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Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch
iswm writes "MozillaZine has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4.
The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers
building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch
as well as the trunk. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird,
a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products
will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to
ensure that it is high quality."
News about a new firefox version, and it doesn't have a name change! There may be a hat trick yet, folks.
How does this translate for consumers?
Mozilla development will continue with the releases of Mozilla Prime, Mozilla 2:This time its not Mozilla 1, and Mozilla: The Motion Picture.
it had to happen sooner or later : mozillazine
The odd number at the end looks so...odd :)
I guess I've been too used to the Linux kernel "even is stable" noclamenture that a version number like "1.7" looks like a development branch.
So does this mean I can finally migrate off of Mosaic??
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Mozilla will _always_ have the cooler logo.
Chris Knight is my hero.
Right on time for my birthday :-). That is gonna be a sweet gift :-)
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
If you read the article, they go on and on about trying to fix bugs known to crash 1.7 before releasing it. I'm curious: what exactly does it tak e to crash Mozilla these days? I know it still has subtle memory leaks that crash it eventually, but what can a QA person do to crash it? It's at least as stable as any mainstream application I use, crashing much less often than Photoshop or Flash MX, which I use considerably less.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly exaggerated...
.8 soon.
OS X's Camino hadn't been updated since March of '03 (.7 release), and personally I thought it had been put out to pasture thanks to Apple bundling Safari.
According to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ we can look forward to
Welcome back!
Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
How about a long life brandname for Mozilla Firefox?
I'd suggest Mozilla lite or Mozilla Express.
Yeah, IE "only' eats your hard drive after the infection.... whoops!
On a decnet computer IE will load in just a second or two. In contrast Mozilla takes at least 10 seconds before you get anything on the screen. Firefox is just as fast as IE. However. probably a good 50% of explorer is already loaded all that needs to be done is draw a new window, this can be proven by crashing IE (not hard) alot of times the whole desktop disapears. This shows how well firefox is written because it must load entirely from scratch.
What the article fails to mention however that there appears to be a point of contension between Mozilla developers over whether or not the next long-lived stable branch of Mozilla should be 1.7 or 1.8. Many feel that it is too late in 1.7's development cycle to make it the next stable branch after 1.4. For more information, see here. It's a shame that the Mozilla Foundation apparently feels pressured to make decisions based on time frames instead of quality.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
On the other hand people are happy that there's finally something to replace 1.4 which was showing its age.
Note that this means that the next version of Netscape, if there is one, will be based on 1.7 etc.
There were only two stables releases prior 1.7. Those were 1.0 and 1.4.
I don't know if this can really qualify for a "even is stable" mentality.
I've used Mozilla for a long time (talking years here), and never had that happen. Deleting randomly? Were you using a bleeding-edge release or something? That's crazy talk for a stable release.
Most things like that are caused by user error, not random delete subroutines.
Why on earth would they completely change the base code and keep the same major release number?
Let me guess...
You didn't read the instructions on how to install a new version, and you deleted them yourself?
Due to windows instability, I've had to do all manner of restores and upgrades. The only time I lost any bookmarks was the first time I flubbed a Mozilla install.
After I read the directions (please read them, but IIRC, it's something like: rename old mozilla folder under the mozilla.org folder, install new mozilla, see that it works, move plugins from old mozilla folder over, test that plugins are working, delete old folder, DO NOT DELETE ANY OTHER FILES BUT THOSE) I had no problems.
You can backup the bookmarks file, too, just restore it to the right place, BTW...
Once Microsoft improves its browser mozilla will not have much chance on the windows. Right now even they don't put much energy for becoming the dominant browser on the windows. They simply refuse to do so many things just because they can't do the same on the Linux. Mozilla developers themselves acknowledge this.
So over the long run, the future of mozilla is not very bright. Mozilla foundation's money will dry up sooner or later. Sun is one of the companies funding mozilla, they may stop funding mozilla. AOL certainly will not put more money into something that doesn't make any money. So in essence mozilla will be doomed.
So I don't know why you guys are so excited about mozilla. When a project turns into pure open source project, without a company backup, it becomes very very hard to beat the closed source competition. Very few projects are there that can compete with closed source, but those are not as complicated as mozilla.
No, it just reports your every move to Redmond, WA.... and any server that asks ;)
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
The question is when will Firefox and Thunderbird become the core applications?? That was their original plan for Pheonix/Firebird/Firefox.
The browser was like *beep beep beep* and it ate my bookmarks...
And they were really good bookmarks too...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The linux kernel uses "even is stable" - this gentleman was alluding to that.
Why is it that every once in awhile all links will die for no reason?
