even when you're not using it.

Re:Wait a while

[shaitand]

As I said in my previous post, I experienced this under both window and linux. And on different machines for that matter.

P.S. On windows you can get most of that memory back. Simply take the office startup out with msconfig or regedit... that will give you back up to 30% of your total system resources on boot.

Actually in my experience with windows EVERYTHING is paged. Even when you've booted with all startup applications removed swap is in use for the OS! It's really pretty sick. The more memory you have, the more swap the system uses.

It makes me sick that I have to spend my days fixing windows crap (we sell and support linux as well... but alas, although we have lots and lots of linux out there, I rarely have to touch a linux machine, except patching which I can do from our office.).

Nonetheless this particular problem with the full blown mozilla occurs on multiple systems and occurs on linux as well as windows. Some day I'll track it down, there must be memory leak or some such.

Re:Wait a while

[Anonymous Coward]

> As I said in my previous post, I experienced this under both window and linux.

Oops, sorry, I missed your reference to Linux because my mind immediately lept to my own experience. In my case, I was experiencing a Mozilla slowdown on Windows, which I am not seeing on Linux.

But, maybe we're seeing different kinds of slowdowns.

As I described, what I was seeing appeared to be mostly caused by Mozilla getting paged out.

But maybe, as you suggest, you are seeing a memory leak. There used to be lots of those in Mozilla, and I don't doubt that there are some left.

Hopefully you can figure out which website(s) is causing the problem to occur, so you can include the URL in a bug report. In the past, I have been suspicious that certain Frontpage-developed websites were intentionally using Javascript that caused problems for Netscape, but then I'm probably just being paranoid. :-)

By the way, I still have to use Windows at work, so thanks for the tip on the memory configuration.

Re:Wait a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually in my experience with windows EVERYTHING is paged. Even when you've booted with all startup applications removed swap is in use for the OS! It's really pretty sick. The more memory you have, the more swap the system uses.

Easily fixed. Set the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive to 1, and most of the kernel will stay in memory.

Re:Wait a while

[mixmasta]

Yeah, this happens to me too on windows. It is why I turn off VM even though I have only 512MB ram.

about:config

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Mozilla features can be controlled by an obscure config setting (the more popular/useful options eventually make it into the preferences GUI).

To view these settings, type "about:config" into your address bar. I'd guess that "browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing" is what you're looking for - try changing the value to "false", and see if that disables it.

and the googlebar

[chocolatetrumpet]

Everytime a mozilla milestone is released the only two mods I bother installing without fail are the orbit theme, and the mouse gestures...

And the googlebar, a beautifully done open source project!

People think the google bar is about having a search box in your browser. It's not. It's about clicking on your search terms and having them found in the page. Saves me hours!!

Re:and the googlebar

[Anony Moose Cow Turd]

EXACTLY! While it is handy having a search bar it is not that much simpler than having Google as you homepage or on your bookmarks tab. But search term highlighting is the best.

Re:and the googlebar

[Saeger]

Eh. Googlebar seems like a waste of screen realestate to me (even when collapsed). When I need to search I just Ctrl-L to get my cursor up to the addressbar, then type the search phrase, then Tab & ENTER. In Opera it's a tad easier: Shift-F8, keyword, ENTER.

And I don't really need the keyword highlighting when CTRL-F works just fine for me most of the time (and when not, google cache will do the highlighting).

Different strokes...

--

Re:and the googlebar

[Anonymous Coward]

with googlebar you use Ctrl-f12 to get to it fast

Maybe because it loads with windows??

[Proneax]

I think that a large reason IE is so fast starting up is that it is highly integrated with windows core processes.(type in a web address in windows explorer and there is no delay in initiation the http request) Mozilla/Firebird do not have this advantage, and the developers have decided not to pursue an option to have firebird load on windows startup. On most systems, firebird is nearly as fast as, and sometimes just as fast as IE to startup. That speaks to the effort the developers have put in to make the program sleek and un-bloated. Plus, once it's open it renders pages faster. So you make up the 600ms you lost on startup.

Now, you can have windows explorer run as a separate process from the windows core, but I'm not sure if this applies to internet explorer, or if it would make any difference. It would be interesting to test.

Re:Maybe because it loads with windows??

[shaitand]

true all of that.

Sometimes it hurts though, recently we've had a wave of customers with popup and spyware issues. On every job I've been ad-awareing the system to death and setting up firebird for them to test, with the understanding they are testing it for us. It's actually gone fairly well, none of them really like IE anymore after using firebird for a week (I even remove the IE shortcuts from the desktop and quicklaunch and replace them with firebird shortcuts that use the ie icon). Their first sight however is firebird loading slow for the first time.

Destructive Tab Bookmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the improvements in 1.5a and b, but something that has been bothering me is that they now destroy all open tabs if you click on a tap group bookmark. Is there anyway to turn this "feature" off?

-Just another AC

Re:Destructive Tab Bookmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

VERY annoying and as far as I can tell (after reading the relevant bugs), there is no way to get the old behaviour back right now. They plan to make this an option though. Let's hope the final release offers the old way again.

Ask and you shall receive

[Anonymous Coward]

http://homepage.mac.com/michael2k/FileSharing9.htm l

Crappy Mozilla Desktop Icon!

[aSiTiC]

Is it just me or is the built-in icon for Mozilla suck? I'm tired of searching theme sites for a better icon!

*Another* problem with browsers that aren't IE...

[baileytal]

...is that I can't use this funky little widget:

Access OneLook(R) Dictionary Search from any site!

I use it a lot, and since someone pointed out the Google Toolbar add-on, this would be all that's stopping me from a complete conversion to Mozilla/Firebird.

P.S. ...1st post ever. Please be gentle...

WARNING: Gentoo Zealotry Follows

[mhesseltine]

Or

emerge mozilla-1.5-beta.ebuild
emerge -u name_of_plugin

No incompatability based on compiler.

</zealotry>

Re:WARNING: Gentoo Zealotry Follows

[Anonymous Coward]

No incompatability based on compiler.

Wow! Gentoo can recompile proprietary plugins without having access to the source? Now I'm impressed!

You f*cking idiot.

Re:WARNING: Gentoo Zealotry Follows

[mhesseltine]

Wow, you can post an insult without logging in first.

Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot. Idiot.

Re:WARNING: Gentoo Zealotry Follows

[mlefevre]

If "name_of_plugin" is something closed source which is only distributed as a binary, you'll hit the same problem. A quick google search turns up Gentoo users having problems with RealPlayer.

