Slashdot Mirror


Mozilla 1.6 Released

Jack Comics writes "Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Foundation has announced this evening the release of Mozilla 1.6. The Mozilla 1.6 release notes can be found here."

30 of 756 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mozilla Growing by Joseph+Lam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ya, most ppl out there that I met don't know what's 'Mozilla' nor its relation with Netscape the browser. Most companies still build IE only websites, some better ones build IE+Netscape, but Mozilla still remains to be the 'underground'.

    More promotions, either by the press or by us /. readers are important.

  2. Re:awesome by PReDiToR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The browser wars have already been won.

    FireBird has beaten IE and we are just waiting for the inertia to bury the old stalwart.

    Are you telling me that you aren't waiting with baited breath for tonights nightly 0.8 build that really says 0.7+ in it?
    The fact that there are nightly builds and every week a couple of builds optimised for Athlon/P4 or older processors should entice you to at least try it, free of charge, and see if it actually works for you.

    Most people that have tried it are still trying it, and a fair number of us have it as default browser.

    --

    Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
  3. Re:Must... restrain... by mfago · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You've forgotten the best part about using Firebird & Thunderbird:

    your email program doesn't crash when your browser does.

    Moz itself doesn't crash that often, but plugins brought it down several times per day for me. A serious flaw in the design IMHO.

  4. Re:Fantastic! by HanzoSpam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firebird is a great browser about to hit 0.8 and stepping closer towards the great 1.0 release that took Mozilla years to obtain.

    Well, yeah, but you have to consider Firebird uses the Gecko rendering engine, the same as Mozilla. Having a pre-written rendering engine wasn't an advantage enjoyed by Mozilla.

    Thunderbird is still in need of lots of work, but the progress is fantastic and I exclusively use it even in its immature state.

    I've been using it across Linux, Windows, and MacOS X, and I haven't had a single problem with it. I'm not really sure how much more work it needs, since it seems pretty clean of bugs, unless they're planning on adding some more features.

    I hope not. Creeping featuritis has been the death of too many fine pieces of software that were fine just the way they were.

    --

    Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
  5. Re:200l 700 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Are you a web coder? What are you waiting for?"

    Users to stop using IE.

  6. Re:200l 700 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been toying with XUL for a while now and am cozing up with 'Rapid Application Development with Mozilla'. Fantasic read, but the one thing that really sticks in my craw is the total lack of organized documentation.

    The *only* way a 'platform'/language will be widely adopted is by making it accessible to Joe Coder. Just take a look at PHP, it's not always the best language, but has a *huge* user base, primarily because it's well documented.

    Yes, there are now thousands of 'developers' writing crappy code, but dammit, at least they're pushing it to their clients, friends, family the neighbour's dog. Evangelism (sic) is the root of success.

    Leo

  7. Top posting is bad by FattMattP · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Another frequently requested MailNews feature, a preference for placing the user's signature above the quoted text, has been added.
    Nooooo! Argh, this will only encourage top-posting.
    --
    Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
    1. Re:Top posting is bad by groomed · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I used to think top posting was bad. I would go as far as to painstakingly reformat the Outlook mails people were sending me. Sometimes the topic would come up between me and a collegue or friend, and I would explain to them that top posting is bad because it destroys the flow of the discussion, making it harder to follow and less useful.

      Over the years, however, I met more and more people, and got a lot more mail, with less and less technical content. It became a hassle to correct all their posts, not to mention to repeat the same arguments over and over again. After a while I found myself top posting, as well.

      Not all people think alike, and I came to realize my reasonable, rational arguments mostly just served to control the way other people expressed themselves -- i.e., so that they would express themselves more like myself.

      Rules such as "top posting destroys the flow of conversation, yadda yadda yadda" aren't the result of some irrefutable process by which the ideal posting format has been established -- they're the exact opposite: they serve as a starting point to find fault with the way other people choose to communicate.

    2. Re:Top posting is bad by ChaosDiscord · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Not all people think alike, and I came to realize my reasonable, rational arguments mostly just served to control the way other people expressed themselves -- i.e., so that they would express themselves more like myself.

      I trust you're equally as accepting of those people who choose to WRITE IN ALL CAPS, or abbrvt lik u r txt mssging, or 3N463 1N 4 B17 0F 1337? (and I've seen all three by email, the first two in business email). Some forms of expression are irritating to receive and just stupid. Where you put quoted text isn't even some deep expression of your personality and life choices. It's just a freaking quotation.

      Quoting text for context is an old idea with well understood techniques. Most people were taught how to do it in high school You block quote things inline, much like I've done your text. You trim to the bare minimum so readers don't waste their time with useless junk.

