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.

Re:speed

[OzRoy]

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.

Re:speed

[Joe Tie.]

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.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

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.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

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.

Re:speed

[critter_hunter]

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.

Re:speed

[edwdig]

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.

Re:speed

[toddestan]

IE is only the fastest because it cheats by loading itself up when Windows boots up, so when you click on the icon the browser instantly appears. Of course, by having it load up like tha a means longer boot time, and a more sluggish system by having all that crap in memory (not really an issue with 2+ Ghz processors with 512MB of ram, but try comparing IE-free Windows 95 vs. 98 on a P133 with 24MB of ram and it's very obvious.)

Once it's loaded up though, IE is not that fast loading and rendering pages. Opera 7 easily smokes it.

Re:speed

[shaitand]

aye, it'd take one hell of a table to get it up to 5mb if it weren't autogenerated. With autogenerated crap code it's hard telling how it would render in a browser that actually expects real html and scripting languages.

Take a look at two identitcal pages, one produced in frontpage, one produced in publisher, one hand-coded, and one produced with the built in mozilla editor.

the largest of all will be the publisher output, pretty much everytime. If you actually break this code down and analyze it (should take a few hours for a simple single page) you'll never quite figure out how it manages to render... or how a table of twenty links can result in 1mb of html and CSS and vbscript!

Frontpage will do significantly better than publisher with the same page. Although you'll still never figure out how it renders at least the output will be more like 100k.

Moz generator will do better than either, it will produce real code, crappily formatted and with about the same uneeded junk you'd expect if you wrote the app to generate the code yourself. This should be under 15k

hand coded you'll end up with something about 1-2k max, it will render lightning fast (compared with the other options at least).

Somehow I suspect what we'll find if we look at how these things render is that firebird will win on the real pages that actually have correct code that has some logical excuse for rendering. Frontpage and publisher output will load faster in IE than firebird (although that garbage won't load fast in ANYTHING).

Re:speed

[oogoliegoogolie]

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.

Re:speed

[Jerk City Troll]

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).

Re:speed

[Disevidence]

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.

Re:speed

[AceMarkE]

Tools > Options > Advanced > Uncheck "Open links in background"

Mark Erikson

Re:speed

[aldoman]

This is because it saves every tab entry too the HDD. I noticed this too, but there is a settinging in 'advanced'. Can't remember what exactly it's called, but it's something like 'Tab Crash Restoration'. Turn it off and you'll be back too fast firebird again...

Re:speed

[seanmeister]

Honestly what can you do in Moz, that you can't do in firebird?

Inspect the DOM of pages and XUL interface components - FB doesn't include Mozilla's excellent DOM inspector!

Re:speed

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.

Opera's JS console sucks ass. It's actually worse than MSIE's.

The problem, however, is not so much writing JS for Opera as it is the crap scripts that get written in general.

Read this next sentence very carefully: Clientside scripting should NOT depend on UA strings -- you should do object detection, which can't be fooled by UA spoofing in the first place. The browser either supports the required object/method/property, or it doesn't. ID'ing Mozilla as MSIE won't fix scripts that depend upon document.all, for example. Clueful scripters that actually think about what they're doing do NOT write "Mozilla JavaScript" or "MSIE JavaScript" -- they write to DOM in which case about 90% of cross-browser problems vanish. (Except for MSIE's crap event model and a few other things here and there, which Opera unfortunately tends to copy.)

These things being said, I happen to like Opera a great deal. It's fast and it's CSS support kicks butt. Not as good as Mozilla's, but very nearly so (although you'd think it'd be BETTER than anyone else's since Hakon Lie runs the company -- figure that one out, I can't).

My one big beef with it is that it doesn't support a big chunk of CSS-DOM -- no document.styleSheets collection. And neither getComputedStyle() nor the MSIE pseudo-equivalents seem to work, either. Working around these issues is a major pain in the ass for the kind of stuff I've been doing lately, which involves a lot of changing style rules on the fly. It means I have to restrict myself to working with style rules written inside STYLE elements and work with their contents using string methods and regexps -- and I can't use linked stylesheets at all if I want this stuff to work with Opera. This is pretty silly, since this defeats the raison d'etre for using stylesheets in the first bloody place.

Opera's still way ahead of MSIE in actual CSS support, tho.

(The preceding message brought to you by The Campaign to End User-Agent Spoofing and User-Agent Detection.)