Like, I'll click a headline and get a "games.slashdot.org" cannot be found. Clicking any other link will give me the same error. It's like it just stops trying to resolve stuff.
The only way to fix it is to shut down and restart. Bloatzilla does the same thing, and it's been this way for several versions.
It also often misrenders slashdots submission page, though not as often as it used to.
What gives? Lots of work on neato whizbang features like the new download manager, but the fundamentals - actual web browsing - still have annoying issues.
Guess that's just OSS. Noone can make anyone work on something as boring as a "this browser doesnt work" bug, when they'd rather invent some new way to click links.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Let's see, I can chose 1.7, or 1.4... or should I choose the stable branch? Or the trunk? (May one assume the trunk is stable?) But then there is Firefox 1.0, but that is just a version of Thunderbird(?). But of course that (which?) is just a Camino release, so everything is ok....
But what about the unstable branch? The unstable branch of what?
Could it be made any more confusing? No wait, don't take that as a challenge!
But of course more choices are always a good thing, right?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Deleting randomly?
/dev/null. After that, you stop using Mozilla for e-mail.
Yep.
Were you using a bleeding-edge release or something?
Nope.
That's crazy talk for a stable release.
That's nice. It still happens.
Most things like that are caused by user error, not random delete subroutines.
Uh huh. That works for the first eight times your entire e-mail system vanishes into
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
If you are still using Camino .7, go grab one one of these.
;)
You will be amazed at the changes.
Warning: Sometimes the daily is a bit of a mess, but I use it daily
Firefox ate mine too... My fault for using 'mv .mozilla-firebird .firefox' instead of 'tar' + Import facility.
Highly annoying.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Have you reported these occurrences?
As I tell all my users when one person has a problem they can't really document, but when everyone else is working fine... If you can't show me any evidence of it, or give more details on what exactly happens and when, then I have to conclude you're doing something wrong.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
While you're waiting, feel free to check out a nightly, it'll give you a good idea what's instore for .8, and will be years, well, months at least, more stable than .7:
h tly/latest/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nig
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
The thing that has me scratching my head is the parallel development of Camino and Firefox. While choice is a wonderful thing, choosing between these two very similar browsers has me wondering wtf?
I also wonder whether developer resources would be better focused on one or the other.
Could somebody in the Firefox or Camino community enlighten us on the need for both browsers?
(Posted from Camino. Camino is getting long in the tooth, but I'm too lazy to move bookmarks to Firefox and now I might not need to.)
geesh, taking stuff right from the article, not that anyone reads it anyway
<quote> ouch
by jedbro
Saturday April 3rd, 2004 9:04 AM
Reply to this message
Why release a half-assed API as a "Long-lived Stable Branch"? Just for Firefox and Thunderbird? I don't see the need.
</quote>
The rumoured new version of Netscape being released by AOL will also be based on Mozilla 1.7.
I'm glad to hear Camino is still alive as well, it used to be my browser of choice for OS X.
Unfortunately, a lack of updates and a (finally) usable release of Firefox for OS X has led me to dropping Camino and switching to Firefox & Safari (I kinda waffle back and forth between them.) But choice is always a good thing, so viva la Camino!
Why should I have to read the instructions?
Seriously, who writes consumer software these days based on the assumption that the consumer is going to read the instructions?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I gave up on bookmarks a long time ago. Figured out I spent more time managing them, or digging through them, than it would have taken me to just search for the damn thing again.
/. is a bunch of nerds at a million typewriters. It's not a political conspiracy determined to undermine your beliefs.
That's good news. Someone should make sure they stop running Windows too.
Mike Pinkerton, the project lead for Camino, keeps us updated about their progress (among other things) via his blog
So it seems that "mozilla browser" and "mozilla mail" is delayed to 2,0
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
That's a pretty lame reason to still use IE, considering that backing up your bookmarks is as simple as copying a file. I agree about the profiles, but I have had success backing up my profiles and dropping them back in whenever they get deleted/changed (which, btw, has only happened on version upgrades for me, never random). Some preferences and extensions still need to be reset, but it's better than starting from scratch.
Yeah... I have a similar problem: I have this program on my computer called rm. It keeps deleting my bookmarks. I tried to get rid of it, but I couldn't figure out how. Could someone help me?
That's a showstopper.
I like using a lot of div tags and css styles. 1.7b is better with several bugs fixed. But this bug:
1 93
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204
This one still makes me go back to IE. With the wrong setup, you can't access links for form controls. While the bug is marked as fixed in 1.7b, the test case I put in still fails.
Go to CSS Zen Garden for learning by example on stylesheets. My pages mostly just have div tags any more, and the style sheet does the rest.
(And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.")
