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."
One of the reasons I stopped using Mozilla was the bloat. I do not need one tool that does: web browsing, email, usenet, html editing and, now, ftp upload.
One of the perennial criticisms of MS software is the bloat. Is bloatware some how ok if it's open source? Of course it isn't.
Adding yet another piece of unnecessary functionality to Mozilla makes it less, not more, attractive.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Mozilla needs more speed and less power.
Currently Mozilla is the most powerful browing suite on earth. Problem is people don't care about all those features, we just want speed. So developers what do you plan to do to make XUL faster? How do you plan to reduce the memory footprint? How about reducing CPU load? What about actually speeding up the rendering of websites ?
And if you are going to add new features, try intergrating bit torrent into mozilla since it seems to be the new default download format why the hell are you upgrading FTP?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Let's hope the answer is "never". The reason: association with bloat, at least in my mind. Whenever someone mentions Mozilla I think "bloatware".
And if any of my colleagues mentions they're considering switching (from IE) to Mozilla I stop them and point them at Firebird (which they always love: how fast they cry! How bloat free!).
There's an expression: You can never be too rich or too thin. For software the corollary is: it can never be too fast or to lightweight.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I hope only as optional plug-in's. Want to keep my browser as light as possible.
Mozilla is a browser for web developers.
Firefox, Camino, and Thunderbird are the browsers and email clients for those who don't need JS debuggers, consoles, ftp clients, text editors, whosits, and whatsits.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Thunderbird and Firefox are the standalone programs for mail and browsing.
The Mozilla Suite is a platform that does everything (except the laundry - but they're probably working on that too) which the other standalone programs use as their base.
I always thought of Mozilla as the technology demontrator platform and the other programs as the bits that are useful.
I wonder if this could be timing. I use Mozilla Mail as my client at home, and I turned on spam filtering for my wife's email account (because she was silly and gave her email address to Publisher's Clearinghouse). After a couple weeks of training, it was catching almost all the spam, but in the last few months the spammers have been intentionally misspelling words in random ways, which reduces the effectiveness considerably. Does anybody know if SpamBayes addresses this issue?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Actually, the Exchange server has to have IMAP or POP access turned on.
The standard Exchange protocol is not something Thunderbird (or Mozilla) can handle, and NTLM authentication wont help that.
There's also the fact that both Mozilla and Thunderbird cant use all the groupware features of Exchange, so it'd have to be mail only.
The result is, sometimes it's just easier to go with the flow and use Outlook. It's not actually all that bad if you're using a current version, and fiddle with some of the settings a bit. (Though I'll never like their "sort by conversation" approach to threading)
Advanced users are users too!
Yeah, I always laugh at the bloatware idea. It's funny watching people at work who use IE and have dozens of Windows open, and how long it takes them to open a new one, switch between windows, etc.
IE is slow compared to Moz. Firefox is probably slightly faster, especially on slow machines, but IMO it's really more about which browser's features you prefer at this point.
Thunderbird used to have the same results - when I used 0.1 and 0.2, I never saw a spam outside my spam box, and no real mails got marked wrong either - after just some minor training. Then, after a while, spams started to look differently, and what do you know? TB started to fail.
Spammers simply learned how to (partly) defeat Bayesian. I'd be very interested to see your results if you tried SpamBayes now. I bet it wouldn't do better.
Or did you think the spammers would just give up and go home?
Why is Mozilla adding new features like the FTP client if they plan to go to a firefox based browser that uses a system of extensions?
Why wasn't the FTP client written as an extension?
Steve
Let's hope people like you fade away like they deserve.
Mozilla is a platform for internet. I fully *expect* mozilla to be composed of multiple collaborative applications. Like today. You may call this bloat, but having a single app (single download, single install, single version tracking) that does web + mail + calendar + html editor + irc on every existing platform is required.
By porting mozilla, any new platform get access to the whole internet suite. This guarantees that Microsoft cannot get a hold on the web by fragmenting the offer.
That is far most important than all your little my-browser-is-smaller-than-yours pissing contest.
I would not mind to see the mozilla suite extended to include a blogger, an im client, a pim synchronisation tool or a p2p client.
Btw, your so-called small browser is waaay too big to be usable on a handheld.
One size fits all don't work. Do not turn mozilla into what it is not. If all you want is to browse the web, then, by all mean use a standalone web browser (based on mozilla, if you want), but don't divert the mozilla.org resources into fullfilling your personal needs.
The war for the control of the internet is not irrelevant and Mozilla is the single most important application in that field. Don't divert mozilla resources into a browser war with Microsoft (because they already won it last century).
Whenever someone mentions Mozilla I think "bloatware".
Maybe, but there are places I will gladly take the bloat of 1.8. For example, my iBook. How OS X has made it so long without including a bi-directional FTP gui, I'll never know. The Finder's support is read only. And I haven't really found a good cost free FTP gui for OS X. So if Mozilla is going to be including FTP upload functionality, this is good news for me.
The Finder IMHO is the once place that OS X is still lacking. I mean, you can browse and read-write any file system you want using OS X, but FTP is still read only? Go figure.
Because Netscape (and Mozilla after it) has always reacted to a middle click by trying to load the selected URL, unless you click on a link. I, for one, am used to that behaviour and use it all the time, and I suspect that goes for a large proportion of the people who used to use Netscape on a Unix(-like) system.
..I'll have to hear this?
It's just the linux kernel that follows that numbering.
A small number of projects followed the idea, but it's very far from a general rule, and it's not intended to be.
Really, after so many years in development, the fact that SVG is still not in the main branch by default is really dissapointing.
Your comment talks about two totally different things - user interface design and new features - which are very different. You can make a lot of changes ("improvements" is a loaded word I'm trying to avoid) to a product's UI without changing the feature set, and you can often add features without changing the UI.
So how is "Mozilla developers aren't taking any UI patches" related to "there hasn't been a worthwhile new feature for ages"?
Also, why are you looking to Seamonkey for new features? The suite is in maintenance mode - there are still people and companies interested in it, but they are interested in it staying as it is. Firefox is where the innovation is happening right now.
Gerv
Mozilla is a platform for internet.
1) This is not the unix way of doing things. Small individual apps that can be combined in powerful ways.
2) What is this "internet" thing you talk about? To me it's a moving target. It does the "big three" (browse, mail, chat). What about streaming MP3s? How about P2P? How about unknown protocol-X? I like mozilla as much as the next person (typing in it now...), but the goal is overstated.
Mozilla should break into separate apps to handle separate tasks.
Then the desktops should provide a standard way of providing inter-app communication (is that what message bus is attempting?), so that clicking on a link in my e-mail client of choice it sends it to my browser of choice...
Sheesh, the whole project is Open Source / Free software, with a largely open, public, and transparent development process. Go to mozilla.org and all the mozilla portals and learn a little bit about the project, where it's headed, why it's headed that way, who's responsible for it, how it can benefit you, how you can help, and et cetera.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I realize this doesn't quite answer your question, but I suggest you continue to train your filter. Then (like me) you should see the results improve with time.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
What webmasters should do is design according to the web standards, not target one particular browser. That will ensure that the page will work for the largest possible audience, and will need less maitenance in the future. In my experience, webmasters generally do care if Mozilla users can't access their site, and if you point out specific problems and standards-based solutions to those problems, they will usually make their site accessible in Mozilla.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.