If the plugin was open source, then the issue wouldn't exist for other people either.

If you want zealotry, this would be a good opportunity for Windows users who have never heard of a compiler to point and laugh...

Hello? It's 1991 calling!

[duffbeer703]

Most people regularly send email attachments larger than the Gecko engine.

If you have space problems on a modern hard disk, it's time to upgrade or delete some pron.

Re:Hello? It's 1991 calling!

[edwdig]

Yeah, I know it's just a troll, but...

The whole point of Firebird and Thunderbird was people complained Mozilla was too big. So Firebird was created to strip out everything but the browser. Fine, that was good. It resulted in a significantly smaller browser. But then Thunderbird came along. It includes almost all the code that's in Firebird, but adds in a bunch more for the mail support. But it doesn't share the code with Firebird. So if you use both, you end up using up significantly more disk space and RAM than you would use if you just used Mozilla.

Firebird is about 7 megs. The vast majority of that is the Gecko core. I can't picture people on dialup regularly sending 7 meg attachments.

Re:Hello? It's 1991 calling!

[aldoman]

a) Give thunderbird a chance - it is very young compared too firebird and a lot of the crap from mail/news part of mozilla hasn't been cut out yet. b) There is an effort too share the Gecko Runtime Engine - ie. you download a web installer, it checks if you need the GRE, if so it downloads that too. If not (eg you have Firebird installed already) it just downloads the small Thunderbird files. Also this will mean that Mozilla can do an 'Internet Explorer' by placing the GRE in RAM all the time - meaning that both apps should load faster still..

Bookmarks dataloss - please vote for 215089

[Liet Hacksor]

Ever since the 1.4a OS X builds were patched to work again with profiles on NFS volumes, there has been a severe dataloss bug (it eats bookmarks.html) Please see bug 215089 for details and how to reproduce it. Some bugzilla searching will reveal LOTS of similar reports, which are being similarly ignored (some were tracked in meta-bug 203343).

This is a SEVERE problem - a browser that can't maintain bookmarks from one launch to the next is pretty useless, especially for corporate use, where home directories are likely to be on non-local volumes. Requests for blocking 1.4b, 1.4 and now 1.5b were all denied, and no one seems willing to investigate where exactly the problem lies.

While I appreciate speed, bloat reduction and fixes for really obscure bits of CSS in order to make someone's 'blog render nicely, I feel that data loss is a more critical issue. If I could code, I'd help do that. Instead, I'm happy to work with any developer to rest and resolve this. If voting carries any weight, please vote for bug 215089. Thanks...

Re:Bookmarks dataloss - please vote for 215089

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it had something to do with a) the moz profile manager b) it's love of storing user profiles as an alias c) problems using aliases with NFS mounts.

Which doesn't really help you at all, but oh well.

Re:Bookmarks dataloss - please vote for 215089

[Peyna]

While no one else really seems to care, this bookmarks bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146856 has really bothered me and still does. (You can't link to bugzilla from slashdot, so you will have to copy and paste the link anyway).

Re:Bookmarks dataloss - please vote for 215089

[boots@work]

It's called the Network Failure System for a reason :-/

Re:*Another* problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[sholden]

http://searchthis.mozdev.org/

ummm.... porn

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to see the sexy ladies all pixelated from being auto-resized. that just ruins the illusion

Re:ummm.... porn

[thumperward]

I don't want to see the sexy ladies all pixelated from being auto-resized. that just ruins the illusion

This actually bears replying to. I'm all for the image being resized using something cleverer than nearest neighbour. pr0n in particular suffers because of the lack of a high-quality resize, but it would be great to have at any rate.

- Chris

Ahem...

[Nailer]

Mozilla (+derivatives) is our only full featured OSS browser

Pardon?

Re:A conversation between two Mozilla programmers

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Damn, the downloads have gone down. People are losing interest in Mozilla."

"Quick! Increment the version number!"

"There's a surge in downloads. It worked! We made Slashdot's front page again!"

Truely great satire makes one wonder if the joke is really a joke. Kudos.

Microsoft has been known to cheat on occasion

[Anonymous Coward]

> > We didn't look at what webservers the pages we tested were running on though. There aren't too many IIS servers out there compared with *nix and I know IE and IIS break http standards to implement speed hacks on page loading in IE and slow it down in other browsers.

> Wow, what bullshit!

Not necessarily bullshit. Here is an explanation:

What makes IE so fast?

Note the "update" where the author speculates whether the observed behaviour was intentional or a bug.

Still, anyone who thinks that Microsoft is too honorable to cheat, needs to have their head examined. And if you think that Microsoft has any respect for standards and protocols, go and re-read the Halloween Document.

Opera ripped right through that heavy javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using 7.2b7 of Opera right now, and tested that site using Mozilla 5.0 identity and page display and rendered fast and perfect. The Javascript engine for 7.2 has improved very much in both speed, compatibility, and stability. What version of Opera are you using?

Camaro

[wideBlueSkies]

And in other news the Firebird/Thunderbird source tree has been checked out by Chevysoft and is undergoing modifications for eventual release as the Camaro Browser.

A high speed version called the IROC will also be produced. The target market for this version of the browser will be young users who don't mind paying 20% more for the same product with fancy packaging.

Hello, it's 1987 calling. :)

wbs.

Re:Camaro

[Gherald]

Even with the Firebird/Thunderbird source tree to back them up, they are going to have a hell of a hard time competing with Opera as a commercial product.

Re:Camaro

[Anonymous Coward]

Think cars, not browsers. Parent is a joke.

Re:Camaro

[Gherald]

Yes but we really shouldn't discuss those things on /. unless they are really, really high tech, eviro safe, or solar cars.

So I was just playing along ;)

Re:Camaro

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you haven't played with Firebird lately. It's small, fast, extensible, blocks pop-ups by default, can block ads with a simple extension, and doesn't eat up 10% of your screen with some silly ads.

Opera is basically dead, and I can honestly say that of all the tech peopel I work with, only one person uses it. The rest use Mozilla or Firebird.

Re:Camaro

[Gherald]

I love Firebird's underlying technology and the fact that its OSS but I think Opera 7.11 is more refined on the UI side of things, so I use it as my main browser.

If you trully can't afford (or don't want) to pay for Opera then a simple google search for a key will let you register and remove the ads.

