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

Old news

[enodev]

But despite standardising 1.7, development of mozilla continues.
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/READM E.html for details.
But this news is already 8 days old. I wonder why this is picked up only now.

Re:Old news

[Gerv]

Odd numbers are the stable releases, even numbers are the development versions?

Mozilla doesn't use an odd/even scheme. We just designate particular releases and branches, such as 1.7 as stable. Previous releases with this designation were 1.0 and 1.4.

Gerv

Happy :-)

[Killjoy_NL]

I'm just glad that they will develop the Mozilla package next to the firefox/etc packages.

I use the Mozilla package at home and Firefox at work (since I have to use Outlook here).

They haven't let me down yet.

Re:Happy :-)

[mabinogi]

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)

Re:Happy :-)

[beachplum]

I feel your joy. I use both also, because FireFox is my favorite browser ever, but it knocked out Acrobat Reader on my one user profile (Yes, I am a dorky XP user). However, Mozilla gets along fine with Reader, and that is great, becasue I need Reader for my job and I like food.

Middle mouse click on MacOSX

[GreatDrok]

It doesn't mention whether the middle mouse button can be made to open a tab as it does under Safari. That really is the one thing that keeps me coming back to Safari for my general browsing. Some sites work best with Mozilla and I have 1.7rc2 installed for that (they just fixed a problem with large images that wouldn't display on previous versions) but still no middle mouse click. I have to do left + CMD combination. Yuk.

Re:Middle mouse click on MacOSX

[martingunnarsson]

My mac mouse only has one button you insensitive clod!

Re:Middle mouse click on MacOSX

[Anonymous Coward]

So it should be by definition the middle mouse button, right?

Re:Middle mouse click on MacOSX

[Pflipp]

Well, is it in the middle?

yet more bloat

[CountBrass]

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.

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 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

[greenreaper]

Because they are implementing FTP upload. Read the darn post. And it may be the new "default download format" for people trading warez, moviez, anime and possibly linux distros, but I certainly use FTP way more than I do BT, because I actually upload stuff to a site where people see it, not leech off others. :-)

Re:Mozilla needs more speed and

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft, /bin/ftp is all I need.

Re:Mozilla needs more speed and

[42forty-two42]

Bittorrent does not cover the same needs as ftp. Bittorrent is good for serving to many users simeltaneously, but needs a seperate client (and the client would not be able to use the same download interface as the rest of mozilla, due to seeding mode). FTP is good for uploading to a web site, or downloading without a seperate client which people might not be familiar with. Also, it does not require a seeder at all times to maintain the swarm.

Re:Mozilla needs more speed and

[anonicon]

"Mozilla needs more speed and less power."

Opinions and assholes, everybody has one. I disagree with yours.

"Currently Mozilla is the most powerful browing suite on earth. Problem is people don't care about all those features, we just want speed"

While you're right about Mozilla, your second sentence is straight from CrackLand. If everyone is clammering for few-feature, speedy-browsing, why isn't Lynx the #1 browser? It dusts *everything*. I happen to love the fact that Moz comes with so many tools. So do the ~10 people whose PCs I've installed it on.

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 ?

Websites render super lickety-fast on my cable modem, even non-standards compliant ones. As for the rest, I'll assume they're working on it, but why not help out and send them some money so that they can spend more time doing it? Heck, I'll make it easy, click this link.

"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?"

I always appreciate better FTP and HTTP transfer performance. As for bit torrent, it may be growing in popularity, and it would be nice if support for it was built into Mozilla, but 95% of my non-p2p downloads and download GB are via http or ftp. Bit Torrent is barely on that radar.

Peace,
Chuck

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:Mozilla needs more speed and

[Gerv]

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

Re:Mozilla needs more speed and

[Gerv]

It was an example.

There are loads of things you need to be able to do to support CSS that the available cross-platform toolkits couldn't do when the project began, and still can't do.

Gerv

Re:Mozilla needs more speed and

[Gerv]

If you need your own widget set to do the web page form controls, why not use it for the UI? Otherwise you need _two_ widget sets.

Anyway, if you want some other set to be used round the outside, use Camino, Galeon, Ephiphany, K-Meleon or any of the other Gecko-based browsers.

But I personally don't choose software based on which widget set it uses...

