Slashdot Mirror
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."
When does the mail client fork?
This guy is way out there
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?
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.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
... 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
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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.
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Actually, AOL donated $2 million!
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
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.
Everything will be taken away from you.
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
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
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.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
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.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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.
.mozconfig?
m an,-content-packs,-helpa s,p3p,pref,transformiix,universalchardet,typeahead find,webservices
I like the new features. Are there any important changes I should make to
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,-venk
ac_add_options --enable-extensions=cookie,wallet,xml-rpc,xmlextr
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
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
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?
how about a spell checker for Navigator?
/. form. I am in withdrawls when I am on my windows laptop.
I have gotten very used to Safari checking spelling as I type into a
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
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.
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
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...
The word bloat has been overused to the point of meaninglessness by this point. Can we all just agree to stop using it?
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.
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.
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
Morphing Software
If there are any 'fixes' for these please let me know.
... So the mozilla team does know how to do it ...
... 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.
... Why can't I tell mozilla what program to run when I want to email someone? Why can't I specify evolution, kmail or ?
... If you have more annoyances please reply to this.. :-) I'll make a list somewhere.
... 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.
-FavIcon's in bookmarks/Toolbars either doesn't work or only works sometimes. They seem to work all the time in Firebird/Phoenix
-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
-MNG Support is dying/dead!
-Under Linux
-I'm sure there are others
P.S. I use Mozilla everyday, all day long
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.
Palin...
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.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
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.
... and as such have assigned it to be part of their evangalism.
... 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)
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
Sorry
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
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.
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.