IMO Firebird is a copy of Opera's UI. Its a good copy, and its progressing nicely, but Opera is still better.

And when I do come across one of the few pages that won't render in Opera I just fire up IE or Firebird.

Actually no

[ChiChiCuervo]

it's getElementById() if you capitalize ID, it won't work...

went thru a good 2 hrs of hell with that one recently.

Ruined bookmark groups :(

[Ark42]

Bookmark groups used to open in new tabs, not closing all existing tabs like they do now. That really sucks, I cant keep page X open and press my bookmark that opens page A B and C in separate tabs without having the tab with page X closed :(

The MNG Controversy

[LPetrazickis]

I think everyone here should know about the most voted for bug in Bugzilla.

In the 1.4 release of Mozilla, the previously complete support for the open MNG image format was removed in order to shave a 100-300 kilobytes from the Mozilla download.

MNG is an extension to PNG, a W3C-backed standard, that adds animation capabilities equal or superior to those in GIF. For example, the Phoenix MNG throbber was about 30 kilobytes smaller and looked far better than any GIF alternative due to alpha transparency and 24-bit colour.

Despite a great reduction in size and optimization of the main library, the authorities have only agreed to put in the MNG-VLC subset back into the 1.5 release.

MNG-VLC is basically useless because it doesn't even support offsets. Putting it back in does not help any of the early MNG adopters at all because their images won't display.

I highly encourage Mozilla maintainers to put the full MNG back in. The code is being actively supported and the feature is something that cutting-edge web developers are eyeing with great enthusiam for eventual adoption.

Note: Further discussion of that particular bug in Bugzilla is discouraged, but every vote helps.;)

Re:The MNG Controversy

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it interesting that there's 560 votes for that bug, but when they looked they could only find 2 or 3 actual MNG files on the WWW.

Take it from Microsoft: it's all about having the most checkboxes.

"Known Issues"

[Anonymous Coward]

The known issues have not been fixed and there is no thought being given to fixing it. That mail labels thing has been a prob for years and in the "known issues" list., Why the hell dont they fix those?

Re:Opera ripped right through that heavy javascrip

[critter_hunter]

Err... I said that Opera 7's JavaScript rendering speed was slow at times, but it was going to be fixed in 7.20. Hello? Why do you tell me Opera 7.20 beta7 breezes through the page as though it was proving me wrong?

BTW, to really check the rendering speed, you have to click on one of the thumbnails, and then drag an drop the image that "pops up" around. I think it's the combination of PNG transparency and javascript that causes the excruciating slowness. There are other examples of JS being slow, but this one is especially obvious

Mozilla Annoyances

[Palin]

If there are any 'fixes' for these please let me know.

-FavIcon's in bookmarks/Toolbars either doesn't work or only works sometimes. They seem to work all the time in Firebird/Phoenix ... So the mozilla team does know how to do it ...

-Under Linux the 'Save As...' dialogs are all butt ugly, they should integrate with the Gnome/KDE Dialogs that do the same thing. I know we all don't use those desktops so it should probably be a compile time option...

-Under Linux the 'Download Manager' dialog is borked. For instance 'Show File Location' doesn't work. Why? We have file manager's under linux. Make it a definable option so people can define something like 'nautlius %s' or 'konqueror %s' or ' %s', etc..

-Under Linux ... Integrate Mozilla's mime type setup with your desktop environment. Yes I know we don't all use Gnome or KDE ... But www.freedesktop.org has a shared mime database to at the least fall back on.

-MNG Support is dying/dead!

-Under Linux ... Why can't I tell mozilla what program to run when I want to email someone? Why can't I specify evolution, kmail or ?

-I'm sure there are others ... If you have more annoyances please reply to this.. :-) I'll make a list somewhere.

P.S. I use Mozilla everyday, all day long ... So I don't hate it, infact I love the javascript debugger and the DOM inspector ... It just could be better and more user friendly.

P.S.S. I'm not a C/C++ developer so I can't, at the moment contribute patches to do any of the above. Nor do I have the money to sponsor the work or I would.

Re:Mozilla Annoyances

[Peyna]

Stop complaining and do something about it.

It only takes a short time to add a bug report, etc.

Re:Mozilla Annoyances

[isorox]

Also, I'd like real full screen for web -> tv applications (no toolbars), and (inline) spell checking in text boxes in the browser, and new windows that pop up on clicking a link to default to a new tab.

Re:Mozilla Annoyances

[Cyrus2001]

Use MozEx to tell Mozilla which program he should use for mailto:, ftp:, news: or telnet: links. -> http://mozex.mozdev.org/

Re:Mozilla Annoyances

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide.htm

It's an extension that adds true fullscreen functionality to firebird.

And http://www.intraplanar.net/projects/tabprefs/

It adds single-window mode support to firebird (the open everything in tabs feature you so desperately want).

As for spellchecking, with it being added into the trunk I guess this is only a matter of time.

Re:Mozilla Annoyances

[BZ]

The GNOME filepicker did NOT in fact have equivalent functionality in GTK1 (in particular, it's internationalization support was sorely lacking). The GTK2 filepicker is much better, and Mozilla may indeed switch to it once it switches to GTK2.

MNG support was pretty broken to start with (eg MNG backgrounds did not work properly); at the moment it looks like removing MNG may in fact give people a push to fix the many issues it had.

I don't think .sos work like that

[ArmorFiend]

I don't think .sos / .dlls work like that. At least not this decade.

I believe that when two applications load libgecko.so (or whatever) they both memory map the same code section. The only copies that are made are for library storage, what you would get if you declare a variable "static" in C. This is probably a very small percentage of the total library size. Like 1%.

But I'm just guessing. And if you d/l different versions of libgecko.so (or whatever) then obviously all bets are off.

Re:I don't think .sos work like that

[rweir]

Yes, but the linker only does this if they are the EXACT same file; ie, it's based on the inode number. Last I checked, there's no independeantly distributable libgecko.so which moz, thunderbird and firebird can all share, so they all include their own seperate versions, which will NOT be shared at run-time.

I do seem to remember that a splitting out libgecko was part of the 1.0 plan...does anyone know what happened to this (or if my memory is just completely faulty)?

Re:I don't think .sos work like that

[Anonymous Coward]

See here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/GRE.html

Don't know what the status is towards actually using this in mozilla products.