Gerv

Improvements in Mozilla Mail

[vivek7006]

Some interesting new features in Mozilla Mail

• Mozilla 1.8 Alpha1 has UI for multiple identity support.
• Users now have an option to mark incoming junk mail as read.
• Preferred mail format (plain text or HTML) is collected and remembered in the Personal Address Book.
• The Mail window menus have been adjusted to improve usability and resizing the mail window no longer resizes the folderpane.
• Addressbook auto-completion has been improved.
• 1.8a1 fixes an issue with listboxes that caused mail to display multiple attachments incorrectly. Additionally, mail sorting scrolls to keep the currently selected message in view.

Mozilla 1.8A is great!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mozilla 1.8A is great!

[nacturation]

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.

Ah, yes... the war has been won! Could you remind me again which side occupies 95% of the land? :)

Spam filter

[darien]

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?

Re:Spam filter

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely the Spambayes filtering are among the updates. See bug 181534 on bugzilla.

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:Spam filter

[Xrikcus]

That and much of the spam I've been getting recently is very simple. Say, two links in an e-mail and that's all (plain text). They're not being picked up as spam by spamassassin any more, it has about 50% accuracy at the moment.

Re:Spam filter

[darien]

If SpamBayes filtered a legit message in with the spam, how would you know about it?

Short answer: because I am very distrustful of technology, and I do actually skim through my spam-box every so often just in case. :)

However, one reason it never came up is that SpamBayes has a very graceful response to email it's not quite sure of. It puts emails below a certain (user-adjustable) confidence threshold in a "suspected spam" bin, for you to review at your convenience. After the first few days actual spam almost never ended up in here, but it was very good for catching email from, e.g. new mailing lists that I'd just signed up for (which Thunderbird 0.6 simply dismisses as junk).

To be fair, yes, I should have taken this into account when making the claim you quote. But y'know.

Re:Spam filter

[tbmaddux]

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?

Paul Graham (inventor of Bayesian spam filters) assessed this a few months ago. He concludes that these sorts of tricks won't work. For misspellings in particular, he states "Misspellings end up having higher spam probabilities than the words they're intended to conceal."

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.

Re:Spam filter

[danharan]

That's exactly what I'm finding too. There are simply so many ways to misspell words that these filters are ineffective.

This may simply create another round of technological escalation, but... if you search Google for "v!agra", it will ask you if you meant "viagra". That's not really difficult to implement.

SO- If instead of storing "v!agra" in the filter we stored say, $typo$__viagra or some such thing, we might get filters working well like before.

Likely someone has already implemented this somewhere, but if so I haven't heard of it :(

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[CountBrass]

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.

Re:Firefox

[stokkie]

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

Torrents

[onco_p53]

For their poor servers ...
Win32 exe
Win32 Zip
Linux
Linux (installer)

I used to use FireFox for the same reason... but!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can configure Mozilla to play nice with Outlook, check out the cool tip:

http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.4/faq/mail-news.h tm l#other-default

Erm... can do?

[MachDelta]

Ok, im no 'zilla expert here, but ever since I can remember Mozilla (or at least Firefox) has supported opening tabs on middle click. I know thats how I have my Firefox set up right now anyways. And maybe its some weird extension or something I have installed, but i'd be willing to bet money on this little sumwhathin' I found being key:

Install Firefox (or Zilla, whatever)
Type "About:Config" into the URL bar
Type "middleclick" into the filter bar and hit enter
Find the entry that says "browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick", and make sure the value is set to true.

Give that a whirl, maybe its what you're lookin for. Or maybe its an extension of mine, either way its worth a shot fer someone to try :)

Re:Erm... can do?

[Lurker McLurker]

It always works for me, too, in both Firefox and Bloatzilla. In fact, unlike Opera, there doesn't seem to be a way to make a middle button click on a link do anything else, from the Options menu (Preferences in Opera).

Re:Erm... can do?

[thesolo]

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.

Firefox

[muzza]

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"...

Plans change

[Kaseijin]

When does firefox/fire* get renamed "mozilla browser"?

Given the effort put into Firefox branding and the decision to continue Seamonkey development indefinitely, probably never.

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:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[WARM3CH]

Mozilla is a browser for web developers.

Actually, it is normal people who like swiss knifes more: They download/buy one package to do all things. A developer on the other hand usually tries to get the best tool to do a specific job. For a developer, no one software is the best answer for all questions. Don't we already have lots of advanced (and open source) tools for things like FTP and editing text files that are much better than Mozilla for those tasks?

Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[CountBrass]

Wouldn't a better architecture have been to go for a plug-in model? That way I could choose what extras I wanted, and either uninstall, or never install, the crud I don't care about.