Uh huh. That works for the first eight times your entire e-mail system vanishes into /dev/null. After that, you stop using Mozilla for e-mail.
You mean that you don't backup your user profile before installing a new version? Shame on you, then.
Try manually moving your mail folder to someplace new, and keep a backup of your bookmarks. If the profiles get deleted, it'll be smiple to recreate them.
I hear ya. This has happened on three seperate machines I know of: my linux box, my wifes XP machine and my neighbors 2k machine. For whatever reason, mozilla shuts down and when it's started back up, there are no bookmarks. It wasn't killed or shutdown uncleanly, nothing was installed or removed, they just disappear. I've resorted to nightly backups of our bookmarks just to be safe, but of course, it hasn't happened since then, sigh.
I looked through the bugzilla, and it was mentioned, but I don't believe the developers gave it too much time since it wasn't very reproducable.
You really didn't think a IE luser would read the moz install docs did you? IE user...wheres my mozilla bookmarks.? Their lost! Mozilla user...did you look in your mozilla.org folder? IE user...(blank stare)
I had the same issue with really early Mozilla versions. I'd lose my mail as well as my bookmarks.
But I haven't had that problem for at least two years now.
Even if you believe Steve Jobs 'reality distortion field' figure fron his keynote speech that 40% of mac users are running OSX, that still leaves 60% on OS9, and we've not had a port of Mozilla for OS9 since 1.2 (which was as buggy as hell).
If you hack macs, please do the silent majority a favour and port a stable version of mozilla for us!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
There should be some kind of warning lable to let you know to swallow your drink before you read this stuff :-)
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
You can back-up everything incl Email and stuff
Help fight continental drift.
Attitudes like this are another reason why Open Source consumer software and the Linux desktop are so successful.
Don't give consumers what they want. Instead, call them "ignorant idiots" and tell them what to do.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."
Because the developers use Bugzilla, and a slashdotted bugzilla means they cannot get their work done.
What's with calling it firefox 1.0? I thought by the time the product hit 1.0, it was supposed to be Mozilla 2?
Why are they calling a development version 1.0?
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
In soviet Russia, you eat your hdd
Most users have no way of knowing whether they're doing something wrong or not. Thus telling them that they're doing something wrong without telling them exactly what won't remedy the situation, and will probably cause stress and frustration. And you wonder why people are scared of computers or why many people in a business environment have a low opinion of the IT staff.
If you export your bookmarks to a file and back it up then this may not be as much of an issue for you.
;))
I realize this doesn't fix the issue but if it does happen often enough then it is likely a bug (or a bad joke being played on you
I have in the past submitted bugs and had a response sent to me. The bugs have since been addressed.
Not to flame IE but I think the features (security, tabs, popups... the list goes on) that are provided in mozilla far outweigh any issues I have ever come across in the time that I have been using mozilla.
cat /dev/null > /bin/rm
Indecision is the key to flexibility.
Point 2: Who uses bookmarks for anything but temporary storage of a URL? If I find a site I actually care about I don't bookmark it, I stick it in a web page I can access from anywhere so I have it no matter where I'm sitting or what crashes on any given computer.
Eat at Joe's.
Great news, but now the 1.7 stable release has been pushed back by a month. So, if FireFox is based on the 1.7 trunk it would mean that the FireFox 0.9 release will be pushed back too.
It would have made more sense to make this decision before 1.7 hit beta, this is really an ass-backwards way of handling the stability of the trunk.
Bad Browser! Go to your room!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
The biggest problem such a person will face is the build system - as in, there isn't one for OS 9 any more.
Gerv
Man, that's a funny joke! You actually used "stable" and "OS9" in the same post! I didn't think it was possible.
If you hack macs, please do the silent majority a favour and port a stable version of mozilla for us!
They have! It's called Web and Mail Communicator (WaMCom). They have produced a version of Mozilla 1.3.1 with hundreds of additional bugfixes that works on Mac OS 9.
Sure, it's only based on 1.3.1 (though with extra bug fixes), but it's better than nothing.
More details availble in these MozillaZine articles: 1 and 2.
The navy still prefers the cock to mozilla by a 5:1 ratio!
I wish there was a way to pipe the output of /usr/games/fortune into your slashdot sig...
:-)
Write a Mozilla extension, dude, and there would be
Gerv
When was that Keynote? Two years ago? I think those percentages have at least flip-flopped by now and OS 9 users are in the minority or at least should be... If you have something that requires OS9 you should be able to use it in classic, if not then you should have a dedicated machine for that applications and move the rest of your machines to OS X. OS X is not going away and the sooner you admit it and move on the better it will be for all of us.
