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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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today. here's a story on it
Google Toolbar 2.0 includes an excellent pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer. You can download it here.
"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
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.
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
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.
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today
Actually, it was a release candidate for 0.2. Anyhow, 0.2 is certainly close.
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
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.
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...
--
Power to the Peaceful
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.
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.
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!
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)?
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 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
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.
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