Re:I don't think .sos work like that

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I believe that the plan is to used a shared GRE between apps. When installing a new app, it wil either use the existing GRE or replace it with a newer one. Remember that Mozilla Firebird and especially Mozilla Thunderbird are not yet at version 1.0! The fact that they are as good as they are at this stage does say something about the commitment of the developers! In the meantime, you can use Mozilla App Suite which is more stable. Its your choice!

Wow

[Cyno01]

Theres a fine line between zelotry and advertising.

Newbie

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a newbie and have been browsing this website for a few months now. Is the email application in Mozilla better than Eudora? I don't want to use IE and OE anymore, so I need an alternative.

Re:Newbie

[dbs_flac]

you could be a troll, but what the hell, im being nice... if you dont want to use IE and/or OE then Mozilla.org is the best place to start. Good Luck!

WebDAV

[bad_sheep]

Does anybody knows if there is an add-on to change Mozilla in a WebDAV browser ?
I know Mozilla already has the WebDAV capabilities (see the publish feature in Composer), but it does not handle browsing an LDAP server (it uses index.html or whatever) as a tree... it is a bit silly since everything is ready to use it as a full WebDAV browser !

They call it Gentoo, source code and dependencies

[axxackall]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.

This is a classic example of why EVERYTHING on Linux must be installed ONLY from the source code.

Compile a new version of a web browser, recompile your old plugins both using the same compiler to guarantee compatibility.

Re:Good chews for Evolution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reply is weenier_dude spew. Real computer users don't compile anything. Only drooly_lip byteboyz compile cause ya can do that with yer thumb still stuck in yer azzwhole.

One feature stopping me from switching to Moz Mail

[Lyrrad]

That is: A Rule that lets me Copy mail. I have not yet been able to determine how I can copy my mail coming in into another folder other than my Inbox. This way, I can get all of my mail in the Inbox, and delete them, while knowing that my mail is stored in another folder, which I can then back up.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to get this functionality in Mozilla Mail or Firebird?

Thanks.

Re:googling with moz

[Ragica]

Another reply points you to the mozilla googlebar. I've tried it an various other search add ons -- some of them are really good. But I always end up forgetting about them and just going back to using google searches from the address bar.

I love way the Mozilla does it, adding the search option to the bottom of the history bar. I like it a lot better than having to always insert a "gg:" in konqueror; or having to have a seperate input taking up space such as in Firebird or Opera...

It's just too convenient and efficient in every way. And google's web interface does everything i want... especially when you combine it with mozilla's amazingly handly type-ahead (is that what they call it) search...

Significant difference on slower machines

[hamster foo]

I've had pretty much a similar experience with speed gains being negligible when I'm on my laptop at home, but when I am at work where I'm saddled with an old P Pro with very little memory I can notice a significant difference between the two. So I guess if you're only interested is speed gains between the two and you're on a fast machine, it doesn't seem to matter.

The more I use Firebird the more I like it. The options dialog took some getting used to, but now find it to be a more intelligent layout. Grouping things like cache, cookies, history, etc. in one area with a clear all button available just makes sense. For me, Firebird just feels better than Mozilla interface wise.

Two Things I Like About Konqueror

[Gleng]

1) If you're using KDE, it's quicker than shit through a goose.
2) The font rendering is *way* nicer than Firebird.

The only thing I don't like is that it's a bit slow when opening things in a new tab, but hey, that's the trade off.

Some notes

[I KNOW MARTIAL ARTS]

You can get a google toolbar for IE.

Or... You can create a bookmark (this feature is in 1.4, not sure about 1.3) to "http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s". Go to manage bookmarks, and change the keyword to "google" for that bookmark. Now you can just type "google your search terms here."

And finally, instead of CTRL + SHIFT + O, try Ctrl+ L, just like IE.

Problems with .wmv

[theedge318]

Also a big problem is the fact that Apache and various other servers don't include the proper MIME type for .wmv files. The sysadmins have to manually add entries for the .wmv file to the server, otherwise it thinks that it is text/plain ... and when mozilla sees that ... it immediately renders the file as plaintext ... and renders it as such.

Much to the dismay of Joe User, it is Mozilla's position that they should not provide a work around for such a flagrant violation of HTTP rules ... and as such have assigned it to be part of their evangalism.

Sorry ... all you guys who want to look at .wmv PRON ... you are going to have to fire up IE (dunno if opera has a work around)

Re:Problems with .wmv

[Anonymous Coward]

Or wget it. Doesn't tie up a browser window or tab, doesn't stop when the browser crashes, and does continue if the server crashes.

Re:Problems with .wmv

[aldoman]

This is a major pain in the ass. But hey, it makes me want too stop watching WMV, which is good right...

Re:Problems with .wmv

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternately, right-click on your PRON link and choose "Save link as..." or something to that effect.

Re:Problems with .wmv

[Tarqwak]

> Also a big problem is the fact that Apache and various other servers don't include the proper MIME type for .wmv files

Mozilla mozdev ForceContentType project to the rescue...

And while we're at it, add to your Apache mime.types:

Per: libmng

image/png png
image/x-jng jng
video/x-mng mng

Per: MIME Type Settings for Windows Media Services

application/x-ms-wmz wmz
application/x-ms-wmd wmd
audio/x-ms-wma wma
audio/x-ms-wax wax
video/x-ms-asf asf asx
video/x-ms-wmv wmv
video/x-ms-wvx wvx
video/x-ms-wm wm
video/x-ms-wmx wmx

and:

video/x-msvideo avi

Infortunately, It destroys bookmarks

[Rooktoven]

in Mac OS X on NFS volumes. And for some reason the block keeps being removed.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2150 89

I just wish the Mozilla team would value cllected information.

Google bar

[Mark_MF-WN]

What's a google bar? Firebird already has a search bar right beside the address bar, which can be set to use any search engine you like. Does the IE "GoogleBar" do something more fancy than that?

Mozilla

[Mark_MF-WN]

What I like most about Mozilla is that it's helped to fire up competition in the browser market. The many Gecko browsers, the renewed interest in Opera, the success of Konqueror, and others; Mozilla has helped to fuel this renaissance.

MOD PARENT UP- please vote for 215089

[Rooktoven]

This is a serious problem that affects use on an enterprise scale.

Re:They call it Gentoo, source code and dependenci

[IM6100]

... EVERYTHING on Linux must be installed ONLY from the source code.

Ummm....

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

There's some good reference material

[Chuck Chunder]

and other goodies at zvon.org. The DOM specs at the W3 site really seem like they are for implementors rather than users.