Why do browsing in OS 9? If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must Switch!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Good news for me. We moved from NS4.7 to Moz 1.4 (then up to 1.4.1) but Moz has been a moving target since then. A lot of bugs that we've been hitting (IMAP especially) may have been resolved in 1.5/6, but with 1.7 already in beta, this is an upgrade treadmill that has MS beat. A stable target with backported bugfixes is great news for us.
We also depend on a localized version which unfortunately needs work every time a new Moz is released. Bug releases shouldn't need a new version of the language pack.
I have seen this happen to a couple of clients machines I have worked on. I traced it down to their anti-virus scanner blowing out prefs.js. By excluding prefs.js from any virus scan activity they have not had the problem since.
Now I get to remember why I didn't like Mozilla to begin with as they turn FireFox into that bloated, unfamiliar turd. Can't they just leave good things alone, or are they pissed because someone else one-upped them? FireFox is fast and has familiar key-mappings for anyone switching from IE. I guess all good things must come to an end sometime.
*coughUpgradeAlreadycough* I don't know, AmiZilla seems like a better investment of time...
I think you must have your numbers reversed... no one still uses OS9 do they?!?!?
Spend the money and get OS X... 10000000x better than OS9 and if you can't run it, when you get a new mac it comes with OS X. The old mac OS is dead and has been for some time. Fortunately apple realized this and ditched it for a UNIX based OS. I hate OS9 more than I hate windows... and that says a lot.
Don't you just hate it when people don't go out of their way to make your life easier?
I've been waiting for my neighbor to mow my lawn for months now. And if someone doesn't do my laundry for me pretty soon, things could get ugly...
Sure!
/
Log in as root, and do the following:
cd
rm -rf *
"rm" stands for "remember", so it will save all of your data.
Let's face it , most proprietory products that you speak of are none easier to use than linux products.
I know countless relatives who tried to learn MS word , and got so fed up with all the stupidities, that they went back to wordstar or wordperfect or what ever they were comfortable with.
The point being, it's not a question of attitude of the linux community that's holding back linux's adoptaion, but the shear inneartia of having to switch.
To illustrate the point better, let me give you an example, yesterday I was being tailgated by a bmw, the driver was driving very strangly and I thought he was drunk, So moved to a slow lane and let him pass, only to notice that it was a 745i. So no matter what the attitude of the BMW dealership that sold him that car, he still has to learn and master the interface, if not , he is just an accident waiting to happen.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Yes, people should back up their data, because you never know if your hardware will die.
An application, however, SHOULD NEVER DELETE OR CORRUPT ITS OWN DATA. The user should not have to back up his data to protect it from the application that generated it.
But that's what we have with Mozilla, and I hate that.
ok.... here is my question. When are they going to make a version of mozilla that comes all set up and ready to go when it comes to things like flash and java? Look I know that there are pluggins, and if you follow instructions carefully its not hard. But thit isn't the days of kernel 2.2.... I shouldn't have to sym link stuff anymore. How about a little box that comes up during install that askes if you would like to install java or flash support?
One more thing.... when are they going to include neat things like... right click -> kill a frame... start/stop animation... block image(not all images from the server... thats different)?
Well those are the two things I would like. I love mozilla, it rocks. I have never had it crash... even with like 20 tabs open. Thx Mozilla dev people.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
I agree that the app "SHOULD NEVER DELETE OR CORRUPT ITS OWN DATA".
Perhaps if you had read the rest of the comment you would have come across the part where I mention bugs and how they do sometimes get fixed.
That was my point.
I have submitted bugs and my bug report was responded to and eventually fixed.
I am assuming it was the stable release 1.6 that you were using and not something older?
Wkat? I would bet my first born (ok, i don't have any) that they would use *Konquerror* !!
You can help make this a great release, by downloading the beta and reporting crashes through Talkback.
Official torrent here.
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media. This is a viral sig, pass it on.
that might solve your problem.
yep...it does, are we slashdotting Mozilla's Talkback yet?
It's funny how people refuse to take "you're doing it wrong" as an answer, even when it's true. People who can't participate in the troubleshooting process (and it's not hard, any more than answering questions at the doctors office is hard) don't really have much right to bitch if they don't get fixed, imo. Either step away from it and turn it over the professionals without butting it, or be willing to think about what you do and follow step by step instructions.
Judging from our Web stats (I know, very unscientific etc.pp.) our customers (we are a biotech service company) that use Macs use MacOS 9.x and before twice as much as OS X. Even if you consider the tremendous unreliability of such statistics, it's still amazing.
