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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."

18 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Mozilla needs more speed and by Adolph_Hitler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Mozilla needs more speed and by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      What I want to know is, why the hell is Mozilla married to its own slow-ass widget set? I know there are assorted versions of the browser which use native OS widgets, and are as such much much faster in some ways than normal netscape, especially on lower-end (P2, P3, Celeron) systems. I know that using your own widget sets makes things a lot easier, and gives you skinning support, but I'd rather have speed - but I still want the whole browser suite.

      There are numerous cross-platform applications out there which support multiple native widget sets, at least Windows, and "everything else". Tivoli's TME10 system (I haven't seen it since they renamed it) had a management console application using a common codebase, built with gcc on Unix and with VS on Windows, which used I believe Motif on Unix systems and used the Windows widgets. All Tivoli GUIs are drawn based on a description file which instructs the system on which components to use where.

      Now granted you'd have to end up having some library which was replaced system by system, but this is something I think Mozilla could really use. You could argue that faster machines run it smoothly (my XP 2500+ rarely slows down because of the mozilla gui, but it certainly does draw visibly slower under load) but there are many of Pentium 2 and 3 systems out there in the 333 to 733 MHz range under which Mozilla performs like an absolute dog but Microsoft Orifice 2000 is not only usable, but also prompt.

      I don't think including new features necessarily must make Mozilla consume more memory or operate more slowly, as long as they either A> are built on top of the framework like everything else and thus not loaded when not needed, or B> are dynamically loaded at the time of use, which probably isn't happening today.

      As for bt > FTP, this is nonsense. Integrating BT would be neat but is unnecessary and the bt code available today is very much in its infancy. Besides, all you have to do is associate torrent files with your bt client and you're in like flynn. That wasn't so hard, was it? FTP is here to stay. It is used heavily by many websites and ftp support is just considered to be part of the system. FTP upload support in a web browser is often really handy for those who use Mozilla to edit and maintain their websites for whatever reason - Maybe they can't afford Dreamweaver, or maybe it's just not available for their platform, or maybe they don't think it's worth whatever the hell Macromedia charges for it these days. Regardless, FTP upload support is not unreasonable. Integrating the moving target of bittorrent (even the main branch of bt is horrendously unstable) at this point would be maintenance suicide.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Mozilla needs more speed and by Gerv · · Score: 3, Insightful

      why the hell is Mozilla married to its own slow-ass widget set?

      a) Justify "slow-ass" with figures.
      b) Let's see you render an animated GIF background on a button using the Motif widget set.

      Any browser which wants to support a decent part of CSS needs its own widgets, because OS widgets just don't cut it. IE does it too - and they have access to the underlying platform development team, _and_ only have to support one platform!

      Gerv

  2. Re:Firefox by stokkie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I hope only as optional plug-in's. Want to keep my browser as light as possible.

  3. Re:yet more bloat by vivek7006 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What you call as "bloat" are useful features for other users. If you dont like/use these features, use firefox.

  4. Mozilla is supposed to be bloated by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!"
  5. Re:Firefox by stiggle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Spam filter by GreyPoopon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Then I moved to Thunderbird, and suddenly obvious spam is regularly ending up in my inbox, despite several weeks' training.

    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?

  7. Re:Happy :-) by mabinogi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
  8. Re:What everyone is interested in... by crayz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. Spammers changed their methods. by Dog+and+Pony · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  10. Re:What everyone is interested in... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  11. Re:Middle Mouse on Linux (was: re: ... on MacOSX) by Patrik+Nordebo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  12. Still no SVG? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Really, after so many years in development, the fact that SVG is still not in the main branch by default is really dissapointing.

    1. Re:Still no SVG? by rmohr02 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      SVG is in the main branch, it just isn't built by default. Also, I believe the only guy doing any serious work with SVG for Mozilla is Alex Fritze. If you want SVG quicker, I'm sure Alex could use help.

  13. Re:Firefox by Gerv · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  14. Re:What everyone is interested in... by BlowChunx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  15. And this is why.... by Koguma · · Score: 3, Insightful
    developers run screaming from the Mozilla framework. I mean, what's the point of developing for it when what you code will be out-of-date within a month or so. Who will run your app on an 'old' version of Mozilla? I've written some stuff using XUL and JXPCOM and having it work in later browsers is a mixed bag. And as has been said, 1.7 isn't even out yet. Why not focus resources on getting all the bugs quashed in 1.7 to make it the standard for developing. And they have the gall to wonder why developers don't use their framework. Doesn't look like M$ has any competition after all...