Two bugs I'm waiting on...

[xtrucial]

1) Ability to retain no download manager history.
2) I know this may not be Mozilla's fault (I hear the issue is poorly written or non-existent headers), but .wmv's display as raw text instead of launching a Save As or a plugin.

All I'm asking

[Kynde]

Is to deliver some 1.4.x series... to stabilize the damn thing. ctrl-keypresses have had focus problems aver since alt-keypresses were changed to these windowsy version around 0.9ish and for keyboard oriented sw developers that is a HUUUGE usability issue. The as-you-type search hasn't worked since it got there, it suffers from focus aswell as what-fscking-ctrl-g-and-why-not-another-/-like-mor e-and-less-and-all-others

I mean, it's cool to go with new stuff, but you also need the STABLE branch. There's been quite enough features for quite some time. Java and flash have worked for ages, so what's stading in the way of it?

It's just that I don't understand how come something so essential as keyboard focus and shortcuts can be borked for soooo long. I mean, there are moments when you kick back and surf with the mouse hand alone, but by god there also moments when you do some power googling about some work related stuff with dozens of tabs and wishing one would never have to touch the damn rodent, ctrl-pgup/pgdn, ctrl-l, find-as-you-type and all that is there for it, but noh... they don't work well, and they never get fixed.

Re:All I'm asking

[Bernie]

1.4.x (like 1.0.x) is a "long-lived" release (ie even after the 1.5 it will be maintained). For stability and large-scale deployments 1.4 should be good for a fair while :)

I experience the slowdown also.

[Futurepower(R)]

I experience the slowdown also. One of the problems is identical with Windows XP and Knoppix: If you close and open a lot of instances and tabs, eventually all instances of Mozilla will crash. Before that, a Windows XP system will become slow. After a Mozilla or Firebird crash in Windows XP, Windows also becomes unstable, requiring a reboot. In Knoppix Linux, with no hard drive or other configuration, Linux remains stable after Moz crashes. During the test with Knoppix, the problem occurred reliably with 20 instances of Mozilla, each with 3 to 5 tabs, approximately.

I reported this during Mozilla 1.4. It is not fixed in Firebird 0.6 or in Mozilla 1.4 yet. Someone on Mozilla Bugzilla commented that the crashing might be due to a stack overflow.

There appears to be another problem that causes slowness. If you approach the limit of memory in Windows XP, and the system begins to use virtual memory from the hard disk, apparently there is a bug in Windows XP that causes XP to become corrupted. I have not done a definitive test, but obviously if Windows XP becomes unstable, there is a serious bug in the OS. (I know this is difficult to believe considering Microsoft's reputation for quality and attention to detail.) A program crashing is not supposed to crash the OS.

Re:I experience the slowdown also.

[shaitand]

The only problem with the second theory is that although linux doesn't turn on swap if it doesn't need it, this is not true of XP. XP swaps even if you have 2 gig of ram and NOTHING running beyond the OS.

Change "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" value

[starvingartist12]

This works in Mozilla Firebird 0.6, and it probably works for Mozilla as well.

Type "about:config" into the address and press enter. Then find the "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" preference and change the boolean value from "true" to "false"

Close the browser and restart. It should work the way you like it now. =)

Re:A conversation between two Mozilla programmers

[jesser]

Mozilla drivers set the date-based milestone schedule ahead of time.

Nor do they have to.

[Chuck Chunder]

I don't have to think or care about any "compatibility problems". When I pull stuff from Ximian Desktop it is just going to work.

Installing Mozilla + Realplayer + Java + Acrobat + Flash is easier on my Linux PC than it is on Windows because I can simply get it all from the same place in one easy hit, no need to hunt around individual sites, navigating download mirrors or trying to work out where Real have put the link that actually goes to the free version.

Try this Mozilla icon set

[starvingartist12]

Plug: My old Antiseptic Mozilla Icons are available from the deviantART website.

It's more of a classic pixel icon style, with an emphasis on a clear, easy-on-the-eyes, 16x16 pixel versions (as oppose to something blurry that was scaled down from a 32x32 version). =)

Screenshot

Re:A conversation between two Mozilla programmers

[NanoGator]

""Damn, the downloads have gone down. People are losing interest in Mozilla."
"Quick! Increment the version number!"
"There's a surge in downloads. It worked! We made Slashdot's front page again!""

Flamebait? Nobody with points found that amusing?

This is why we need more Free Software.

[jbn-o]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

I saw that same entry in the release notes and concluded that is why the community either needs a free software RealPlayer replacement or a free software video/audio solution to compete with RealPlayer so we can simply recompile the programs we need and become more self-sufficient.

I'm guessing Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis will come in handy toward reaching the second goal.

The shift-click should open a new window

[fluor2]

Anobody know how I enable that when shift-clicking on a link, it opens a new window like Internet Explorer (AND MOZILLA FIREBIRD!)?

Also, it would be nice if somebody knew how I disabled the auto-open (like zipfiles) of some files, and auto-save of some files (like exe files).

Re:The shift-click should open a new window

[janbjurstrom]

Umm.. ctrl-click?
In Prefs > Edit > Navigator > Tabbed browsing, you even get to decide whether to open a new win (bad) or a tab (good).
Now who's your daddy?

Re:The shift-click should open a new window

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not shift-click -> new window and ctrl-click -> new tab?

Prefs > Edit > Navigator > Tabbed browsing everytime you want to open a new window, and again when you want to open a tab, is just way too much clicking.

Why does mozilla use so much damn memory?

[escape]

When i have it running in windows it uses 36megs, thats more than every other app i have running combined. including msn messenger, aim, my virus scanner 2 explorer windows and one ie window. there is seriously something wrong with that. make no mistake i love mozilla because of its features i get annoyed when i havent used the browser window for a couple minutes and then when i go back to it, have to wait almost a minute for it to load back into memory so i can continue browsing.

Re:Why does mozilla use so much damn memory?

[bad_sheep]

Stop FUD !

On my NT4: I have 3 Tab open in Mozilla 1.4

Total: Memory 24400kb, (cache set to 16Mb)

I open 3 MSIE 6 windows to have the same pages open as Mozilla:
15848 Ko
+13480 Ko
+ 8084 Ko
---------
37412 Ko ==> Which one is heavier ?

I know it means nothing (benchmarks and so on suck), but it means IE is heavy as well... even maybe much more than Mozilla !