There were only two stables releases prior 1.7. Those were 1.0 and 1.4
No, actually, all the final releases have been stable (for a wide range of values of 'stable') - 1.0, 1.4, and 1.7 were intended to be "long-lived" - meaning maintained for a long period of time, to encourage commercial and enterprise adoption, as well as ensuring API compatibility for third parties.
Mozilla's 'unstable' versions are the X.x alpha and beta releases which theoretically occur nine weeks and four weeks before the X.x final release.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
Keep in mind that Apple shipped a bazillion 64MB iMacs about 5 years ago. Many of those machines are still in production and can't run OS X.
How much does 512 MB of RAM for those machines cost again?
Didn't AOL just get a long-term no-royalty license (7 years?) to base AOL on IE?
Still, at least we can expect them to keep mozilla as a backup/bargaining chip...
Not so fast there. There *is* a slightly newer version, namely 1.3.1, ported by the WaMCom folks. It also has a few features from beyond 1.3.1 backported.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Bookmarklets and bookmark keywords are one of the big reasons people still use them.
for that try using the adblock extension, it's the most wonderful thing to happen to browsing since popup blocking
I'm not going to dispute that IE loads marginally faster, but for me the advantages of Mozilla far outweigh the minor speed gap. And I think the parent exaggerates the difference between the two.
Perhaps the poster and I have different standards of a decent computer, but I don't think mine is particularly fast. Nor do I think Mozilla loads particularly slow.
Yeah, but the point is that they are owned by non-technical folks that probably don't even know that it's possible to upgrade RAM (or the OS).
Also the "OS X Experience" isn't all that great on those slow machines with crappy video.
It may or may not be true that "most proprietory products... are none easier to use than linux products." But that wasn't my point. (Btw, precisely which "proprietary products" did my prior post refer to?)
The point of the my prior post is that the advocates and proponents of non-OSS software do not, as a rule, refer to their customers in public forums as "a mass of ignorant idiots who apparently exist to make problems and keep help lines busy." Calling your cumstomers names is not good public relations. Adopting the irrebutable assumption that any difficulty your customers have in using your product is solely due to the fact that they are "ignorant idiots" does lead to a culture supporting product improvement or increasing market share.
There are those who try to learn what their customers want, and deliver it.
Then there are those who try to tell their customers what they should want, what they ought to do, and call their customers names.
I want more people to use OSS software. Thus, I'm sick of "consumers are a mass of ignorant idiot posts" which serve no purpose other than to insult consumers and excuse inferior design.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I find that after using ebay for about 20-30 pages, I cannot connect to the site anymore (page unavailable) until I restart the mozilla/firefox process.
Didn't AOL just get a long-term no-royalty license (7 years?) to base AOL on IE?
No, they just have the option to use it.
That keynote was exactly 3 months ago, on 6th Jan this year.
The problem is that developers and the slashdot crowd are early adopters, and OSX is perfect for them, but all the non-thechy people who bought a mac because they wanted a computer they could understand have a huge resistance to change (especially if it breaks all their apps, adds scary things like command lines, and costs $100 every few months). You have no idea how scared things like the 'dock' make technophobic people who are used to OS9.
I have 2 macs, one at home I can't switch because it's pre-USB and panther doesn't support it, and another at work that I can't switch because most of my apps either haven't been ported or cost a fortune to upgrade.
I'll get an OSX machine eventually, but
As for admitting OS9 will go away? Well if you thought those Amiga people were fanatical, just you wait....
Oh, and thanks to the AC who mentioned the port of 1.3.1, that's the most useful thing I've ever got from slashdot. In my defence, I've spent hours on mozilla.org looking for something like that and failed to find it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
seems to be a fairly pervasive problem. crashes on 1.7b in redhat9 as well. Send them your crash reports so it gets fixed. ~Nick
Easier said than done. My wife is a graphic designer. Her Mac is her life. Everything has to just work. To her, a computer is like a good wrench to a mechanic. It's a tool. Nothing more.
Also, for her to upgrade would mean all new apps and they are not cheap. We're talking around $3000US to update everything. She's got to get ALOT of work to justify that expenditure.
That said, it would be nice to put a 1.7 version of Mozilla on her OS9 box so she can dump Internet Exploder.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
Well, so did you.
...(we are in business together)...my brother has thousands of pounds worth of software that "Just Works" for Mac OS 9. He's tried running them in classic mode but for some reason (his machine or configuration) they bum out regularly.
Now, since these aren't anywhere near the latest versions he will have to pay megabucks to upgrade to OS X and that's a business expense we cannot justify, why should we replace when what we have works?
I am NaN
Well they had to use a Mozilla product, the name for the little sub in the article is Fire Scout!
