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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."
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
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.
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.
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
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."
Version 0.2 was just released for windows today. here's a story on it
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I know this is flying in the face of most peoples experience, but I haven't found much difference between most aspects of mozilla and firebird in quite some time. At one point phoenix seemed to move quite a bit faster on my machine, but around 1.4 I gave mozilla another try and didn't see much of a difference anymore. Pages load and display at the same speed, the gui in both react at the same speed, they both use about the same amount of memory...firebird seemed to start faster, and that was about the biggest difference I could find.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I have sampled firebird and I am very excited on this new direction. It is a shame AOL has sealed a deal with MS. They don't really understand what they have!
Great products like this and the community surrounding them have made me appriciate free software more and more.
Thanks Mozilla
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
/proc/cpuinfo
...
$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 348.491
Startup time < 5s
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.
They are colored in Composer. (The tool for creating webpages) So, you are in fact stupid. =) j.k.
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.
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.
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.
browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing = false
viola.
bananas like monkeys.
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.
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