(and it does far less)

The most interresting part is that IE has already some shared libraries loaded with Windows, so I think the size of these shared libraries is not in counted there... so it is even more !

If you have not enough memory, it is maybe due to Windows which loads the IE libraries !

English spellchecker

[Zog The Undeniable]

I've RTFA, but can't find this. Is there a British English option, or does the spellchecker only know American English? You'd be surprised how many differences there can be in a lengthy e-mail.

Re:English spellchecker

[mlefevre]

The standard Mozilla builds only come with the US English dictionary but you can get a UK English dictionary (and dictionaries for around 20 other languages) from www.mozcafe.com/download

Re:English spellchecker

[jopet]

This page has instructions how to download and use the dictionaries for OpenOffice: http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/installation.html

voting is no needed.

[leuk_he]

First : Check your links, linking to bugzilla from /. does not work.

second, look at the discussion of bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id= 94035

Also a very high voted bug. (360 votes i believe)

note this comment there:

"mozilla.org is not a corporation nor is it a democracry (there's actually text on mozilla.org that talks about democracy) and you aren't paying most of the developers who volunteer their time and effort to contribute to this project. now it might be the case that there are ways for you to hire someone to do work for this project, in which case you are welcome to seek out such avenues, but you will not find them in this bug.

Please read: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette. html, especially
the part about no obligation.

If you think that this bug is important (perhaps because it has so many votes) then you are welcome to and encoraged to create a solution. once you've written the code to solve the bug you can attach it to the bug and seek reviews. at that point your comments in the bug are valid and worthy of note. until then please consider that you might not have anything useful o say. for example, i shouldn't have to write this comment, it's a waste of everyone's time. but people asked. "

So put your money/time where your mouth is.

Re:voting is no needed.

[bill_mcgonigle]

once you've written the code to solve the bug you can attach it to the bug and seek reviews. at that point your comments in the bug are valid and worthy of note.

Yes, except in this case, the decree is that one must write a MNG decoder that's smaller than the existing PNG decoder, an already highly tuned library. Translation: "Fine, Kyle, you can go to the Raging Pussies concert if you clean out the garage, shovel the driveway, and bring democracy to Cuba."

Also, the drivers are making the argument that MNG has to stay out due to embedding size concerns, when a configure option can turn it on or off. They also don't see the value of a one-time 200k download that could potentially save hundreds of megabytes of image download over time (MNG compresses GIF-89a-style stuff very well).

There's alot of politics, interpersonal bickering and cognative dissonance involved with this bug, none of which are well covered by the mozilla rules of etiquette.

New business proposition

[amcguinn]

That gives me an idea. Perhaps there's an opening in the market for a company that takes the source code written by the numerous free software authors, and compiles them all together in a way that makes sure that they all run together without problems.

That way, your mom, and people like her, wouldn't have to worry about compiler compatibility and stuff like that, they would just get a CD or set of CDs with an operating system that worked!

Do you think anyone would go for a setup like that?

Export restrictions

[KillerLoop]

"This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including Denied Parties, entities on the Bureau of Export Administration Entity List, and Specially D"esignated Nationals)."

Hey Mozilla project, care to host it somewhere a bit more... you know... free?

Re:Export restrictions

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course, there are no "Taliban controlled areas" any more!

Or so they said.

Re:Export restrictions

[jalefkowit]

Yes, because I'm certain that if you live in North Korea or "Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas)" your primary concern is how to get your hands on a fast, standards-compliant browser! :-)

Re:Export restrictions

[KillerLoop]

No, more along the lines of "who will be next on the list".

Re:Export restrictions

[jopet]

Obviously this is not something the Mozilla project invented, but the US government - why not go and complain to them? And obviously it will apply to any software that supports the same kind of encryption that Mozilla supports.

Filtering and spellchecking.

[Channard]

Plenty of nice features there, but the Baysian filtering alone is worth its weight in gold. Mozilla's email client is better at filtering out spam than most commercial standalone spam killers I've tried. As for spellchecking, how about an on the fly spellchecker that actually took in a dodgy l33t JeffK (www.somethingawful.com/jeffk) style webpage and translated it to readable english?

It should be called the DejaVu browser

[ader]

Hey, can we just go over the Firebird migration one more time?! Please? And then cover the AOL stuff? And maybe a bit about resource footprint compared to IE? I promise not to read any of it so we can repeat it all for the next beta.

Ade_
/

the only way

[lemody]

forget

* css-styles
* java-script

and you will have nice html-pages that every browser will display, even the most hated netscape 4.7 (if you do not use tables of course:)

Re:Change "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" valu

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a Firebird-only option. Right now there is no way of getting the old behaviour back in Mozilla.

Never heard of MNG

[RedLaggedTeut]

Is this an extension of PNG ?
I see that it stands for Multiple-image Network Graphics.

Besides, the US patent 4,558,302 on GIFs has run out; in 2004 it will run out in other countries as well. So the pressure to move to a new, exciting file format has kind of gone.

Not quite...

[Kjella]

I was under the impression that the difference was that firebird was actually intended to be used as a web browser and mozilla is not supposed to actually be used to browse the web... it's just supposed to be the core technology which is to be used in web browsers?

Mozilla is the whole package deal, browser, mail client, irc client, you name it. At the start there was Mozilla and nothing but it. However, some people felt this huge monolithic app didn't quite perform as well as it should, creating spin-offs such as Phoenix (now Firebird) as a separate web browser, and Thunderbird as a separate mail client.

According to the roadmap, Mozilla intends to change from the monolithic approach to a component approach, where Firebird would become "Mozilla Browser" and Thunderbird "Mozilla Mail". This was supposed to happen in 1.5, but I guess that's been delayed.

Kjella

Re:Not quite...

[Anonymous Coward]

They can only do this when the *bird apps have caught up to their respective equivalents in mainline mozilla, which is currently not the case (still lots of functionality missing or unpolished). I'd say it would be reasonable to expect the transition during 1.6 though.

even more fun

[SHEENmaster]

80286 laptop + 2400 baud + terminal software + phone number list of BBSes for the country

If only I had known about minix five years ago. (Yes, I was quite behind the times.)

Re:even more fun

[drinkypoo]

My 286 non-laptop with 1MB RAM and 40MB RLL disk (Seizegate) ran Xenix 2.3.2 from evil evil SCO, because I am from Santa Cruz and I know a bunch of SCO (well, ex-SCO) geeks. No room for X or a development system in 40 megs, though. Still, it was a much better way to get UUCP than UUPC on DOS (I did that too, on a PC-1) and it had a vt100+ansi console, so it was very slick as far as 16 bit PC operating systems go :)

But it's nothing *extra*

[Clansman]

I have IE here at work + the google bar, which gives my the right click search, the blog this, the block these popups etc etc.