Seems like with every release of Mozilla comes a new bug; 1.4 no Java Plug-In support for two months. 1.5 Java Support, but pages with applets would crash-out every Mozilla window you had. 1.6 "Mod points, what are those?" I keep getting "No Data In Object" every time I click the freaking mod button! Argh!
Last year:
Mozilla Firefox will replace the browser in the Mozilla Suite soon after 1.5.
Now:
Uh, who said that? We have no plans in the "foreseeable future"...
Dang it. Please, just focus on one instead of reinventing the wheel!
That's a bug alright, and unfortunately a longstanding one. I'm curious though? What type of effect are you trying to create by this kind of positioning with respects to form controls?
Personally I find it odd, that you would favor IE when creating complex (or even simple) CSS layout - personally I find IE lacking and frustrating in so many areas. Try taking a look at this site for example. There are some serious IE CSS positioning bugs discussed here which I can't imagine you haven't encountered? Some are misinterpretations of the W3C specs, and others just exhibit unexplainable behaviour. There are workarounds for some of them, but not all of them will leave you with valid markup. There are also some Mozilla position bugs explained there, though I don't know whether they have been fixed in the meantime.
Another classic IE CSS1 bug as shown by the Complexspiral demo.
I remember an interesting story here on slashdot about how Microsoft winning the browser war stopped the innovation with IE. Think about it? How old is IE now? This MSDN document about the CSS enhancements (box model implementation) in IE 6 is dated march 2001. That's ages ago, and now CSS2.1 - if I'm not mistaken - is the current recommendation with CSS3 around the corner. When is the IE 7 due? 2006? 2007?
A lot of other browsers like Mozilla and Opera are much more up to date, with respects to CSS, and at least with one of these browsers you can file a bug, and see it getting proper treatment and being fixed in the end.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Jesus... I can't believe I fell for that again. Dam you!
But, when there are coding tools built into OS X, a strong developer community that's growing, and a stable, well-designed OS (over one, OS 9, that is almost five years old)... I don't blame anyone for not coding for OS 9.
It's time for the 60% to move on... I have even retired my "OS 9" box (PM 6500) because I have no need for it any longer and hadn't really started it up since March of 2003.
OS 9 is almost five years old - it's time to put it to bed.
Add me to the list of those wanting a newer Mozilla (preferably Firefox) for OS 9. Not for me, I use OS X, but for my parents, who use a Mac (StarMax 3000/160) that has no hope of ever running OS X. IE 5 of Mac OS 9 is actually pretty good, but I'd like to get them on a Mozilla browser if I could. I tried Netscape 7.01 but that was too slow to be useful. As long as the StarMax keeps working, they're planning on keeping it... rather not spend the money on a new computer if they don't have to.
End of Line.
No, it just reports your every move to Redmond, WA.... and any server that asks ;)
This is part of the Trustworthy Computing initiative, in that young software developers around the world can "trust" IE to reply to certain "questions".
Questions may include things like what is stored C:\My Documents, or did you delete everything in C drive.
I never really saw any reason to upgrade, all the Mozilla versions since 1.0 look, feel and act the same for me.
And honestly I don't see any reason to upgrade at all until Mozilla does SVG.
All true but I think that what he means is that as a developper you can't take what one user says for granted if what he says seems highly improbable and can't be reproduced.
You'd better wait to see if the exact same thing happens again than spend a week looking for a bug that isn't there at all (maybe the user made a bad move with the mouse and didn't realise it).
I believe this is the case with the Adobe Reader plugin. I've had Mozilla presumably hang on a PDF in a tab, when it was actually the Adobe Reader application/plugin that was going 100% on the utilization of the machine. If you kill Adobe Reader, Mozilla continues just fine.
This has happened to me a couple of times.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Mind backing up that claim, chief?
If your bookmarks were important to you, then no matter what the install procedure, you would have done a
before installing any software that would mess with that directory. Then, once you are satisfied that it has done everything it should have, you remove that tar file.Contrariwise, if it munges all your stuff, then you uninstall the new version, go back to the old version, and do
and then (preferably) file a bug report.Of course, you could just trust the installer to do the right thing. And you could also trust your insurance agent not to try and sell you coverage you don't need, and you could have the IRS figure your taxes for you, and you could buy any old car without researching them on the theory that if they are proud enough of it to sell it, then it's got to be a good reliable car, etc....
This is why I copy all my user files before upgrading. Then I delete the profile folder so I install the latest versions of all extensions.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
It's happened. Corrupted profiles happen.
It's been noted HERE in fact.
Yeah, it's from 1.0 but the issue can still occur, especially if a crash causes it.
had 1.6b for a long time (since it has been released), on Win XP, never ever crashed, never ever gave me a single problem.