The problems with the Mozilla monolith are:

• 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.
• 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).

And separating the dev' environment (browser) from the users environment as you suggest only makes life harder.

Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[CowboyBob500]

On Linux I just choose the "Navigator only" install option...

Bob

Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[Spad]

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.

Yes you can - you just select "Browser" during the install process and deselect the other components. It's really not that challenging.

Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[mercuriser]

The problems with the Mozilla monolith are:

• 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 .mozconfig file to how you would like. Plus there are the other applications which have already done this for you (think firefox, thurnderbird which the changes in the main mozilla app are propogated to anyway)

• 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.

Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated

[juiceCake]

"Mozilla is for the masses who either a) don't understand that email and web browsing are 2 different things (never-mind ftp etc etc). These are the people who think that a browser IS the internet. Or b) People who are irked by the fact that they have to run IE _and_ Outlook Express."

Sorry, but I understand full well that web browsing and email are different things but I prefer Mozilla over Firefox/Thunderbird. Imagine that...

Fortunately, Mozilla offers both alternatives to people. Because, you know, we all have our preferences and they're just that, preferences. If they are different than yours they're most certainly not, in all cases, for the reasons you list. I also don't have to run IE or Outlook Express, save for testing the web pages I develop.

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.

Xft version

[AirLace]

There doesn't seem to be a version compiled against Xft or Gtk+2.0. Is this a regression?

Re:Xft version

[arvindn]

I was thinking exactly the same thing. Makes a nice punchline: "The 1990s called. They want their fonts back." :-) Joking aside, I think it is indeed a regression. The Burning Edge Firefox nightly build blog says that gtk2 builds don't start (since May 11). It could be an unrelated firefox-specific problem, but I'm guessing there's a connection.

This build sucks

[Celt]

I've been using Mozilla 1.7rc1 for some time so I decided to install 1.8 Alpha, it short it sucks
Installed without a issue but tried to start it and it just consumed 15MB ram and wouldn't start so rebooted XP and started it again, this time it loaded a webpage but wouldn't do anytiung else (m,enu's would not work etc)
So I'm back to 1.7RC1 now :-(

Re:This build sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you have some extension installed which doesn't work with 1.8alpha. The extension management is crappy (it's being improved in Firefox), but the build works ok. There are bugs though - it's an alpha after all.

Re:Try this:

[spektr]

No, FileZilla doesn't use the Mozilla framework.

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[mabinogi]

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.

Mac OS X: Mozilla 1.8a1 and Firefox

[VEGx]

I have a trouble, I can't make them co-exist!
Firefox is using the pref files that Mozilla uses BUT the new Mozilla hangs at the older version's pref.

Can someone tell me how to move Firefox preferences so I can make them both work.

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.

Re:Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

More cookies?

[bwalling]

the number of cookies that Mozilla can hold has also increased 'dramatically.'

I have submitted this as a bug!

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[CeleronXL]

Never. It was the initial plan to rename it to Mozilla Browser, but now they have settled on Mozilla Firefox as the permanent name (it no longer remains simply the codename).

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:Spammers changed their methods.

[SimplyCosmic]

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.

Re:Spammers changed their methods.

[Gerv]

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.

Yeah, Thunderbird's Bayesian implementation did fall behind a bit. Fortunately the latest 0.6 release has an updated version, which is apparently a lot better.

Gerv

Middle Mouse on Linux (was: re: ... on MacOSX)

[cyxxon]

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?

Re:Middle Mouse on Linux (was: re: ... on MacOSX)

[Patrik Nordebo]

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.

Re:Try this:

[cyxxon]

"FileZilla is a powerful FTP-client for Windows 9x, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP"

I think the grandparent refers to Linux.

Well, both is true, guys. FileZilla right now is available for all them Windowses around, but the upcoming 3.0 will be cross plattform.

And that is some release I am really waiting for, since FileZilla is my ftp client of choice on Windows. Really. Especially the bookmarks-in-a-xml-file thing makes it quite useful, as you can just put the whole FileZilla directory wherever (USB stick, network volume, whatever, it just works).

Re:Jabber ?

[cyborch]

hey look features are features but a few are missing

I would like a IM client (IRC does not rock my world) a Jabber client would be good

jabber support

I would like a iCal clone... (in process)

Indeed it is :)

I would like OpenPGP intergrated (only 128bit to save the export legal stuff) just basic crypto would be great (make it easy to setup as well)

There's a gpg extension, will that do?

Re:Firefox

[jonasj]

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.