      Ultimately it's a matter of being polite to your recipient. You value their time, don't you? So send them a bare minimum. And for those cases where they need lots of context in the form of previous messages, top posting is an amazingly crude and rude solution. I have a powerful, modern email client for a reason. I thread my messages to keep track of context and have powerful searching and filtering capabilities. Putting the entire conversation in a single message throws that entire system away and leaves me with a stupid giant list of text, sorted in reverse historical order with signatures, Yahoo ads, and headers all intermingled. It's a mess. If I need those messages as context, forward the lot of them to me with as little mangling as possible (often called something like "bounce"). Now my powerful email client can do smart things to help keep me sane.

      Ultimately not top-posting is about not being rude to your recipients. Top posting says, "I'm lazy, and this is easiest way for me to provide context you may or may not need. I don't care that it's less convient to you, my time is more valuable than yours."

    3. Re:Top posting is bad by groomed · · Score: 4, Insightful
      For better or worse, most people don't work the way you describe. I like to spend time writing clear and concise emails, but most people don't. What's more, my effort is completely lost on them, and sometimes it even strikes them as pedantic/weird/irrelevant.
      Ultimately not top-posting is about not being rude to your recipients. Top posting says, "I'm lazy, and this is easiest way for me to provide context you may or may not need. I don't care that it's less convient to you, my time is more valuable than yours."
      This just underscores my point. You have an elaborate system, and you want people to conform. What you need to understand is that they are under no obligation to do so whatsoever.
    4. Re:Top posting is bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      > I don't care that it's less convient to you, my time is more valuable than yours.

      Sez you. Most business people find top-posting MORE convienient, and that's why every corporate mail system defaults to top-posts. Why? Because more often than not, they alredy know the context, and as pointed out, scrolling is slow.

      It's better to think about business email as a form of IM or Voice Mail rather than a "conversation". When the boss says "Do It" or the engineer says "We have a problem", they want it right up on the top where everyone sees it.

      (And this isn't a Microsoft/AOL thing, either. IBM PROFS did top-posting, as did anything from Lotus.)

    5. Re:Top posting is bad by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Yeah, I hate it too, except that the owner of my company polite corrected my habit of interleaved posting by informing me that it made my emails hard to read and archive.

      It didn't make any sense to me, either, but he's the guy that signs my paycheck, and I'm not in a position to respond in any way other than "yes, sir".

      So my work account defaults to top-posting. My personal account, on the other hand, is set correctly.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  8. Firebird.. by xankar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Should be prepackaged with various popular plugins like Flash and Shockwave.

    I've reccomended firebird to all of my windows-using, non tech-savvy friends and they love it, but they wouldn't have done it without my encouragement because it was such a pain to redownload so many plugins.

    People are lazy. Lazy people buy(in the loose sense of the word, since the software's free) convenience.

    --
    ~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
  9. Re:Keep 'em coming... by Malc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "From what I've been reading, more people are interested in the suite over the *birds than originally anticipated, so they'll be keeping it around for a while."

    Grrrr. This is a pet peeve of mine. Why do so many people find the word "suite" to be synonymous with "monolithic app"? There's absolutely no reason. The suite can consist of the *birds where each component runs in its own process space. There are plenty of other tightly coupled suites out there that do this very well. Why would anybody want to run it all in one process space? It was a fundamental architectural mistake made by Netscape a decade ago, and just pure foolishness when the open source Mozilla team copied it!

    As far as most users are concerned, they click an icon on their desktop (or in the app) for whatever they want to do, be it browsing, mail, IRC, calendaring, etc. A window appears and they do their thing. Why does it matter if that window comes from the same process or not? It doesn't. In fact, it's preferable if it doesn't. Crashes, or blocking actions won't tie up or interfere with the other process(es) (which is a major problem with the current suite).

    Once the *birds implement the same functionality from a UI and extensions perspective, and the same integration with each of the other components as the current suite, there is no reason to continue with this monolithic monstrousity. I like the Mozilla products. I use the components (mostly mail/news and browser), I want the suite. I don't want a monolithic single process app.

  10. Re:$ TMPDIR=/my/new/temp mozilla by dedazo · · Score: 2, Insightful
    That's like saying IE is OK because I installed the Google toolbar to block popups.

    We're always so fast to make excuses for shortcomings in open source products yet woe the commercial one that has a bug for it is "teh sux".

    --
    Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
  11. Bad for YOU, maybe. by pclminion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Saying "top posting is bad" is like saying "EMACS is better than vi." A matter of opinion ONLY.

    Bottom-posting is more useful to outsiders to the discussion, since they can follow the temporal flow of response and reply. However, top-posting is more convenient for those enagaging in the discussion, since they presumably already know who's saying what, and therefore it's better to have the most up-to-date information at the TOP. They can scroll down to get context if necessary.