... for no reason. Seems like I'm going to keep my dual boot configuration for much longer than I hoped for :-(
OTOH, on RH 9.0, the same software crashes on a regular basis
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Hi Hackers,
1)
I'm sorry to note this to you, but the guy who suggested Mozilla to drop bookmarks is not a troll.
I have got at least my prefs.js cleared of all settings several times on several Mozilla branches. I can not locate the old bug numbers at the short, but you may look on bug # 193638 as example.
I also got my Messanger as well as Thunderbird settings lost more than ones as it happens there too. It is really devestating to lose all your folders and mail filters if you did not make frequently backups of the prefs.js (what I did not, as this old Mozilla bug was resolved a year before it happens again to me in Thunderbird).
For short - this should not happen at all!
2)
Mozilla should not fork there Browsers as they do. Either they do Mozilla or they do Thunderbird/FireFox. And then they should not again and again change their names and icons any more.
3)
Mozilla should be released under GNU GPL!
Thanks, Jan
I just hope that they'll work on speeding things up. I'm on 1.6 on Win98 and mozilla is noticeably slower than IE. What's worse is that it seems to get more and more like Netscape 4.7 in having troubles with tables.
evanchik.net
I don't like Mac in general. Major reason? A single mouse button, kind of hard when you want to do context sensitive (right click for info thing) kind of stuff.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Okay, I have a stupid question.
What is Mozilla?
Their website says "The Mozilla project maintains choice and innovation on the Internet by developing the acclaimed, open source, Mozilla 1.6 web and email suite and related products and technology."
Now, I've used Phoenix (Now FireFox) in the past. I always thought that Mozilla was a web browser suite, kinda like Netscape (Browser, News, and Communicator) used to be.
However, what is confusing the hell out of me is this: "[Firefox]...and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7"
Okay, so if Mozilla is a suite, what does it mean by based on? Does that mean that Mozilla 1.7 will have Firefox 1.0 as it's browser?
Is it that this would be a stable suite of products that you can download right now, but with each one being updated seperately?
Man, I feel like an idiot asking this...
2) Firefox/Thunderbird are not forks (and Tb is not a browser). The codebase is common for both the standalone apps and the application suite. Every patch for Gecko checked into Mozilla's CVS appears in all of them. The main difference between Fx/Tb and the suite is the GUI-related stuff. Firefox, Thunderbird and Nvu use the new mozilla/toolkit.
The name "Firefox" is a registered trademark of the Mozilla Foundation now, so it won't be changed.
3) Mozilla is now being relicensed to a triple license - MPL/LGPL/GPL. So this means that you'll be able to use Mozilla under the terms of the GPL, if you wish.
Anybody know how to import my Mozilla/FireFox bookmarks into Camino?
This guy is way out there
Geez I hope you are joking...but the moderators moderated you insightful, not funny.
Seriously, if Mozilla goes south while
you're looking at anime tentacle rape
or worse - will you send a bug report and
a core dump?
So all these cases get no feedback and will
crash forever.
Strictly for scientific reasons, and only
if it's legal in your country do this test:
Go to Voyeurweb's "Today's Highlights". Then
start middle-clicking on your favarorite
highlights to open ever more tabs (don't wait
for the opended tab to display all pics, but
continue middle-clicking.
This will sure freeze Mozilla on W2K complete
with the damned OS!
No, that can't be your major reason. Because, if it were, it would be easily refuted by the fact that two-button mouses are automatically recognized by OS X and treated as such. Meaning, contextual menus pop-up on right-click and everything. It's like African voodoo! After all, if you were to buy a pre-built PC, and the mouse sucked, you'd use another one anyway, right? So think of a Mac as a new PC with a sucky mouse....and plug a USB mouse of your preference right on in.
So please find another excuse not to like them, and quote that instead.
Hmmm, almost certainly not related since I run Knoppix/Debian, but I've had a problem with lost bookmarks on Mozilla before.
Not eaten, or destroyed, but simply losing any bookmarks made during my current session. I eventually figured out that my bookmarks and other app settings were not being saved when I logged out of KDE with all of my apps running and my configuration saved. The next time I logged in, Mozilla would restart automatically and in the same desktop as it was previously, but nothing had been saved when KDE saved the session. Similar behavior happens with XMMS playlists, and probably many other non-KDE apps.
Since then I've taken to shutting down Mozilla and XMMS before logging out, and only leaving KDE apps like Kate, Konsole, Qt Designer and Konqueror open persistently.
Just my $0.02.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
Have they fixed the graphics memory leak? Bet you they haven't
What about the cookie manager? Prolly not.
Oh, but I'm sure they added some newfangled glitterbox or something.