Off-road

[Henry V .009]

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.

Re:Off-road

[lordcorusa]

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.

Re:Off-road

[RickHunter]

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.

Re:Off-road

[shaitand]

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?

Re:Off-road

[Palin]

No, Gecko is the 'core technology'. Mozilla is the 'all-in-one' Web Browser/Email/Chat/Etc/Etc/Etc client that was meant to replace the Netscape 'Suite', called Communicator.

For Firebird and Mozilla use the Gecko rendering engine, along with Galeon and a few other 'browsers'.

Re:Off-road

[Planesdragon]

You're thinking of Gecko, the rendering engine that's behind Mozilla, Firebird, et al.

Mozilla has always intended to be a browser suite--it's the OSS version of Netscape, after all. Mozilla.org has meant for the tech to be taken and used everywhere, but Mozilla-the-browser is still a logical first project, and, as this release shows, it's very much a valid and valuable one.

to recap:

Mozilla.org is the company.

Gecko is the HTML rendering engine.

Mozilla-the-suite is a Netscape Communicator replacement.

Firebird, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are de-bloated standalone apps, based on Gecko and other Mozilla.org projects.

Re:Thunderbird

[quantum bit]

When it gets a version number a little higher than 0.1.

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:Great, but..

[Gherald]

> 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.

Exactly! You have the same mindset as corporations. By the time people like you think it is worth upgrading from 1.4 they will not be moving to 1.5, because it won't be the latest stable build.

Instead, you and them will be going directly to 1.6 or 2.0, which will incorporate Thunder/Firebird.

My point is: No one will ever care about 1.5

Re:Great, but..

[pierre.ch]

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.

Re:Great, but..

[rlowe69]

Fire/Thunderbird might be where the action is... but I don't want action. I want a stable application that's fully featured.

Actually, Mozilla tends to be where new development goes ... at least up until now. For example, I've been waiting for NTLM authentication in Firebird for about 4 months now ... Firebird still hasn't completely caught up to the 1.5 Mozilla branch yet.

Presumably Firebird will be the main development trunk, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe by the Firebird 0.7 release.

Beta with bugfixes??

[maliabu]

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?

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[be-fan]

Huh? It features lots of bugfixes over the alpha version that led up to the beta. It is not yet stable enough for regular people to use. If you want stable, then use the stable 1.4 release!

Re:Beta with bugfixes??

[marvin2k]

Um...there is a bugfixed stable version for innocent users out there. It's called 1.4.

Good

[SpineZ]

I'm glad to see that they are still making headway with Mozilla. However, I recently installed MozillaFirebird, and I won't be looking back anytime soon. I suggest you give it a try. Also, check out MozillaThunderbird for your mail needs.

http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/
http://mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

Re:Good

[rmohr02]

Also, see why people are switching to Mozilla Firebird.

Re:Good

[error502]

Google Toolbar 2.0 includes an excellent pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer. You can download it here.

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.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[OzRoy]

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.

Neded feechor.

[Anonymous Coward]

A speelchacker for any tects entery.

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 :)

Re:Spell checker

[Swaffs]

That's a good idea. Maybe we could even get Malda to use it.

Also, check out the latest Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

Thunderbird 0.2 RC1 is available now (for Windows, other builds should follow shortly). It's had a good size reduction and speed increase.

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

Re:is the image resize still active?

[FryGuy1013]

browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing = false

viola.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[thumperward]

Still looks like a map to me. I can read the important text.

Whereas if I turn OFF image resizing, I can't even see the store!

Well, that's a useability improvement.

- Chris

Re:is the image resize still active?

[MenTaLguY]

I don't think it would be so bad if it used some sort of averaging/interpolation.

Re:is the image resize still active?

[cheekyboy]

1. its interpolation resizing is crap!, not like photoshop, its hardly perfect.

2. when you have massive porn images, you might want to zoom in to the good bits!!!!

3. why cant i resize/zoom a whole webpage like ACROBAT, ie resize all fonts by X percent, and resize all images X percent at the same time too.

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?

[metamatic]

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?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[imnoteddy]

This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.

Until Linux gets more stable, not changing libraries willy-nilly, it is still just a hobbyist's OS.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[foonf]

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.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[earlytime]

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)?

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[kcbrown]

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.

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[foonf]

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).

Re:And they call this an upgrade?

[pe1chl]

This just demonstrates that the plugin interface is broken.

