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."

Comments

Re:Mozilla Growing

[Joseph Lam]

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.

Re:awesome

[PReDiToR]

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.

Re:Fantastic!

[HanzoSpam]

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.

Re:200l 700

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Top posting is bad

[FattMattP]

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.

Re:Top posting is bad

[ChaosDiscord]

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."

Re:Top posting is bad

[groomed]

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.

Firebird..

[xankar]

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.

Re:Keep 'em coming...

[Malc]

"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.

Bad for YOU, maybe.

[pclminion]

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.

Re:Keep 'em coming...

[WuphonsReach]

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.