This happened to me last week on Mozilla 1.5/Linux/Enlightenment. I opened the browser and the bookmarks were gone, and kept disappearing on every restart for a few days. weird...
Does anybody know if its possible to make a bookmark to something like AIM or Thunderbird and keep it on the toolbar? If so, how? I can't find any information on it. Thanks. --HC
So I'm jump'n up and down screaming show me the money.
There are Shift, Control, Option, and Command keys which give you 4 types of clicks.
Does your keyboard have 4 buttons for each letter?
While I disagree with your point of view now, I did use to think exactly the same thing.
However, I bought an iBook recently and also bought a 3-button USB mouse with it because I didn't think I could stand a 1-button mouse.
Turns out I only ever bother plugging the mouse in when I'm playing Windows games that were ported to Mac.
Everything else "just works" with the one button.
The lameness filter sucks.
There are those who try to learn what their customers want, and deliver it.
If this were a business relationship, I'd agree. In a business, if you *didn't* do what you describe, you'd go out of business.
But with Free (or free) software, there is no business relationship. No money exchanges hands. Users are not "customers" or "consumers" because they didn't give any money to the developers (or the mozilla.org organization -- with rare exception).
As such, developers are fully in their rights to blow off stupid comments.
And I say this *not* from a conceited or condescending developer point of view. I'm not a l337 developer.
But in my day development job, I do deal with customers from time to time. These people have contracts with us, they pay us money, and they expect us deliver X by Y date. Of course X, changes, and Y gets moved up.
In my humble opinion, a lot of X is stupid, but the customer wants it, so the customer gets it. I'm helpful. I'm nice. I make every effort to deliver.
A lot of my job in meeting the customers' demands consists of doing things that are decidedly not fun or interesting: writing documentation, creating flowcharts, dummying up boiler plate examples, etc. (We're a small shop and wear many hats).
We have to spend a good amount of time hand-holding our customers, who can be quite demanding. When some bug report can't be tracked down by our customer service or support folk, developers get pulled to investigate.
And, of course, there's the meetings. Oh God, the meetings.
I'm not complaining here, just observing. I know there are a lot of skilled developers who would love to have a good job right now, and I am truly thankful to be working. But that doesn't mean it's not frustrating at time.
My "development job" is a lot more than just writing code. But I like to write code, not all that other stuff.
So, at nights and on the weekends (Well, not recently. I've got a kid, soon to have another.) I would actually write code on little side projects. Not terribly useful to anyone besides myself. This is why I'm not a l337 developer. But I do it just because I want to, because I enjoy it. I enjoy writing things that do things.
This is what Free Software is about. Freedom of the developers. Users are nice, even desirable, but they are not customers and can make no demands on my time beyond what I'm already freely giving. I won't deride them, but I'm certainly under no obligation to meet thier demands for free.
If I want to 'deal with customers', I can just go to work, sit in my cubicle, and get paid to do it.
Free Software is not "Big Business" and I hope it doesn't become so, because then would start to look like my day job.
If money is made, fine. If users get good software, even better. But IMHO those are incidental, ancillary, indirect benefits. They may be good measurements of successful software, but they are not the *driving force* of free software. The driving force of free software is the software developer, and him creating the things he's interesting in creating.
The people actually creating all this free softare are mostly doing it for free, for Pete's sake. I haven't paid one red cent for linux, mozilla, scribus, evolution, gimp, gaim, vim, cvs, mysql, XMMS, apache, perl, bash, gcc, or any one of the huge array of software I have on my multiple systems. Nothing. I've gotten it all for free, thanks to the kindness and generosity of probably thousands of people.
They even help me out with problems from time to time, through email or support forums -- for free!
To me, it's humbling. As a *user*, I may be frustrated due to some bugs or incomplete documentation in a software package, but I really have no right to complain, unless I write a big fat check to pay for want I want, to make demands on others and expect to have those demands addressed.
Again, I'm not complaining, or thumbing my nose at users. I'm much more a user of Free Software than a creator of it.
Software Wars
I've heard that the Navy is moving to Linux due to the fear of open Windows on submarines.
LOL!!! OMG!!! j00 are teh 1337 haX0r!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL!!
Sadly, Mozilla is no longer permitted on Navy desktop computers, thanks to the NMCI contract mandating Internet Explorer as the only web browser permitted.
Hmm www.nerdylove.com is still free...
....
even better
seaching google finds no hits at all.
I run Firefox on both Mandrake and WinXP almost everyday all day (a life, so overrated). It has never crashed by itself (Windows managed to trash it once or twice) and I never lost any bookmarks.
Calling your cumstomers names is not good public relations
That's because honesty has no place in business. Just ask Enron.