The problem of interfacing GCC 2.95 compiled code to GCC 3.x compiled code should be fixed, preferably once for all cases (it also affects kernel modules, for example) and if that is not possible it should be fixed inside Mozilla or in a "shim" plugin.

And while that is done, a new interface should be defined that does not depend on things like this, and the plugin coders should be motivated to move to that new interface.

Do you think the providers of binary-only plugins will be helping is for much longer when we lock them out at arbitrary moments and require them to spend work on building a new distribution package? As it is now, the percentage of plugins supported on Linux is already relatively small. Moves like this are certainly not going to make it better.

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, or will they just kill their browser product by saying "sorry guys, no more Acrobat PDF viewing!"???

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.

Wow

[digital bath]

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.

Re:Wow

[GiMP]

"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

Re:Wow

[Disevidence]

If your only looking for a browser, there is no really no special need to download Mozilla, Firebird should work well by itself, as it has a much smaller footprint and load time.

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.

I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

... 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 ...

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[dracocat]

which is booting in less than a century on my PII-266 / 96M of ram.

Here, this one might work better for you.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[thumperward]

Firebird? Galeon? Epiphany? Is software meant to stay usable on a P-266 for its entire lifetime?

Go buy a packet of Raisin Wheats, dude. They're giving away Athlon XPs in every packet just now. Oh, and they actually changed the formula of the cereal from wheat-wrapped raisins to sticks of special edible DDR RAM because it's cheaper to produce.

- Chris

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[fupeg]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 348.491
...

Startup time < 5s

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[thumperward]

Right. And who, exactly, is *forcing* you to upgrade your browser?

Stick with Netscape 3. So it won't display modern pages properly - tough. At least it's fast. In order to make it a better browser, and easier to hack in the future, its requirements have increased. Firebird loads faster on my machine (by about thirty seconds, if memory serves) now than Netscape did in 1996 on whatever mechanical adding device I was using to access the web at the time. It's also a far more capable application.

Computer parts are cheaper than groceries. If you want to get your money's worth out of parts that should quite rightly be put to better use elsewhere than a modern desktop machine then that's fine, but whining about it when upgrading costs less than a night on the tiles is silly. Intel conspiracies my foot.

- Chris

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[LordMyren]

web browsing hasnt evolved much since the pentium 100 was a new born baby. css2 is the most recent milestone, aside from the oodles of streaming porn, neither of which should be insufferable under a pentium 133 or better (assuming your normal postage stamp grade 320 x 240 video).

there's no reason for a browser to require twice the processor it used to, if you disable cpu intensive options. just because computers are fast as all getout does not mean we should start accepting shitty code that takes three times the machine to run, just because its "better" (mouse gestures and tabbing... thats about it really for me).

96 mb of ram is a metric f-ton if your doing anything reasonable (ie: not kde or xp). pentium 266 should be nothing to sneeze at, not by a long shot, especially for web browsing. i rememeber advising people they didnt need a 350mhz for just web browsing, its overkill, hell, i remember telling that to my parents last month. they hardily agree and are pleased as punch with my old dp 366. many embedded system style applications are running even less ram; you want to tell them to upgrade?

apps obsoleting hardware that used to do the same task fine is bullshit, no matter how you dice it. people shouldnt have to move over to make way for progress. on the flip side, i understand "dont upgrade if it aint broke", but i simply dont see new browsers having any excuse to use worlds of resources to do the same mundane web browsing. its reasonable to expect we get the latest compliant browsers for our old machines and have them still run fine, so long as we dont start breaking out the auto-smooth scroll while anti-aliase zooming all tabs context menu option.

Re:I still doesn't have the feature I want

[LordMyren]

modularity is not good enough.

software should not run features that are not asked for. "convenience" features should be disablable.

its understandable that some apps require large amounts of computational power, no matter what. but when your talking about something thats remain virtually unchanged in the past nine years aside from css2, there is no need to up the requisit power level.

Multi Computer Bookmark Management

[Yazheirx]

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.

Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Chess_the_cat]

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.

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[jrockway]

How about this google bar?

http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[CyberMatt]

Googlebar extension for mozilla, mozilla-based browsers:

Clickie:
http://googlebar.mozdev.org

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[Malcontent]

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?

Re:Problem with browsers that aren't IE.

[glsunder]

Mozilla also has a nice search feature where you can highlight text, then right click on it and search for that text. It also has a search button which searches for whatever is typed in the address bar. Through preferences, you can change the search type to google, as well as numerous others.

