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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.
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)
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.
How does this translate for consumers?
[Karma burn]
What consumers?
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.
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.
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.
I am the only one at work that uses Mozilla. One day shortly after installing it, someone at my office said, "How do i get the cool looking dinosaur icon for my pictues too?" I've never had people jealous of my icons before.. 8)
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
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
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.)
The rumoured new version of Netscape being released by AOL will also be based on Mozilla 1.7.
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)
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
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.")
Except, it's not a choice. If you want the best version of Mozilla, download it from moz.org. How hard can it be? All this stuff is transparent to end-users, it's only techies that see the branch/trunk discussions.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
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
You can back-up everything incl Email and stuff
Help fight continental drift.
Why on earth would they completely change the base code and keep the same major release number? Er, they're not. Mozilla 1.7 is just an upgrade to Mozilla 1.6. Even Firefox and Thunderbird do not use new base code. The backends of Mozilla and Firefox/Thunderbird are virtually identical. The only thing that's different is the UI. Of course because the UI is the most visable part of the program, it feels like completely new code.
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.
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.
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.
The biggest problem such a person will face is the build system - as in, there isn't one for OS 9 any more.
Gerv
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Casual users don't have to worry about trunks, branches, or stable versions -- Mozilla.org hides that stuff pretty deep so that only developers and interested geeks can find it.
Currently Mozilla.org has five programs available on their main page. Four of those -- Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, and Mozilla 1.7b -- are clearly marked as "technology previews" -- i.e., developmental software that's being released to help get the bugs worked out. Mozilla 1.6 is the program casual users will want, and, except when there's news to report, it's always at the top of the page.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
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)
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"
...(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
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.
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...
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