    Please, don't turn top-posting into yet ANOTHER religious issue... We don't need more of them.

    1. Re:Bad for YOU, maybe. by ChaosDiscord · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Any sort of "quote the entire freaking message I'm replying to" is wrong, be it "Microsoft spits on your pathetic standards" top-posting, or "AOL Me-Tooer" bottom-posting. Both are wrong, wrong, wrong.

      Only quote the bare minimum necessary to maintain context. If someone needs the entire prior conversation, forward them the entire conversation, ideally using "bounce" or similar feature so that they have access to individual messages and can have their email client do intelligent things like threading with it.

    2. Re:Bad for YOU, maybe. by Lars+Arvestad · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Saying "top posting is bad" is like saying "EMACS is better than vi." A matter of opinion ONLY.

      Yeah, but how many users do you think actually has an opinion on this? 99.99 % of the bottom-quoted email I get is there because their email program encourages it, not because they think it is convenient.

      Bottom-posting is more useful to outsiders to the discussion, since they can follow the temporal flow of response and reply.

      I don't think bottom-quoting help with the temporal flow at all! You have to start at the bottom and guess at what people are referring to. With the top-quoted emails it is much more common to people actually breaking the quotations up and responding to the sentences/paragraphs that actually matters. At least in my circles: I guess it varies with your community.

      I also think that there is a larger risk with bottom-quoting that inappropriate information gets passed on. I don't have an anecdote or so, but I have long been curious about what insults and copmany secrets that have been forwarded this way!

      What it really comes down to is that there is not much support for quotations in most email programs. The only app I know about where your MTA actually gives you a little bit of control is in Emacs, both VM and Gnus, where there is an add-on called SuperCite. Really nifty utility.

      I'd like to see a edit mode where you can move parts of quotations in and out of emails as units. Mozilla Mail has some help in marking what is a quote, but it is all text based in the end. I would like to see the quotes as little widgets.

      --
      Reality or nothing.
  12. Re:I don't understand their QA process by bunratty · · Score: 2, Insightful
    why are releases made with known Major bugs, and what does it take for a bug to get seen to and not sit in Bugzilla, ignored
    If the next release of Mozilla had to wait until all known major bugs were fixed, it might be years until that next release. The chances are that almost no one experiences or notices that particular bug, or even if someone else does notice it there are more serious bugs they experience. As you can see, no one has voted for the bug to be fixed and no one else has complained that it's a problem.

    I've reported dozens of bugs over my three years of using Mozilla, and about half of those bugs (mainly the more serious ones that others have voted for) have been fixed. In one case, I fixed the bug myself just a week or two after I reported it. Unless you fix it yourself or get some indication that others think it's serious, it will likely be years before your pet bug is fixed. There are just too many other bugs that are more important.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  13. Middle-posting by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    However, top-posting is more convenient for those enagaging in the discussion

    In my e-mail messages, Usenet posts, and message board posts, I prefer middle-posting: trim down the quoted context and insert a response to each point immediately after each piece of quoted context. I have written this very comment in middle-posting style.

    it's better to have the most up-to-date information at the TOP.

    In a proper middle-posting reply, the first piece of "most up-to-date information" will typically appear above the fold (definition) because the poster has trimmed the context.

    (Read More...)

  14. Re:Who uses the suite? by antdude · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I like to have my email, newsgroups, and browser running at all time.

    Also, Prefbar only seems to work with Mozilla. :(

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  15. Re:awesome by TechnoPops · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Firebird has won the browser wars? That's quite the statement to say, since it seems IE still has a good ~85% chunk of the market. I think it still needs to carve quite a big piece out of Microsoft's share before we can start claiming any victories.

    --
    "Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
  16. Re:Keep 'em coming... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The 'suite' has taken 2 years to get to the current stage. The 'birds' want to start from scratch for some unknown reason. Why would any sane person want to go thru the pain of bugs nobody wants to fix again?

    Seriously, Gecko is mature, but I wouldnt say the Mozilla GUI is completely polished yet. So many visual problems that nobody wants to fix because they don't change any of their windows settings.

    When the birds get to about 1.1 some smartass will think it's a good idea to make another browser from scratch.

    That's how broken the bug system is. Nobody is 'responsible' for boring bugs, and thye just get put in a corner to rot for 3yrs.

  17. Re:Keep 'em coming... by WuphonsReach · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some of us wish that Firebird had multiple processes so that a crash in one window wouldn't wipe out the other 4 windows with half a dozen tabs each....

    (A habit that you form once you have a tabbed browser...)

    Thunderbird 0.4 has worked well for me for the last month (replaced Moz 1.4). It's finished enough that it's useable for me at least.

