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."

Comments

Mozilla needs more speed and

[Adolph_Hitler]

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?

Re:Mozilla needs more speed and

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:yet more bloat

[vivek7006]

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

Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[Aqua OS X]

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.

Re:Firefox

[stiggle]

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.

Re:Spam filter

[GreyPoopon]

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?

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[crayz]

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.

Spammers changed their methods.

[Dog and Pony]

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?

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Still no SVG?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Still no SVG?

[rmohr02]

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.

Re:Firefox

[Gerv]

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