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

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.

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: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.

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 :)

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?

[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

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?

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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!

Ahem...

[Nailer]

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

Pardon?

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).

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?