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Mozilla 1.5 Beta Released
asa writes "Today mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.5 Beta, available for Linux,
Mac OS X, and Windows. This beta release features lots of bugfixes, the inclusion of a spellchecker for Messenger and Composer, and lots of minor feature improvements to Navigator, Messenger, Composer and Chatzilla. More information is available at the Mozilla Release Notes."
What they really need to work on is the speed and the bloat. You might not notice it if you're used to IE, but after using Opera ever since I've found out about it, having to endure something as slow as Mozilla causes me large varieties of pain which may or may not include the physical kind.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
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.
I thought Netscape killed it off because they were buying AOL.
From memory what happened is that AOL laid off the Netscape developers who were working on Moz. A non-profit foundation was set up to fund continued development and AOL made the first donation ($1 million). Red Hat, Sun etc have also donated to the foundation, but they still need a lot more $ from users if the pace of development is to be maintained.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
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.
A speelchacker for any tects entery.
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 :)
Thunderbird 0.2 RC1 is available now (for Windows, other builds should follow shortly). It's had a good size reduction and speed increase.
its a horrible 'feature' that needs to be disabled by default.
From the release notes:
The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2. If you're using these binaries then popular plug-ins like RealPlayer, compiled with previous versions of GCC, will not work. See bug 213234 and 158385.
This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.
Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.
I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.
... which is booting in less than a century on my PII-266 / 96M of ram.
...
I don't want to spit in the soup, I think Moz rocks the boat, but apart from the oh-so-welcome stability issues, it's more or less functionally equivalent to Netscape Communicator 4.7 to me (yes I know about popup blocking and cookie control, but I did that with Junkbuster before and it worked just fine too).
Unfortunately, Mozilla is one of the two key software pieces I use (the other one being KDE) that contribute to making my otherwise perfectly working laptop more and more unusable as they mature. Too bad
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I 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.
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.
More of my thoughts
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.
"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 ;)
Here's the amusing part: if it were a Microsoft product that did this, hordes of Slashbots would post hundreds of "+5" posts decrying the evil antics and poor design. But it's standard procedure when it comes to major Linux apps, and nobody bats an eye.
Every single time someone writes one of those annoying "here's what's wrong with Windows" posts, I have to laugh because of much, much worse stuff like this.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Changelog: "Gecko now supports setting color for and
."
I may be stupid, but I can't think of any reson to have a colored linebreak. A colored horizontal bar kinda makes sense, but doesn't sound very useful. Nobody uses those these days anyway. But a colored linebreak... thats... someone please explain.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
How about this google bar?
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
My other car is first.
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today. here's a story on it
Whenever it creates a child process
"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
I have sampled firebird and I am very excited on this new direction. It is a shame AOL has sealed a deal with MS. They don't really understand what they have!
Great products like this and the community surrounding them have made me appriciate free software more and more.
Thanks Mozilla
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
I don't mean to sound antagonistic, but you don't get it, do you? You don't understand the ideas and concepts by "standards", do you?
No, you most definitely should not make sites that are Firebird-compliant. Make sites that are STANDARDS-compliant. It's by designing for a specific browser that we got into this morass of browser-specific tags and browser incompatibilities.
Use the standards that exist, and test using Firebird and IE and Opera and Galeon and Safari. But don't design with a specific browser in mind.
Congratulations for giving Moz/Firebird a try. The best advice I can give for making cross-browser scripting:
forget about document.all
instead use getElementByID()
Despite the funky capitialization, it's the key to making cross browser DHTML. I think you'll find that Mozilla supports at least as much of the CSS2 spec that IE does. The main problem is IE's box model, which can be worked around. Unless you're pushing the envelope, CSS compatibility shouldn't be a problem. If you really need a cross reference, I recommend Osborne's CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference.
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.
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today
Actually, it was a release candidate for 0.2. Anyhow, 0.2 is certainly close.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
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?
War is necrophilia.
Bookmark groups used to open in new tabs, not closing all existing tabs like they do now. That really sucks, I cant keep page X open and press my bookmark that opens page A B and C in separate tabs without having the tab with page X closed
Morphing Software
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.;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
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.
If there are any 'fixes' for these please let me know.
... So the mozilla team does know how to do it ...
... Integrate Mozilla's mime type setup with your desktop environment. Yes I know we don't all use Gnome or KDE ... But www.freedesktop.org has a shared mime database to at the least fall back on.
... Why can't I tell mozilla what program to run when I want to email someone? Why can't I specify evolution, kmail or ?
... If you have more annoyances please reply to this.. :-) I'll make a list somewhere.
... So I don't hate it, infact I love the javascript debugger and the DOM inspector ... It just could be better and more user friendly.
-FavIcon's in bookmarks/Toolbars either doesn't work or only works sometimes. They seem to work all the time in Firebird/Phoenix
-Under Linux the 'Save As...' dialogs are all butt ugly, they should integrate with the Gnome/KDE Dialogs that do the same thing. I know we all don't use those desktops so it should probably be a compile time option...
-Under Linux the 'Download Manager' dialog is borked. For instance 'Show File Location' doesn't work. Why? We have file manager's under linux. Make it a definable option so people can define something like 'nautlius %s' or 'konqueror %s' or ' %s', etc..
-Under Linux
-MNG Support is dying/dead!
-Under Linux
-I'm sure there are others
P.S. I use Mozilla everyday, all day long
P.S.S. I'm not a C/C++ developer so I can't, at the moment contribute patches to do any of the above. Nor do I have the money to sponsor the work or I would.
Palin...
> The sad, sad news is that Firebird and Thunderbird will not made :-(
> it into 1.5
If you've been testing Firebird and Thunderbird this is good news.
They're not ready. Firebird is getting there, and hopefully will
be ready to replace Navigator by 1.6 time, but SeaMonkey really
can't be put out to pasture if only Navigator has been adequately
replaced. Thunderbird... well, it still needs a lot of work.
Also, Sunbird needs to be working before SeaMonkey can be dropped.
Actually, Firebird has most of the features Navigator has, *if* you
install a metric tonne of Extensions. (This is a major issue,
however; it takes considerably longer and *many* times more
clicking to download and install all those extensions as compared
to just downloading and installing the entire SeaMonkey suite. A
solution needs to be worked out wherein many extensions can be
downloaded and installed in one go.) Even with all of the
extensions, though, FB is still missing a couple of very major
features, like the DOM inspector (which is dogfood, or should
be -- it's painful to do any work on themes without it; it's quite
handy for web development also).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
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)?
MSIE actually does break TCP/IP. Here's some links from an old slashdot story.
... Sometimes
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
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