Why new features if they have an extension model?

[beforewisdom]

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

Re:Firefox

[Gerv]

It seems the core developers fight every little attempt to improve the interface

- Not everyone has the same definition of "improve"
- The suite is now in maintenance mode, and so there will be no big UI changes

If I was running the show every new release would have a new splash screen ala the GIMP

This sounds like a great way to get people to spend their time arguing instead of hacking.

Gerv

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).

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[bwy]

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.

Speaking of Kitchen Sinks

[aelfwyne]

All that's left now is to merge EMACS and Mozilla. Then we'll have everything in one application.

Re:Speaking of Kitchen Sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

There would be some feature overlap, like two news readers, yet still no decent text editor :(

Compile it yourself!

[UberLord]

This is one of the places where Gentoo really shines. Using RedHat 9 on my lappy, finding a recent version of Mozilla with XFT/GTK2 support was a right royal pain.

Using Gentoo the ebuild compiles XFT/GTK2 support by default :)

Not 'real' bloat though

[MarcQuadra]

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.

Re:Not 'real' bloat though

[Chester K]

Have you done a quantitative ascessment of this feeling that Moz is big or slow?

Yes. I've implemented a web grid-view component that runs solely using DHTML orchestrated by a JavaScript object. The component is capable of showing a grid with literally millions of lines of data, since the display algorithms I use are O(1) with respect to the data set size and O(xy) with respect to the visible size of the grid on the page. This is done by dynamically creating/modifying/repopulating a table which is absolutely positioned within an overflow:clip DIV to give the appearance of a small view into the bigger dataset. On top of that is overlaid a overflow:auto DIV with a transparent DIV inside that is sized by calculation of the number of rows and columns in the dataset, in order to present scrollbars to the user where the scrollbar thumbnail is sized appropriately. I went to great pains to make sure it works in both IE and in Mozilla.

The component, without any data attached, but set to think it has a dataset of several thousand rows and several hundred columns, when maximized to fill my 1280x1024 display, can update the display for each scroll in 70ms in Internet Explorer. On the same system, under the same conditions, even running a slightly different code path in order to make use of Mozilla-specific performance boosts, it updates in 180ms. In IE, it's usable but feels a little chunky -- in Mozilla, it's so slow to the point where grabbing a scrollbar thumb and dragging the view is not practical.

These times were calculated by loading the page in question, scrolling the view from top to bottom to top using the Page Down and Page Up keys, allowing the system to settle, then doing the same operation, having JavaScript measure the amount of time each update took to scroll from top to bottom to top again, then averaging the times.

(For what it's worth, a .NET-based implementation of the component which can used directly in IE 5.5 and up in a completely secure fashion, the update times with data population are less than 10ms. This is why I've been wanting Mozilla to support the use of .NET components via the OBJECT tag, like IE does, but that's mostly a pipe dream since I don't realistically think it's ever going to happen.)

In this real world example, using code that's actually being used in a web-based intranet application, Mozilla's performance is more than 200% that of Internet Explorer. Depending on whether I can convince management of the potential benefits of doing so, I might be able to release the actual code used in this test some day. I'd really like to see Mozilla improve, I've certainly been giving it the old college try to the point of spending more time on testing with Mozilla than I really should, but this is just one in a long string of problems with Mozilla I've run into that would block it from being rolled out as our platform of choice.

Re:Why new features if they have an extension mode

[mlefevre]

They didn't add an "FTP client" - they added UI to allow FTP upload. The FTP back-end is useful for other stuff, and was already present - adding the menu command wasn't a huge thing.

How many more times...

[BinLadenMyHero]

..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.

Does it support MNG/JNG?

[PybusJ]

Does this new release restore any support for the MNG/JNG graphics formats, or is GIF still the only animated format supported?

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]

Why? Who decided that? Why can't obvious UI mistakes be fixed?

Not everyone has the same definition of "obvious UI mistake". Same point as last time. :-)

nobody has the balls to draw the plans for Mozilla 2.0.

Says who? Just because we haven't reached the stage where it's appropriate to publish them doesn't mean they aren't being looked at.

That's all it takes to spin a 2.0, nothing more.

You've got it all backwards. You don't pick a version number first and a set of features second. We are not thinking "goodness me, what can we do so that it looks sensible calling it 2.0?", we are thinking "what's the next big step in Mozilla's evolution?" and, incidentally, deciding to call it Mozilla 2.0.

it also gets Mozilla a new fresh round of much needed media coverage.