    --
    Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
  18. Re:Who uses the suite? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I've tried both, and while I love Fire/Thunderbird, I'm sticking to the Suite until the Firebird developers get their heads out of their respective asses and fix the CTRL-ENTER/ALT-ENTER idiocy.

    In Mozilla, when you CTRL-click a link, a new tab opens. When you press CTRL-T, a new tab opens. When you enter a URL and press CTRL-ENTER, a new tab opens, as it should.

    In Firebird, all is the same, except when you press CTRL-ENTER, whatever URL you've entered changes into www.URL.com (e.g. www.slashdot.org.com) and overwrites whatever webpage you have in your current tab. You're supposed to press ALT-ENTER, because that's the way fucking Internet Explorer does it.

    It wouldn't be so bad, if it were possible to change the key bindings. But I guess Firebird developers are only targetting IE users.

  19. Re:Why the need to uninstall onld versions to upgr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And that's acceptable? To recreate your profile directory every time? To reinstall browser plug-ins/extensions? To uninstall the old version each time? (And yes, you will need to uninstall the old version, unless you're content to have a zillion different versions sitting on your hard drive simultaneously.)

    The upgrade process needs to be easier.

  20. Re:Why are people still using IE? Firebird rocks. by rsborg · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Firebird has a number of thigns that are good but the last time i tried it out (.6 iirc) it was still.. lacking in certain areas.

    Note: Firebird is meant to be a stripped down browser, but extensible for those who want additional functionality. Thus, I will refer you to many extensions you need to install.

    1.) When a link has a target=_blank it opens a new browser instead of a new tab. Cannot express how much this annoys me.

    Get Tabbrowswer Extensions

    2.) You cannot save a series of tabs to always open everytime you restart the browser.

    Again, Tabbrowser Extensions

    3.) Can't disable gif animation.

    Several ways to do this, but my favorite is the Things they left out extension. Adds in some missing 'zilla pref pages.

    4.) Cannot turn on the tab bar by default or always have it on

    Can't help you here, don't know what you mean.

    5.) Doesn't have zoom feature or a "always use my stylesheet" feature like opera (this is incredibly handy when dealing with sites that insist on impossible-to-read-text)

    You can hack your stylesheets, but I'm sure there's an extension or bookmarklet that allows you to override your stylesheet.

    6.) cannot change it's indentity like you can in Opera to, say, IE 6.xx -- this is becoming less and less of a deal as fewer websites I go to at least "require" IE 6.x.

    Check out User Agent Switcher, or a number of other extensions that change your UA.

    HTH

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
  21. Re:Eolas and Mozilla? by StrawberryFrog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Read between the lines, because this bodes VERY well for Mozilla. While W3 and Microsoft are hemming and hawing about what this kind of patent meant to them, and it means something very bad for Internet Explorer, I suspect Mozilla will not be a target.

    A dumb patent is a dumb patent, and should be overturned as a matter of principle, no matter who it advantages tactically. Dumb patents in general are a threat to open source. Actually, they are a threat to anyone wanting to make good software.

    --

    My Karma: ran over your Dogma
    StrawberryFrog

  22. Re:Begging for Firebird 1.0 by juhaz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Extensions fscking rule.

    What makes you think extensions are Firebird-only?

    There have been extensions for Mozilla long before any of the developers even dreamed about Phoenix. Good ones work in both browsers.

  23. Re:Keep 'em coming... by jonadab · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > Why do so many people find the word "suite" to be synonymous with
    > "monolithic app"?

    Because most of the components of the suite are not available as *birds yet.
    Navigator (if the browser itself is all you use) can be replaced with Firebird,
    and the truly adventurous can replace Messenger with Thunderbird, and Composer
    (which to me was never useful anyway) is I *think* available as a Thunderbird
    extension, but that's about it. Sunbird last I checked is so far a non-starter,
    and then there are the other components... where are they in the *bird series?
    They remain... unimplemented. Okay, I think DOM inspector is available as a
    Firebird extension, but then you can only use it to inspect Firebird; you
    cannot, for example, use it to look at the Thunderbird XUL (for theming
    purposes). So, basically, the *birds are still lacking that.

    It's not the monolithicity of SeaMonkey that keeps people using it; it's the
    fact that it's essentially *complete* (well, except for Messenger, which is
    still missing quite a number of critical features, but that's another thread).
    The *birds are still very alpha; there are whole *categories* of features
    that nobody has even *looked* at implementing in them yet.

    If all you want is the browser, Firebird can be used as a replacement for
    Navigator (though to get the full functionality of Navigator you have to
    install about twenty extensions and a small handful of minor things are
    still not up to snuff), but if you use the SeaMonkey whole suite, there is
    no non-monolithic replacement available yet from Mozilla.org.

    That is why people continue to use SeaMonkey.

    --
    Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.