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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."
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.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
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.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
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 :)
its a horrible 'feature' that needs to be disabled by default.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
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.
> 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).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.