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Three New Releases (And Other News) From Mozilla
An anonymous reader writes "A couple of interesting releases by mozilla.org. First of all Mozilla 1.5 was released. This is supposed to be the last version of the old Mozilla suite. Mozilla Firebird 0.7, the stand-alone browser by mozilla.org was also released today. It includes many new features, e.g. Web Panels. For more information see the newly designed product page for Firebird. A third release is the stand-alone version of the Mozilla mail-program Thunderbird , which has now reached version 0.3.
The Mozilla Foundation also launched new end user services, like CD Sales and Telephone Support. As an effort to target more end-users, a redesigned website was also created.
As always MozillaZine has all of the stories, too.
Give these new releases a try, but please use a mirror if possible."
As always they do a great job! Especially with Fire- and Thunderbird.
it looks...awful. the new moz 1.5 beta site looks good, as does the thunderbird site, but the firebird site looks like a bad joke. i'm just waiting for a flash jobbie screaming "SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY". they ought to at least put up a link to the 0.7 release notes (maybe explain the new auto-download feature). ok enough ranting on the site.
anyway, i love the product. in fact, i'm posting this with 0.7. actually i'm just glad they fixed the form completion bug back with 0.6.1.
The website redesign won't make Mozilla more successful. Advertising is what's needed, plain and simple. How the site looks won't affect people's awareness of Mozilla, advertising will.
Making the site UI more streamlined does make sense though.
.: Max Romantschuk
I like Thunderbird, but the spell checker is really bad, especially at guessing words. Wish they would use ASpell. What this e-mail client really needs in an inline spell checker.
Ideally it should just not load them ;)
./ has those annoying text ads.)
NO, it should load them, otherwise the site is able to detect you're blocking the ads, and may take precautions. (That's probably why
For example:
- Why do I have to set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled just to turn off Firebird's damn "helpful" URL-rewriting "feature" (yes, I *didn't* mean to put a ".com" at the end!)
- Why do I have to set browser.tabs.autoHide to false just to have it keep the tab bar visible all the time like it should be doing by default (don't they understand it's *annoying* to have your whole window shift down whenever you open a new tab?)
There were other little minor annoyances, too, but I've forgotten those. Anyway, it's still Moz for me, all the way.Al Qaeda has ninjas!
> I really hope that 1.5 is their last integrated release
If it is, I'll be using it for a while. I've tried Firebird 0.6, and it shows
promise, but I got tired of installing extension after extension after extension
just to get features I've been taking for granted for months. Every time I
think I've got all the extensions I need I discover another missing feature.
Also, last I checked, some things I use aren't even available yet, though it
does seem to get better every time I check back. The long and short of it is,
even with *all* the extensions, Firebird isn't ready to replace Navigator yet,
and when it is, a way is needed to install multiple extensions all at once;
this nonsense about installing each one individually is crap.
Then there's Thunderbird... fortunately I don't have to be so eager for that
to shape up, since I use Gnus. But I get the feeling that if I was waiting for
Thunderbird to be a viable mailreader, I'd be waiting a while yet. (Then again,
I don't consider Messenger a viable mailreader either, so maybe I'm just being
picky in that regard.)
Are Firebird/Thunderbird/&c the future? Yes, absolutely -- and separating the
components out is something that has needed to be done for a long time. But
for the moment, the reality is that SeaMonkey is still the present. We look
forward to a day when it will be the past, but that day has not come yet.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
>Because I don't live on caffiene, I don't play Quake, I don't read Slashdot, and I hate Linux.
If you don't read slashdot, why are you replying this news?
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I've tried Firebird (coming from the regular Mozilla) and while it technically may be the XSOP, it went straight out the door again here.
;)
If you want it to do half the stuff Mozilla does, you have to install a ton of plugins, and none of these seem properly "coordinated" project-wise. So you end up much like with Miranda - tons of functionality, lots of duplicate settings and no grand master-plan as to how things should look or where they should be in the UI.
I mean, the whole concept of tabbed browsing is void if the top right-click menu item isn't "Close Tab".
I just hope they "fix" these useability issues before dropping the good old memory-hog
Noo..... I still want my XPFE.
I swear that if mozilla.org stops distributing XPFE binaries off the trunk, I'll compile it myself until it breaks. I actually appreciate the "swiss army knife approach" that we have seen since Netcape.
Yes, Firebird is great, but the functionality of the XPFE app suite leaves FB in the dust in my opinion.
Granted, that's got SVG in it too
Really great SVG support, IMHO, is one of the necessary ingredients for making the web more exciting. This is the kind of innovation that is not just useful, but something the whole community can participate in.
- Vector graphics,
- independent of screen resolution,
- able to convey layout information, and in
- a standard format accessible to anyone who can download and read a specification,
would really help the web become a better place.Mozilla's market share is so low that it is not regarded as a serious competitor to IE.
The only way Mozilla can gain broader acceptance is if it not only does the standard HTML rendering acceptably good, but if it offers exciting new technology that is not available in IE.
IIRC, an SVG implementation is already in IE, but there's little incentive for it to be further developed. Arguably there's incentive for SVG in IE not to be further developed by Microsoft because a robust successful implementation may displace competing product lines of their own and other partners (Shockwave, Adobe). There's a potential wonderful application area to be served, but it will require someone besides established big-names to develop.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Indeed, for us, the Slashdot crowd, this is not difficult at all. But If I tell this to 90% of my friends, then they'll say that I shoud talk normal and don't use all this difficult computer science speak.
They don't know what unzipping is, they don't know how to find C:\Program Files. They don't know what an executable is, and how to find/recognize it. They don't know how to create a link to it, they even don't know what a link is. Nevetheless they aren't stupid.
You guys must not be using the same web that I am. While I can still use Mozilla for most of my web browsing, there is still that 5% of websites that don't work. It is almost always a javascript issue, and almost aways listed as an "advocacy bug" in bugzilla. This drives me nuts. I can tell you right now that BBandT bank is not going to fix their website anytime soon. Wouldn't it have made more sense to implement those few "broken" features and pop up a warning about them being depricated/contact the webmaster? Once most sites stop using them, THEN you can remove them from the browser. My GF gave up on Mozilla because it just didn't work for her online banking and a few other sites she frequents. Yes, I told the webmasters about the problem, but most of the time they're just using some out-of-the-box web services suite and have no idea of how to fix it. In a couple of instances the original company is out of business (oh those .coms ) but they figure: why fix it, it works with everything here?
IMHO, advocacy bugs are one of the leading causes of "screw it, I'm switching back to IE".
I read the internet for the articles.
Never mind that banks and other major websites *are* responding and are getting their act together. As more people start moving to Firebird, this will only increase.
I wish some people would take a reality check from time to time, you can't make utiopia and ignore the flaws of the real world. Not all the time, atleast.
You can try. Why give up on your goals just because some shitty banking site doesn't work? If someone really wanted to, they could fork Mozilla and make it work with IE's non-standards. Mozilla is meant as a reference implementation of a standards-compliant browser. At least they are trying to help the situation.
#!/