Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla 1.8 Alpha Released
AllMightyPaul writes "Last Friday, the Mozilla Organization announced Mozilla 1.8a. You can download Mozilla 1.8 alpha (with torrents available) from the Mozilla public FTP server. Features include a basic upload FTP UI, improved junk mail filtering, and the number of cookies that Mozilla can hold has also increased 'dramatically.' What's amazing is that they haven't even released Mozilla 1.7 yet. Here I thought that Mozilla was going to standardize on 1.7."
But despite standardising 1.7, development of mozilla continues.M E.html for details.
1.7 is about third party developers and products which rely on a fixed api.
1.8 is where new features will be found.
New features are for example ftp upload capability, use of 4. and 5. mouse button.
see http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.8a1/READ
But this news is already 8 days old. I wonder why this is picked up only now.
improved junk mail filtering
I really don't understand why this is still a live issue. When I used to use Outlook I used SpamBayes to filter my spam and within a few days it was catching 99.99% of my spam. That's obviously a made-up figure, but that's how it felt. I never missed a single real mail, and after a few weeks I don't think a single spam ended up in my inbox.
Then I moved to Thunderbird, and suddenly obvious spam is regularly ending up in my inbox, despite several weeks' training. Don't get me wrong, it's a great mail client, but I don't see why it's so hard to implement something that's already been done perfectly in more than one open-source project?
I thought Firefox was scheduled to be *the* browser in the suite [...] How does that work if Firefox is on a branch and the suite ploughs ahead?
Firefox is only on a branch for 0.9 and 1.0. That's no different from how Mozilla 1.7 is on a branch. Future versions of Firefox will be built from the trunk (or, more likely, from a more recent branch from the trunk), and thus will contain all the backend work that's been going on since 1.7 branched.
Of course, you're welcome to download the trunk builds of Firefox (which are being made available daily) -- you'll get the same backend fixes that 1.8 Alpha1 has, but it won't be anywhere near as stable as the branch builds.
I hope bugfixes [...] are consistantly and promptly backported to 1.7 (and thus to Firefox)
Actually Firefox is on its own branch now, based off the 1.7 branch. And no, not all fixes will be backported, that's the whole point of having a branch. And the bug you mentioned isn't even fixed yet.
or the impetus could be there to reverse the flow back to the suite
That doesn't make sense. If you wanted the bug fixes that 1.8 had, you could just get a 1.8 build of Firefox instead of the one from Firefox' 1.0 branch. No reason to switch back to the suite.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Ok, im no 'zilla expert here, but ever since I can remember Mozilla (or at least Firefox) has supported opening tabs on middle click.
Well, you're mostly right. Tabs were added prior to the 1.0 release, and middle-click to open the tabs was turned on then...except on OS X.
Kindly see Bug 151249 -- Middle click on links does nothing in OS X (You'll have to copy that link, bugzilla has a referrer check to block links from slashdot.)
Unfortunately, Carbon doesn't have the ability to recognize a middle mouse click, so Mozilla (Seamonkey) and Firefox can't do anything on a middle click. Camino, on the other hand, is built with Cocoa, so middle-clicking works on a default build.
Combine this with the lack of Ctrl+Enter URL autocomplete, and I don't enjoy my Mozilla experience on OS X. I use Firefox on a daily basis on both Windows & Linux; the second I go over to my Powerbook, Firefox doesn't behave even close to the same way, and it drives me crazy. I still use it, because I really dislike Safari's interface, and it's still missing too many features, but Mozilla on OS X needs a chunk of work before it will act like it does on other OSes.