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Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch

Posted by michael on from the long-live-the-gecko dept.

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."

19 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. Oh glorious day! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    News about a new firefox version, and it doesn't have a name change! There may be a hat trick yet, folks.

    1. Re:Oh glorious day! by arvindn · · Score: 5, Funny
      I think the real reason they're changing the names every 2 months is that they can now assert their superior intellect and geekiness just by asking people what browser they're using!

      Just imagine this conversation in a bar (assume, for the sake of argument, that at the time of this conversation the current name is FireChameleon):

      Cool Moz Dude: Hi! So... what's your browser?

      Hot Chick: Uhh... firefox.

      Cool Moz Dude: What?? Have you been living under a cave? FireChameleon was released a whole week ago! All the l33t people have already switched!!

      Hot Chick is impressed by Cool Moz Dude's uber-geekiness and falls all over him.

      That's the intention anyway. In reality, of course, the reply would be at best "oh, that explorer thingy, same as everyone else" and at worst a glazed look of complete apathy ;^)

  2. Wow! by Wavicle · · Score: 5, Funny

    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)
    1. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You work for the government don't you?

    2. Re:Wow! by arvindn · · Score: 5, Funny

      No geek points for you! Real hackers telnet to port 80 and parse the html themselves :)

  3. how exactly do they crash Mozilla? by victorvodka · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:how exactly do they crash Mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      1) Go to about:config.

      2) Select "Print Preview"

      3) Crash.

      On Firefox 0.8 on Windows 2000.

  4. Re:Deleting bookmarks by jazzis · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, IE "only' eats your hard drive after the infection.... whoops!

  5. Mozilla vs. Firefox by moberry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Contension by Jack+Comics · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  7. Problems... by arvindn · · Score: 5, Informative
    The blurb doesn't mention it, but quite a bit of dissatisfaction has been expressed about 1.7 becoming the next long lived branch, rather than 1.8. The issue seems to be that the APIs for this version are rather half-assed, which means that those who develop on the platform won't get a clean interface and will need to get used to some hacks and kludges.

    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.

  8. What about the previous roadmaps for Firefox? by Synistar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The question is when will Firefox and Thunderbird become the core applications?? That was their original plan for Pheonix/Firebird/Firefox.

    1. Re:What about the previous roadmaps for Firefox? by steeef · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here's your answer (from the roadmap):

      We are not retiring the SeaMonkey [Mozilla] application suite, or its XPFE front end, in the foreseeable future. Several companies have shipped and will ship products based on this venerable component of the application suite, and on the entire suite. Many organizations deploy it or a derivative of it, such as Netscape 7.x. We intend to keep supporting these deployments in at least a conservative, sustaining engineering fashion. However, we still intend to focus on evolving Mozilla toward the more flexible application architecture pioneered by Firefox and Thunderbird. That's where our innovative engineering effort should go.

  9. Re:Deleting bookmarks by Junta · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  10. To answer your last question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1 by Gerv · · Score: 5, Informative

    The biggest problem such a person will face is the build system - as in, there isn't one for OS 9 any more.

    Gerv

  12. Re:No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:1.7 by HungWeiLo · · Score: 5, Funny

    1.7 - the '33' in 1337 is silent.

    --
    There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
  14. Re:Yeah, never mind the long life branch by Simon+Lyngshede · · Score: 5, Funny

    I suggest Firegnu then, maybe Firestallman. Or they could just call it "Internet", that would help some lame ass users who seem to think that Internet Explorer is the internet. Yes go with internet, Mozilla Internet.