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]

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

[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

[AceMarkE]

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

Mark Erikson

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

[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?

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..

[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.

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: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.

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?

[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?

[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

[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

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.

[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?

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.

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

[BRSQUIRRL]

Read the parent a bit more carefully: "it's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption" (emphasis mine). To the "widespread" masses, which includes my mom (hehe), recompiling your browser to fix a compatibility problem with a plug-in is not something that they can and/or are willing to learn to do.

Re:The amusing part

[Feztaa]

the real evil lies with the fact that RealPlayer don't have a gcc 3.2 version of their plugin (I assume).

Moreover, if the RealPlayer plugin was open source, we could simply recompile it with gcc 3.2, and this whole thing would be a total nonissue.

Instead, we've got to wait for Real to release a new version of the plugin for us. I see this as a failing of the closed source development model. If everything was open source, there would be no problem here.

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?

[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:Good

[error502]

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

Re:Thunderbird

[Penguin2]

Whenever it creates a child process

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

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

Crappy Mozilla Desktop Icon!

[aSiTiC]

Is it just me or is the built-in icon for Mozilla suck? I'm tired of searching theme sites for a better icon!

Ahem...

[Nailer]

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

Pardon?

Re: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...

--

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.;)

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.

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.

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).

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)?

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.

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: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.