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.

related to bug #85799

[mattdm]

Check Bugzilla #85799 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85799 -- direct bugzilla links from /. not allowed), a RFE to make form textareas able to act like more powerful text editors. A spellchecker could definitely be part of that.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[marvin2k]

Netscape/AOL is no longer supporting Mozilla, but Mozilla still exists.

This isn't correct. From the press release:

"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 ;)

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

[russellh]

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.

Hey Overly Critical Guy, I was going to write a nice, well thought-out response but then I thought, so what?

so my response is: so what?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no access to the source, and cannot change things if you don't agree with their direction. Now THAT is evil!

First of all, this really isn't directly related to source code availablity.

Second, in this case it's just the opposite. The closed-source model forces vendors to maintain binary compatibility at pain of death. For browser and other plugins, that's a good thing.

In the real world, not everyone decides to switch compilers at the exact same time. Not everyone CAN use GCC 3.2, and they also need to support customers with every other current version of GCC.

Open Sourcers like to say "Use The Source", but in reality that's an engineering shortcut borne out of a student userbase that reinstalls every 6 months. As more corporate users with slowly-moving configs get on board Linux, things will have to change. Support of 10 year old binaries is not an uncommon thing in the business world.

The overall benefits of source code availablity are not an excuse for crappy, fluctuating ABIs.

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.

Re:The amusing part

[deek]

• 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.

Hey, I agree with you. The common computer user should not need to compile anything for their computer.

But the common computer user should also _not_ be using a beta version of Mozilla distributed by mozilla.org. The common computer user can quite happily use the version of Mozilla that is compiled by their distribution. Therefore it's the distributions responsibility to make sure of compatibility.

color in HR and BR tags?

[Lord Ender]

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.

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[nazsco]

There may be a display option that shows the line breaks, like GTK does. I'm still downloading to find out exactly why that's useful (since i'm a mozilla junkie I don't need to find interesting things on the releases note to get the new version) "releases notes ...lemme me see... ahn... no, no crash upon start up. Fine, let's install!"

Re:color in HR and BR tags?

[romcabrera]

They are colored in Composer. (The tool for creating webpages) So, you are in fact stupid. =) j.k.

Re:Thunderbird

[Senator_B]

Version 0.2 was just released for windows today. here's a story on it

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[Izanagi]

Actually, AOL donated $2 million!

Re:Thunderbird

[Penguin2]

Whenever it creates a child process

Re: A question...

[error502]

So what does this story have to do with Apple!?

Mozilla runs on Mac OS X. Duh! Here's even a friendly link to download it!

It's hard to win a rigged game.

[SHEENmaster]

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.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[edwdig]

MSIE isn't violating the TCP standard. It's using a feature of HTTP called Keep-Alive. The connections really do exist, even if you're using Apache or any other halfway decent http server.

Mozilla does it too. Check Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> HTTP Networking. There's a checkbox for keepalive there.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Malcontent]

"no other browser compares the blinding speed of lynx."

Open up preferences in mozilla. Go to appearance->colors and choose "Use my chosen colors, ignoring the colors and background image specified".

Under privacy and security->Images turn off images.

Voila a superfast browser a-la lynx or netscape 3.x but with HTML support.

If you want you can even specify a black background and white text ;)

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[srn_test]

No, it's not.

Everything does HTTP keepalives. IE+IIS does something dodgier at the TCP layer where it doesn't send the FIN-ACK to tear down the connection, and can thus skip the SYN at the beginning of the next connection.

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[natmsincome.com]

MSIE actually does break TCP/IP. Here's some links from an old slashdot story.

It's not "HTTP - Keep-Alive" which is similar. The difference is that Keep-Alive doesn't close a connection between files which is fine. IE on the other hand make a request without creating a connection (Like UDP) and at the end doesn't close it. This makes IIS faster (less overhead) but other servers slower as the broswer times out before it gets the page and the server has to time out before it closes the connection.

