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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."
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.
When it gets a version number a little higher than 0.1.
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/
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.
Thunderbird 0.2 RC1 is available now (for Windows, other builds should follow shortly). It's had a good size reduction and speed increase.
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!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
Um...there is a bugfixed stable version for innocent users out there. It's called 1.4.
I still use it though, 0.1 means nothing to me, since it's based on near current Mozilla code.
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.
More of my thoughts
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.
"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 ;)
How about this google bar?
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
My other car is first.
Clickie:
http://googlebar.mozdev.org
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today. here's a story on it
0.2 Release Candidate is out.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
"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
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!
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
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
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!"
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
/proc/cpuinfo
...
$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 348.491
Startup time < 5s
They are colored in Composer. (The tool for creating webpages) So, you are in fact stupid. =) j.k.
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.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today
Actually, it was a release candidate for 0.2. Anyhow, 0.2 is certainly close.
So there.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
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.
-- HG Pennypacker, wealthy industrialist and philanthropist
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.
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
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.
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.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
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!!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
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.
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?
War is necrophilia.
browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing = false
viola.
bananas like monkeys.
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.
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.;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
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).
Join Tor today!
Fire/Thunderbird might be where the action is... but I don't want action. I want a stable application that's fully featured.
... 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.
Actually, Mozilla tends to be where new development goes
Presumably Firebird will be the main development trunk, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe by the Firebird 0.7 release.
----- rL
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)?
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?????
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.
Tools > Options > Advanced > Uncheck "Open links in background"
Mark Erikson
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).
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I think --enable-plaintext-editor-only prevents midas (wysiwyg editing in html forms) from working.
The shareholder is always right.
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. =)
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.
The shareholder is always right.
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.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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?
668.5
First : Check your links, linking to bugzilla from /. does not work.
= 94035
. html, especially
second, look at the discussion of bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id
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
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.
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.
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...
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
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!
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 :)
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).
. 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.
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
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
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.
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.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.