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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."
I have been running the new alpha of Mozilla for a little time now and I can definitely say that this is the best browser I have ever used.
It's faster, more responsive, uses less memory and overall is just one great piece of code.
I'm looking forward to the final release, but to those who are sceptical to running an alpha release I recommend that you give it a try anyway - it's that great!
Internet Explorer will have a hard time keeping up with the great folks at Mozilla. In my book, the browser war has already been won.
I thought Firefox was scheduled to be *the* browser in the suite (with Thunderbird the equivalent in the mail space). How does that work if Firefox is on a branch and the suite ploughs ahead?
I hope bugfixes (217527 for example which affects Slashdot) are consistantly and promptly backported to 1.7 (and thus to Firefox) or the impetus could be there to reverse the flow back to the suite- up until now I have tended to think of Firefox as "the best of Mozilla"...
--Murray Barton
There doesn't seem to be a version compiled against Xft or Gtk+2.0. Is this a regression?
You know, starting FireFox and Thunderbird takes longer in total than starting Mozilla.
And together they use more memory than Mozilla does, or at least no less memory.
As far as usage goes there's no perceptible difference in browsing speed between Mozilla and Firebird.
I think people like to say Mozilla is "bloatware" because it's the trendy thing to do, but I don't think it deserves the title.
The interface used to be fairly slow in pre 1.0 versions, particularly in the Mail/News component...but that really didn't have a hell of a lot to do with "bloat".
Now I don't notice any difference between the speed of Mozilla's interface or any other Windows Program.
Advanced users are users too!
Rarely have I seen developers so resitant to change as on the Mozilla bugzilla forums. It seems the core developers fight every little attempt to improve the interface, fought the new website (and thankfully lost), fought adding a new splash screen (and apparently threw in that nice new orange "thing" as a big "fuck you" to everyone who posted on that thread). Hell, If I was running the show every new release would have a new splash screen ala the GIMP. Because, really, who gives a shit about some minor bugfixes, but the GIMP splashscreens rock and are genuinely funny in the beta builds, so people upgrade anyway, the builds get more testing and everyone is happy.
Basically, everything should be open for change. Every UI pixel spacing issue should be open for improvement, every 1px border in the interface needs to be justified. All text that is presented to the user needs to be constantly reviewed for easy of use, and so on... Of course, these things are only essential if you care at all about people actually using your software... The Thunderbird logo will convert more users than any single feature X you can name. If you can't see that you really don't understand the end user market and their need to download spyware infested wallpaper changers.
Only slightly related is this:
What I never understood, though, is why with the X version of Mozilla (Linux in my case) clicking the middle mouse button on a tab by default tries to load the current selection as an URL.
Why? First thing with all Mozilla installs on Linux I do is to disable middlemouse.ContentLoadURL. Why on earth do they set it to true on Linux? Just to make life harder for people whop use both Win32 and Linux? Or do they track this silently somehow, trying to figure out how many people know how to change settings "back to normal" via about:config?
- You get everything or nothing: I can't decide just to have the web browser and html editor: but I'd rather use my existing email app so I don't want that taking up resources on my machine.
The good thing about the mozilla browser is you -can- do this, all you need to do is pull down the source and compile your own version of mozilla with the various features that you do/dont want. Pretty much everything can be disabled/turned on and off in the main build by simply editing the- Regression testing. This is more an issue for the Mozilla developers, but a change in one component (email say) could break another part (html editing say).
The HTML editing component of Mozilla is in no way dependant on anything at all in the mail component. (although mail is dependant on the editor to create HTML emails etc). Thunderbird still pulls in the same dependant compoents just like standard Mozilla does. It's similar to using libGtk+ libraries in an app, it has the possibility to break things further down the chain (usually it put thru more testing anyway).Isn't this all standard software engineering practise which makes development alot simpler rather than having to have a similar thing coded in 10 different places.