So they are not cool tricks that are restricted to moz or anything else. They are just standard now across browsers.

Fact is that if we want people to use free software, then the key, unique selling point is that the software is free as in speech. Not particularly in feature sets for desktop apps.

J

Re:But it's nothing *extra*

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the spyware google bar. But then I suppose you don't mind that.

Re:But it's nothing *extra*

[adpowers]

They are just standard now across browsers.

And by standard you mean, of course, having to install an extra menu to use them. Just like Mozilla comes standard with Windows, all you have to do is download and install it!

Google toolbar

[alexo]

> Well thats all fine, but whats wrong with typing your search into the address bar and clicking "search"?

Um, highlighting?

Re:Google toolbar

[Jagasian]

You just double-click the address bar, type in your google search, and then click the "search" button. Hence you have the functionality of both an address bar and a google bar in one.

Note that double-clicking the address bar highlights all of the text in it, so when you type what you want... it overwrites the previous entry.

Re:Google toolbar

[isorox]

double click, or just press "F6, search term, up, enter"

Re:Google toolbar

[Jagasian]

You, good sir, have just doubled my efficiency!

Re:Google toolbar

[isorox]

cool, wanna send me half your wages :D?

How to get DOM interactivity

[judowillreturns]

I can work the DOM in both IE (I have 5.01) and Mozilla (Firebird 0.6).

// Set the variable m_games to the class menu_games
m_games = document.getElementById('menu_games')
// Display menu_games
// variable_containing_class.style.property_of_class= 'value'
m_games.style.display='block'

Works in both.

Mozilla likes onclick, IE likes onClick. onClick works in both. Same for onMouseover and other event handlers.

The only problem I have with mozilla is that sometimes {... ; position:absolute ; top:0px ;...} sometimes isn't actually positioned at the top. Which is a pain.

No!

[Ender Ryan]

No it's not. It's a horrible misfeature. When people link to images that are a specific resolution, they mean for them to be at that resolution(unless they're just stupid). For years, the company I work for has been producing images for clients to view. These images have to be readable, and they are quite large. Resizing them makes them totally unreadable.

Image resizing should be a non-default and obvious user option.

Browsers don't rewrite html to make web pages look different, and they shouldn't do that with images.

Anything that alters the way a user sees the web from what was intended should be a non-default user option.

That's just my ignorant opinion anyway :)

Yes, but something different happens...

[Futurepower(R)]

Yes, but something different happens when Windows XP swaps because it has reached the limit of free memory.

No Themes Updated Yet

[Washizu]

So far 1.5 seems cool, but I could only find one ugly theme for it. Wait a week or two for the theme authors to support 1.5b.

... What makes you think you can't?

[Balinares]

> I'd like that big projects like Moz or KDE be modular in terms
> of speed vs. functionalities

For KDE, start 'kpersonalizer', the third screen of the wizard lets you adjust a slidebar from 'Fast' to 'Heavily eye-candied'. Or you can switch to advanced mode and activate/disactivate the features on a case by case basis. This remains a bit superficial, but *does* have a significant effect on the desktop's responsiveness.

Mozilla's case is a bit different: the project's scope is twofold. 1) Produce a fast and stable HTML engine. This is Gecko. It is fast and stable. 2) Produce a full-featured environment using that engine. This is Mozilla itself. It's not what you want. Just keep Gecko in a different wrapping (Galeon...). That's how the Mozilla project does speed vs. functionalities, and it IS modular.

I Won't Switch From Opera Until...

[vigilology]

...it uses anti-aliased fonts by default, without recompiling it.

Re:I Won't Switch From Opera Until...

[jopet]

There is a bug on this ( http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176382 ) that also gives an URL that has regular nightly builds ( http://www.hut.fi/~tontti/mozilla/ ). Mybe there will sometime be 1.5b buils (or there: http://www.scottbolander.com/mozilla-xft.html )

They're working on it

[Anthracks]

As per the roadmap, the plan is to eventually to get a common runtime environment that all Mozilla-based apps can run within (Firebird, Thunderbird, Chatzilla, the Sunbird calendar, etc). This will eliminate the problem of all these programs sharing significant amounts of code and wasting memory/disk space. It'll take a while though, and to be fair neither of these programs is claiming to be at release quality anyway (Firebird is working toward version 0.7, and Thunderbird is closing in on 0.2). Give them a chance, I'm confident that once these changes get made we'll see a huge reduction in bloat.

No, don't forget "document.all"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very nice an' idealistic advice, but you shouldn't *forget* document.all. It's the best way to detect when someone is browsing using IE.

The CSS deficiencies of IE are really quite dire nowadays. You may call it "pushing the envelope", but isn't that exactly why standards are still being developed, rather than just stuck at HTML3.2?

A couple of examples:
- IE's handling of 'position:fixed' - if you detect IE, you'll want to get rid of this stylesheet rule somehow.
- "event.srcElement" vs "parameterName.target" for event handlers

Both of these have been issues for me within the past month.

Re:Opera ripped right through that heavy javascrip

[Anonymous Coward]

jeez, man.. don't have to get all cranky

Look into alternatives

[Anthracks]

I'd like that big projects like Moz or KDE be modular in terms of speed vs. functionalities : if I have a powerful machine, I'll want the super 3D web-o-matic, and if I run it on an old machine, I have an option to do without and I can stay at a level of niceties and support corresponding to the speed of the machine.

I believe that's why Mozilla Firebird (a leaner, browser-only version of Mozilla and the future of the project) supports the concept of extensions, of which there are now over 100. These are all non-critical features that have been stripped out and made available to those who need them. And Firebird is still months away from a final release; performance, UI and bloat-reduction are top priorities and will only get better as it nears 1.0. I don't think Mozilla is the tool you're looking for; give Firebird (or another stripped down Mozilla version) a chance.

Re:bunghole

[Anonymous Coward]

woohoo!

Relevent bug is #16409

[Anthracks]

There is another bug posted in this thread, but I think the best match is actually bug 16409 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16409 ), "Invoke spell check in browser (multiple form fields)". I encourage those interested in seeing this feature to get a Bugzilla account and vote for it, or if you're programming-inclined, dive in and write some code ;).