Who says the Mozilla suite needs media coverage? It's certainly not obviously true. One could argue that we should spend all our effort getting media coverage for Firefox and Thunderbird.

Also, there is no plan to leave maintenance mode at the moment

No, and that's the point. That's what maintenance mode is. Seamonkey is still around because some people care about it, but they care about it being like it is now. Any massive marketshare increase we get will be driven by Firefox, not by Seamonkey.

Heck, you could hold "Vote for Mozilla 1.X splash screen" sessions at Mozillazine.

A vote is (well, was originally, it's now mostly inertia) the reason the suite is stuck with that current weird throbber. Votes, in general, suck as a way of choosing anything. Open Source projects are (mostly) not democracies.

If you want to be listened to, come out from behind that cowardly anonymity and engage in constructive discussion.

Gerv

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

Bloatware

[dpilot]

I was recently "forced" to get IE running on the kids' dual boot Linux/Win98SE machine. My son needed to use a certain college web site, and rejected Mozilla, being "IE-only". So I visited Windows Update, since IE on the box had never been used for web browsing. Many, many updates and reboots later, he was able to do what he needed to do. After I have paid the first tuition bill and become a member of the in-crowd, I'm going to write to the college about their IE-only site, about how they're aiding and abetting a convicted monopolist with a site like that, and how they should be using w3c, webwasher, and the like to generate portable content.

My kids tend to keep the machine on Windows, largely because they can do what they need there, plus play games. After this experience, I cautioned my son to avoid IE because of future security problems, even if it is currently fully patched. His response... IE is a *pig* compared to Mozilla.

Re:Bloatware

[drinkypoo]

This is pretty funny to me. First, unless they're using ActiveX you can change your browser personality in order to make it think you're using IE. Second, I use IE (Actually I use MyIE2) on my WinXP system and I occasionally use Mozilla and in general IE itself loads quicker than mozilla but mozilla loads many pages faster. However, under periods of high load and due to their insistence on using their own widgets, the gui for Mozilla becomes completely and utterly unresponsive. Mozilla also has problems rendering pages in the help desk application we use at work; It's fine until you try to shrink the window, and then it doesn't draw the table narrower to fit the width window as it should. It's funny because it handles resize-to-larger events but not to-smaller. This is Moz 1.6.

Schools, like anyone else, target the most common platform. Typically speaking they don't have the staff to care about things like whether you can get on with Mozilla. Their attitude tends to be that if you can't get on from home, you can come and use one of the many Windows machines on campus. For better or for worse, unless you organize a coalition, no one is going to care that you want them to use web standards.

Re:Bloatware

[Anonymous Coward]

i taught for 2 years, and this second especially, when the systems were all Win2k, i mandated the use of Mozilla.

why? for one it was a defensive measure. the geniuses who installed win2k during the previous summer neglected to install a virus scanner as well (!!!). using mozilla, while by no means fool proof, was a defensive measure, being less vulnerable than IE.

second, i wanted the kids to experience a better browser, pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing being the biggest benefits. once they grew accustomed to tabs, they loved them. it's hard to go back to a lesser browser after using tabs (for me anyway).

the other big draw? mozilla composer. composer is the single reason i didnt have them use firefox by default. it was a great way to introduce kids to HTML editing. first i'd teach them very basic HTML, then show them how much easier it was to use composer. it also helped for them to grasp the basics of HTML coding so they could tinker with the page source to make up for any shortcomings in composer.

that's not to say the experience was flawless. these were older boxes in the lab, and even with mozilla pre-loaded in memory, the launch time wasn't that great. it didn't help to explain to them that slow start times are to be EXPECTED when you have a P2 with 64 MB RAM running Win2k. kids merely thought, "mozilla=slow". also, since popup blocking isnt enabled by default (mozilla team, PLEASE consider changing this!!!), some smart asses would say, "HAHA! mozilla's broken! it got a popup!" a few keyboard strokes and one checkbox later, smart asses were put in check with blocking enabled, but it would be nice to see this already done beforehand.

the handful of kids who used firefox--either on a linux box i had setup or on the Win box i put it on--loved it. i burned several disks that had mozilla and firefox on them so kids could use it at home without having to dl it over dial up. all in all, i think introducing them to the mozilla family was more than worthwhile. i try to spread the gospel to everyone i know as well, and people who use it (especially firefox) love it.

you're right in the sense that people dont care about web standards. they do care about getting rid of pop ups and not having web sites that take over their pc's. the mozilla family is a great start for these folks because it just plain works. i have experienced very very few page rendering problems, and the ones that do render funny are usually written by mo-mo's, and are shite for content (not always, but generally). for the majority of users, the differences between mozillas and IE in page load times and rendering, in general, are not only barely noticable, they are much lower on the priority list than safe, unobtrusive web browsing.

