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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."

21 of 674 comments (clear)

  1. Beta with bugfixes?? by maliabu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  2. Wow by digital+bath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  3. I still doesn't have the feature I want by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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 ...

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    1. Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, how about you buy ne the raisin wheats then, if it's so cheap?

      I'll tell you what : Microsoft and hardware vendors have managed to convince people that computers have a finite lifetime because there's a universal intangible rule that says software gets more and more bloated. And Linux people, in true I-copy-Microsoft, are doing exactly the same thing. It's pathetic.

      I'd like that big projects like Moz or KDE be modular in terms of speed vs. functionalities : if I have a powerful machine, I'll want the super 3D web-o-matic, and if I run it on an old machine, I have an option to do without and I can stay at a level of niceties and support corresponding to the speed of the machine. Is that unreasonable? It should be easier to downgrade than the reverse.

      You wouldn't accept it if gas stations used a new gasoline for cars every 5 years and you had to buy a new car and junk the previous one for nothing, I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can.

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  4. Problem with browsers that aren't IE. by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  5. Re:Great, but.. by pierre.ch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. color in HR and BR tags? by Lord+Ender · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  7. Re:speed by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  8. what a long strange trip its been ... by qoquaq · · Score: 5, Interesting
    mozilla has come a long way. I began with version 0.5 and have used the mozilla browser almost exclusvely at work since. Through the "dog-food" bugs and a few bug reports, it is still my default browser and browser of choice. Mozilla has pushed the web browsing experience forward and it's current feature set is benchmark. It is this feature set which keeps gaining loyal users. Netscape's decision to open Netscape source turned a lot of heads and helped "sell" the concept of open/free software in a corporate setting.

    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

  9. Re:And they call this an upgrade? by foonf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  10. Question: Building Firebird from CVS? by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    I like the new features. Are there any important changes I should make to .mozconfig?

    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,-venkm an,-content-packs,-help
    ac_add_options --enable-extensions=cookie,wallet,xml-rpc,xmlextra s,p3p,pref,transformiix,universalchardet,typeahead find,webservices
    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

  11. 'Der Spiegel' logs show Mozilla+Netscape at 15% by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:speed by shaitand · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  13. Re:And they call this an upgrade? by kcbrown · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    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.

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  14. Re:Off-road by shaitand · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  15. how about a spell checker for by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 3, Interesting

    how about a spell checker for Navigator?

    I have gotten very used to Safari checking spelling as I type into a /. form. I am in withdrawls when I am on my windows laptop.

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  16. Wait a while by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Wait a while by shaitand · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As I said in my previous post, I experienced this under both window and linux. And on different machines for that matter.

      P.S. On windows you can get most of that memory back. Simply take the office startup out with msconfig or regedit... that will give you back up to 30% of your total system resources on boot.

      Actually in my experience with windows EVERYTHING is paged. Even when you've booted with all startup applications removed swap is in use for the OS! It's really pretty sick. The more memory you have, the more swap the system uses.

      It makes me sick that I have to spend my days fixing windows crap (we sell and support linux as well... but alas, although we have lots and lots of linux out there, I rarely have to touch a linux machine, except patching which I can do from our office.).

      Nonetheless this particular problem with the full blown mozilla occurs on multiple systems and occurs on linux as well as windows. Some day I'll track it down, there must be memory leak or some such.

  17. Re:speed by oogoliegoogolie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  18. Ruined bookmark groups :( by Ark42 · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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 :(

  19. Mozilla Annoyances by Palin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If there are any 'fixes' for these please let me know.

    -FavIcon's in bookmarks/Toolbars either doesn't work or only works sometimes. They seem to work all the time in Firebird/Phoenix ... So the mozilla team does know how to do it ...

    -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 ... 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.

    -MNG Support is dying/dead!

    -Under Linux ... Why can't I tell mozilla what program to run when I want to email someone? Why can't I specify evolution, kmail or ?

    -I'm sure there are others ... If you have more annoyances please reply to this.. :-) I'll make a list somewhere.

    P.S. I use Mozilla everyday, all day long ... 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.

    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...