Why IE Is So Fast ... Sometimes
Article it linked to

Summary:
this isn't the same deal. based on the TCP specs, here is what a server (or client, for that matter) is supposed to do when it wants to close the connection: 1) send FIN 2) wait for ACK 3) wait for FIN 4) send an ACK if the server never receives the FIN in step 3, it assumes that the client wants to keep the connection open for some reason. this is _correct behaviour_ with regards to the TCP spec. if this article is correct, MS is merely exploiting the TCP spec to its advantage. yes, it's dirty and wastes resources, but it works. the thing that bothers me tho, is this is what should be happening on the server end (a non-IIS server, that is): 1) send FIN 2) wait for ACK 3) ok, got ACK, now wait for FIN 4) (after timeout) hmm, no FIN, must have been lost, so we'll resend our FIN 5) client ACKs that FIN, but doesn't send its FIN 6) server thinks the response FIN is lost again, so probably resends its FIN

Re:It's hard to win a rigged game.

[Jugalator]

And the equivalent procedure in Opera, for users of that one :-)

View -> Styles -> User Mode -> Emulate Text Browser.

... or use ...

View -> Styles -> User Mode -> Nostalgia.

... to get a C64 look & feel. ;-) (for those of us who liked the Contiki look, but want it with better HTML support, hehe)

what a long strange trip its been ...

[qoquaq]

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

Not as exciting, but it's a good thing!

[RichiP]

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

Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[Saint Stephen]

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

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[pryan]

You may want to add

ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --disable-toolkit-xlib
ac_add_options --disable-toolkit-qt

Re:Question: Building Firebird from CVS?

[jesser]

I think --enable-plaintext-editor-only prevents midas (wysiwyg editing in html forms) from working.

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:You don't get it, do you?

[x mani x]

Well IMHO, you are being antagonistic for no good reason.

A site can be "Firebird-compliant" and be fully "standards-compliant" simultaneously. I'm pretty sure this is obvious.

Furthermore, he/she asked about testing for CSS2 compliance, which I believe implies he/she does "get it" when it comes to standards compliance.

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?

I'm sure you're a nice guy and all, but this makes you sound like an asshole.

-Mani

Opera?

[Cyno01]

Uh, opera has a built in search bar that defaults to google and has about a dozen other types of searches built in too. It also has the wand, which is comparable to the google toolbars form filler, which seems to be the only other really useful feature of the toolbar. Thats according to this though, there are probably other features, i use Opera, so i've never tried the google toolbar.

'Der Spiegel' logs show Mozilla+Netscape at 15%

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

Version 0.2 was just released for windows today

Actually, it was a release candidate for 0.2. Anyhow, 0.2 is certainly close.

Bug fixes need testing too.

[jabber01]

So there.

Re:Wow, Moz is still alive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. What AOL donated were 2 million AOL CD's, with the stipulation that they would pay the foundation $1 for every new subscriber that they signed up.

MOZILLA IS TRYING TO KILL MNG

[H.G. Pennypacker]

I thought that this is something that requires attention here on slashdot. In the newer releases of mozilla (>v1.4) they have either crippled or eliminated the support for the MNG image format. See bug 18574, and see the furor that this has caused amongst Mozilla users.

You may have noticed that this is the MOST VOTED ON BUG ever in Mozilla but the people in charge are dragging their feet about this one. It is truly shameful. This is the only Free alternative to gif, and provides features that go above and beyond the gif standard. To any quibblers out there who say that patents on gif have expired, they are not entirely correct. Patents still exist in countries outside the US, and so anything that is not completely Free, is just that, not Free.

I wholeheartedly suggest that anyone who cares about open standards and formats get a bugzilla account and vote or post comments on this issue, otherwise Mozilla will kill MNG by either not supporting it or supporting some bastardised version of the standard.

Re:MOZILLA IS TRYING TO KILL MNG

[Alereon]

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.

how about a spell checker for

[the_2nd_coming]

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.

Oh brother

[Anonvmous Coward]

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.

Wait a while

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wait a while

[shaitand]

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.

Re:Thunderbird

[MrJones]

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.

and the googlebar

[chocolatetrumpet]

Everytime a mozilla milestone is released the only two mods I bother installing without fail are the orbit theme, and the mouse gestures...

And the googlebar, a beautifully done open source project!

People think the google bar is about having a search box in your browser. It's not. It's about clicking on your search terms and having them found in the page. Saves me hours!!

Re:and the googlebar

[Saeger]

Eh. Googlebar seems like a waste of screen realestate to me (even when collapsed). When I need to search I just Ctrl-L to get my cursor up to the addressbar, then type the search phrase, then Tab & ENTER. In Opera it's a tad easier: Shift-F8, keyword, ENTER.

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...

--

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!

Bookmarks dataloss - please vote for 215089

[Liet Hacksor]

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...

