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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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)
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
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...