Mozilla isn't bloaty though, I've been using it since 'milestone 18' back in the mid-nineties when it was a bit pokey and broken.
Have you done a quantitative ascessment of this feeling that Moz is big or slow? I think Mozilla is quite fast, certainly faster than IE. Also, I think that if you could un-marry windows and IE and get a full grasp of how much RAM IE was using (even when it's not loaded, mshtml.dll and friends are in RAM) you'd change your story.
Every web browser is going to use a fair amount of RAM because it needs at least a window-sized buffer to composite on. Safari and IE are tricky because they use the OS libraries for that, so it's not as easy to see the footprint, but Moz does it inside itself, so the footprint looks somewhat massive.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Hi, I install cable modems for a local cable internet service provider. Before I go any futher, let me just say this:
Geeks don't get to see how the other half lives (fixing mom's computer doens't count).
I am required to configured the customer's computer and setup their e-mail. Part of the install process requires me to hit the cable company's web page to allow the customer to chose their e-mail. Every day I get to see 20 or more fscked up customer computers that have so many spyware programs, viruses, trojans and other assorted crap gumming up their desktops. It's not uncommon to see 15+ instances of IE load up with ads before I can get a usable browser. More often than not, the browser's spyware add-ins have the customer's computer so fscked, that I have to ftp to mozilla and pull down an clean, standards compliant browser that blocks pop-ups. Only when I load the same web page back to back between IE and mozilla does the customer begin to understand just how fscked microsoft software is.
So, even though I don't have the money to contribute to the Mozilla project, I would just like to thank the hard working folks who put that fine browser alternative togeter.
Thank you so very much. Without Mozilla, my install time would increase from an average of 20-25 minutes to well over an hour.
And to Microsoft: Shame on you, your shoddy code and your market share. If there's anybody headed for a fall, it's you.
I started using Thunderbird a long time ago, much like you did, and found myself in a similar situation to yours.
In the beginning, the included spam filtering worked wonders, but after time more and more spam began to leak through no matter how much "training" I did.
Instead of moving to a different email program as you did, however, I simply kept Thunderbird and used POPFile as a spam-filtering proxy. Because of this, I can actually directly compare the in-program filtering of Thunderbird to an outside bayesian client. Right now, according to the built-in statistics of POPFile, it's at a 99.36% accuracy rate, even with the large number of random-word spam attacks I get daily, yet Thunderbird only catches about half of them.
So I have no doubt that you are correct in your argument that SpamBayes isn't being caught by the same random-word techniques that are currently ruining the effectiveness of Spamassassin or Thunderbird's built in filtering.
And no, "Sunbird" isn't even close to a suitable answer. Neither is "Thunderbird" or "Firefox."
Corporate users can barely grok "Mozilla" but they certainly understand "Oh, no functional calendar? I'll just stay on Outlook..."
This is not the unix way of doing things.
Agreed. But it's time to start working towards some unification and integration on desktop apps because the 'UNIX Way' has failed to capture the desktop market.
Mozilla is OSS, so improvements to any part of it wil ripple through the different products automatically. FireFox, ThunderBird, Mozilla and Camino are all coming from the same base code, and improvement to that code improves all the products. Continuing to develop the 'monolithic' mozilla is vital to the rest of the projects, because the monolithic app showcases and tests the ground for features that may or may not dribble down to the 'birds.
Thinking about it like 'if you write code for Mozilla, you DIDN'T write for FireFox" is backwards, if you improved Mozilla you improved ALL of the mozilla.org offerings.
If you add code to Mozilla that does AOL mail or AIM protocol, that would be fscking AWESOME! Someone else will modularize it and make it a plugin for FireFox later, and we'll have a better offering, and it won't be shoved down anyone's throat.
Personally, I just moved from Mozilla (for mail and web) to FireFox and ThunderBird, I'm not at all impressed. I saved a few MB of RAM, but overall I was happier with the monolithic app. I switched so that I could file bugs and make the new apps better.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails