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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."
How does this translate for consumers?
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
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.
The question is when will Firefox and Thunderbird become the core applications?? That was their original plan for Pheonix/Firebird/Firefox.
How about a name that is indicitive of the programs function? You know, something like 'FireWeb', except not so lame.
/. is a bunch of nerds at a million typewriters. It's not a political conspiracy determined to undermine your beliefs.
At least with tabs Mozilla is really quick - opening a new tab takes no time at all, yet with IE opening a new window there is a perceptible pause. Especially as IE seems to think "oh, he's opened a new window. What I'll do is load up the same webpage he is viewing in the original window" ... weird logic that leads to even more delay.
Firefox 0.8 has been the least stable version of Mozilla/FireWibble I've used though. It eats memory like a whore in a chocolate dick factory. It crashes and takes down Windows with it (this is really odd, but it does, I can't explain it, no decent OS should be taken down by a rogue application).
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.)
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.
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
Note that this means that the next version of Netscape, if there is one, will be based on 1.7 etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no way that there's going to be a new Netscape version considering that AOL killed off the Netscape division a while ago.
Especially as IE seems to think "oh, he's opened a new window. What I'll do is load up the same webpage he is viewing in the original window" ... weird logic that leads to even more delay.
That logic is the main reason I just can't stop using IE entirely (in favor of firefox), no matter how much I try. "New window" is useful in IE, because it not only opens the same page, but it makes a clone of your history...allowing you to "branch" your history.
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.
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 installed the browser uptime extension and every time someone, mentions how stable XP is, All I do is show them my browser up time, arguments stop.
I have firebird 0.7 on solaris, firefox 0.8 on Windows ME (yes the dreaded ME) and firefox , CVS build on gentoo linux and none has crashed on me so far.
I did have stability problems with fireXXX What's more even my roommate has now switched to firefox, and this is the fellow who ran to buy the Win XP upgrade on the very first day it was released.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
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.
The decision was made to improve quality. Several projects, including the 1.0 release of Firefox, were schedule to come off the 1.7 branch.
That caused the Mozilla people to delay 1.7 in order to work on stabilizing it so that the products using it would have a higher level of quality.
Making 1.8 be the stable branch wouldn't have been of any use to any of the major projects using the code.
Funny you should say that, since there was an Internet Explorer before Microsoft released theirs. Their argument in court was that Internet Explorer is a generic name and thus couldn't be trademarked.
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
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.
Mind backing up that claim, chief?
A quick Google for "Internet Explorer trademark" would have done you wonders, but here's just one URL from that search:
http://www.geek.com/techupdate/msynetst.htm
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...