It's off by default

[Anthracks]

I normally use Firebird, but I downloaded a Mozilla build yesterday to check on a bug and it looks like resizing is off by default (and I agree it's a fairly stupid feature, but I guess since IE has it enough people clamored for it and it's an option now).

Copied without Permission

[PetoskeyGuy]

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

mod parent up

[aytekin]

that is one great idea! Of course it should be an optional feature that you can disable or enable.

Why not add JPEG2000?

[cheekyboy]

I want jpeg2000 adopted as standard now.

It rocks.

We don't need a spellchecker for textareas.

[devphil]

All we need is the ability to invoke arbitrary text editors.

1. Put initial contents of form in temp file.
2. Run $users_favorite_editor on temp file.
3. Wait for child process to finish.
4. Read in temp file, replace contents of textarea.

Umpteen million text editors, most of which have some form of spell checking available, even if it's just "pipe contents through spell(1)". Mozilla doesn't need to reinvent that wheel, or any other text-editing wheel.

Re:We don't need a spellchecker for textareas.

[mattdm]

There's an RFE for that, too. Bugzilla #13474. I agree that it'd be *nice* to not reinvent the wheel, but you have to balance that against the desirability of in-place editing. That whole user-pluggable-components thing never did take off, and until we've got that, having to pop up a separate window to enter text in a textarea would be annoying.

g is better than d

[timothy]

or maybe it's not ... but 1 out of 10 fingers surveyed preferred to introduce that particular typo.

timothy

That's not a bad idea...

[RandyOo]

And presumably you used your windows laptop to post that comment?

Re:That's not a bad idea...

[the_2nd_coming]

yes :-)

as you can see, I need it as well :-p

Same with .MSI

[klep]

Whenever you try to download an MSI installer file, it will display as plain text.

But then again, it's a good thing to save MSI's to harddrive before you use them to install anything.

RPMs?

[Bob Uhl]

Anyone know why they've stopped making RPMs? Some of us like having mozilla installed in standard locations, and don't like having to recreate e.g. our plugin dirs.

Sure, I could stick with 1.4, but it is truly evil--I end up having to quit and restart several times daily due to some odd bug or another which causes me to need to double-follow links.

Errant tab behaviour

[jaylene_slide]

My main issue with the 1.5 version of Mozilla is the tab behaviour. Now all of a sudden, loading a group of tabs REPLACES all of the previous tabs that were loaded, removing however much information had been gathered previously.

What appears to happen is, the removed group of tabs is relegated to the back button of the newly loaded tabs. I suppose that someone using a bradband connection might not be concerned about having to reload the entire group of tabs again, not to mention losing the ability to have all of the tabs loaded in a single window, but it's unfortunate that this seems to be the assumption made for every user.

Doubtless, there must be some logical explanation for this change, but I'm at a loss to understand what that might be. I'd seen some discussion in the BugZilla forums about the conflict between loading tabs to the left or to the right of the current tab. I think it should be to the right, but that's a side issue.

Make it configurable please, even if I have to edit about:config or somesuch. Let the user choose their preferred method.



"If you serve people crap all day there is no reason for a competitor to serve them steak when they know you will eat crap. Microsoft has proven that people will eat crap." -- HOM from #macobserver

slide

The Mirror

[Walrus99]

Well, that reflects the use of browsers in Germany or by German speakers, not their use world-wide or in the US. Germans tend to be better educated and would be more likely to use a faster, better, cheaper browser.

spell checker in textarea widget

[neves]

There's a lot of options of email packages with spell check. What is really necessary is a TEXTAREA and richtext widget with a spell check. It would be a great boost to the "two way web", were users are not just consumers of information, but also the producers.

Imagine Slashdot and all the blogs out there without spell errors?

Got Camino

[Walrus99]

Tried the new Mozilla on OSX, but I didn't like the "look and feel" and it didn't import my bookmarks from Chimera. So I got Camino which is what I am typing this on. Seems to work as well as Chimera, not sure why the name change. Will run it for a while. Chimera had a way of crashing unexpectedly, only every few days or so, will see if Camino does any better. According to freetranslation.com Camino means road, sorry to see the mythological creature motif go. Griffin might have been good if they had to get rid of Chimera for some sort of copyright infringement.

a VERY simple question

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok this is absolutely not meant as a troll, but what reasons would you give me as someone who knows almost nothing about mozilla for switching to it from IExplorer 6 ? When you come to think about it that is the simple question the developers will have to answer if they want to get people to switch. I know that Microsoft will no longer support further standalone versions in the future, but for now IE 6 does the job. That doesn't mean I don't support Mozilla - I do - ANY competition is great, and Mozilla can only get better. Another important question : I'd love to try Mozilla to see for myself but I'm worried that it might "take over" my system as the default browser or mess other things up.

I actually also use Opera 6.05 and love it for tabbed browsing etc., but it has it's own niche and I use Explorer mostly because Opera doesn't always display pages correctly.

Re:Change "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" valu

[Ark42]

No, this config option does not exist in 1.5b, and setting it manually does not work either. Regardless this behaviour is so broken and even if some few people want it, it should NOT be the default option at all. Groupmarks are NOT about saving the state of the tabs, they are about bookmarking more then one page at a time.
It is rediculous to think that groupmarks should work any differently then normal bookmarks. A bookmark will replace the current tab with a new page, all other tabs remain. A groupmark should do the same, either replace the current tab and insert new tabs to the right, or overwrite tabs towards the right appending new tabs to the end if needed.
The entire point and all of the power behind groupmarks was being able to add more then one page to your current view. This ability is completely removed by this bug.
If you want a clean window, press control+N first, if you dont want to overwrite anything, just append to the end, press control+T first.
On a side note, control+clicking a bookmark/groupmark or middleclicking it should open it in a new tab, just as if you pressed control+T right before opening the bookmark. v1.4 and prior's behavious should be what happens if you middleclick the groupmark to open it in a new tab.

Someone already did

[lorcha]

See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574# c14 (no clickable link, 'cuz clickable links to bugzilla from slashdot don't work).

You'll notice that someone implementing it didn't really help.

Almost as fast as IE?

[Inoshiro]

IE's an OS component -- it loads at boot time, consuming ram in the background always (ala Mozilla's quickstart). On my machine, Windows takes about 1.5 minutes to boot. Firebird loads in 20 seconds under Linux. I think that's a pretty big difference in speed.