Re:Bloatware

[bunratty]

unless they're using ActiveX you can change your browser personality in order to make it think you're using IE

There are several other reasons that a web page may not work in Mozilla, even if you set the user agent to spoof IE. One is the use of proprietary DOM, such as document.all, which Mozilla does not support. Another is if the server is misconfigured to send files (for example, WMV files) with an incorrect MIME type. Yet another is if the client-side JavaScript checks navigator.appName, which is not spoofed even if the user agent is spoofed.

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.

THANK GOD FOR MOZILLA!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:THANK GOD FOR MOZILLA!!!!!

[RobertLTux]

Might i suggest that you put together a "Geek On Disc" with current copies of Mozilla, Ad-aware, and SpyBot Search and destroy (add OO.O If you can) Drop a Readme file that disavows any link between the cd and your employer and... (note IANAL you kight want to check with one)

Re:one point against Moz but few against firefox

[gabec]

I also don't like firefox's lack of Ctrl-Enter in new tab thing, as well as some auto-appending www / .com thing. (try typing slashdot.org into firefox and it will try to go to http://www.slashdot.org.com/.really is a more mature product.

to open a url in a new window it's ALT+ENTER.
to open a url such as "cnn" and add ".com", use CTRL+ENTER
to open a url such as "sourceforge" and add ".net", use "SHIFT+ENTER"
to open a url such as "slashdot" and add ".org", use "CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER"

Feel free to criticize after you RTFM.

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[BlowChunx]

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...

what I don't understand...

[Ender Ryan]

... is why people are always making you answer the stupidest questions over and over! :D

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.

Re:FTP?

[Gerv]

To me, it seems that it's just tailing on the 'zilla name, and no real relation.

Bang on.

Gerv

Fix the damn calendar!!

[EvilStein]

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..."

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I like the "UNIX way" of doing things, and it can work very easily for this sort of thing.

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...

Although it might be nice, I don't think we really need a desktop standard for this right now. My email client already does what you describe. In a similar fashion, the browser should run the email client when you click a mailto: it's simply "sylpheed --compose [address]". A web browser can allow you to enter the appropriate command to run, or it can have a list of popular email clients to select from (including any that are built-in).

That kind of simple process invocation is the Right Way to do this. It's trivially simple, and it can do 95% of the things you'd ordinarily want inter-app message processing to do. Or 100% if you extend it a little where appropriate, using pipes and so on. The more complex it gets, the more it needs to be standardized; but the dead simple stuff that everybody uses all the time doesn't require much thought at all.

That there is no obvious way to configure Firefox to run that command when I click an email link is an inexcusable omission. Even if they are trying to build a all-powerful development platform which will eventually replace every other app, there's no reason they shouldn't play nicely with the rest of the system in the meantime.

Re:What everyone is interested in...

[MarcQuadra]

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.

Don't mean to bust your research bubble...

[ashpool7]

but

"Unfortunately, Carbon doesn't have the ability to recognize a middle mouse click"

Is completely false.

As this developer page shows, Carbon can handle 65,535 buttons. The problem is, as you would know if you poked around in bugzilla, mouse events don't use Carbon Events (here's the filed bug for rewriting them). At least be correct in your knowledge of the situation next time. :)

MNG and JNG support

[roesti]

Mozilla 1.7 has been pending for a couple of months now, and I reckon something specific must be holding everything up for 1.8 to be in alpha before 1.7 is finalised. Does anyone know what these things are?

I've been following Bug 18574 (no links allowed from Slashdot), which concerns restoring support for MNG and JNG image formats. The debate about this bug has been long and arduous, and heated at times: essentially, it's the same old nobody-supports-it and it's-just-code-bloat arguments versus the same old it's-a-good-format and Web-pages-will-use-them-if-browsers-do arguments. However, people are starting to get it to work on their own builds, with some crashing still on some systems (eg. OS/2) with some image files.

If there are specific issues holding up 1.7, I'm starting to suspect this is one of them. Officially, there is no target milestone for Bug 18574. Of course, if it doesn't make it into 1.7, it may end up as an XPI (eg. Mngzilla) and all will be well. Does any one know for sure?

And this is why....

[Koguma]

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...