Ahem...

[Nailer]

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

Pardon?

Re:Hello? It's 1991 calling!

[edwdig]

Yeah, I know it's just a troll, but...

The whole point of Firebird and Thunderbird was people complained Mozilla was too big. So Firebird was created to strip out everything but the browser. Fine, that was good. It resulted in a significantly smaller browser. But then Thunderbird came along. It includes almost all the code that's in Firebird, but adds in a bunch more for the mail support. But it doesn't share the code with Firebird. So if you use both, you end up using up significantly more disk space and RAM than you would use if you just used Mozilla.

Firebird is about 7 megs. The vast majority of that is the Gecko core. I can't picture people on dialup regularly sending 7 meg attachments.

Ruined bookmark groups :(

[Ark42]

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 :(

The MNG Controversy

[LPetrazickis]

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.;)

Mozilla Annoyances

[Palin]

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.

I don't think .sos work like that

[ArmorFiend]

I don't think .sos / .dlls work like that. At least not this decade.

I believe that when two applications load libgecko.so (or whatever) they both memory map the same code section. The only copies that are made are for library storage, what you would get if you declare a variable "static" in C. This is probably a very small percentage of the total library size. Like 1%.

But I'm just guessing. And if you d/l different versions of libgecko.so (or whatever) then obviously all bets are off.

Re:I don't think .sos work like that

[rweir]

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)?

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).

Some notes

[I KNOW MARTIAL ARTS]

You can get a google toolbar for IE.

Or... You can create a bookmark (this feature is in 1.4, not sure about 1.3) to "http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s". Go to manage bookmarks, and change the keyword to "google" for that bookmark. Now you can just type "google your search terms here."

And finally, instead of CTRL + SHIFT + O, try Ctrl+ L, just like IE.

Problems with .wmv

[theedge318]

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.

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 ... and as such have assigned it to be part of their evangalism.

Sorry ... 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)

I experience the slowdown also.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Change "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" value

[starvingartist12]

This works in Mozilla Firebird 0.6, and it probably works for Mozilla as well.

Type "about:config" into the address and press enter. Then find the "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" preference and change the boolean value from "true" to "false"

Close the browser and restart. It should work the way you like it now. =)

Re:Is this the new release based on phoenix

[jesser]

Mozilla 1.5b is not based on Phoenix (which was renamed to Mozilla Firebird). Mozilla 1.5b is still the old Seamonkey suite. I don't know when mozilla.org will declare fb+tb to be its main products or whether fb+tb will inherit seamonkey's version numbering when that happens.

In the meantime, development on Mozilla Firebird is still active. Recent Firebird nightlies have been great and 0.7 will probably be released within a week.

Nor do they have to.

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

Re:The shift-click should open a new window

[janbjurstrom]

Umm.. ctrl-click?
In Prefs > Edit > Navigator > Tabbed browsing, you even get to decide whether to open a new win (bad) or a tab (good).
Now who's your daddy?

voting is no needed.

[leuk_he]

First : Check your links, linking to bugzilla from /. does not work.

second, look at the discussion of bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id= 94035

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. html, especially
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.

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?

Re:All I'm asking

[Bernie]

1.4.x (like 1.0.x) is a "long-lived" release (ie even after the 1.5 it will be maintained). For stability and large-scale deployments 1.4 should be good for a fair while :)

Re:Thunderbird

[cheekyboy]

Well, Firebird can import IE bookmarks, but it CANNOT IMPORT , ie in the menu by default , mozilla bookmarks, how lame is that.!!!

surely it could show those in the tree.

tsk tsk!!

Re:Thunderbird

[thesolo]

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).

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. 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.

Look into alternatives

[Anthracks]

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.

I believe that's why Mozilla Firebird (a leaner, browser-only version of Mozilla and the future of the project) supports the concept of extensions, of which there are now over 100. These are all non-critical features that have been stripped out and made available to those who need them. And Firebird is still months away from a final release; performance, UI and bloat-reduction are top priorities and will only get better as it nears 1.0. I don't think Mozilla is the tool you're looking for; give Firebird (or another stripped down Mozilla version) a chance.

Re:Google toolbar

[Jagasian]

You just double-click the address bar, type in your google search, and then click the "search" button. Hence you have the functionality of both an address bar and a google bar in one.

Note that double-clicking the address bar highlights all of the text in it, so when you type what you want... it overwrites the previous entry.