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Batch-o-Moz: Firefox, Thunderbird, Suite Released
bluephone writes "Today Mozilla.org has unleashed a triple threat; Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8, and Mozilla Suite 1.7.3. Wow. Lots of news in all three fronts. so, for your release notes, sys-requirements, what's new, and download links, here you go. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite. Enjoy."
more than half of my extensions, even if they really are compatible with firefox 1.0, still say they're only good for 0.9.x+, not 0.9+, which means that firefox 1.0 won't install and use them.
biggest pain in the ass -- firefox won't let the user override an extension's compatibility setting.
I can only hope they all change their settings soon...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
All the themes I was using with 0.9.3 (on WinXP) are not compatible with 1.0PR, and that includes the neat Noia 2.0.
I wonder if it's really a compatibility problem, or a bug.
Thank you for making a wonderful browser. Thank you for gaining market share and thank you for stopping this non-standard-compilant IE madness. Image a world where all browsers have to follow Microsofts web standards to have all pages displayed correctly. One or two years ago, I thought exactly this would happen, but with Mozilla and Opera being such great products, websites are now W3C compilant with little IE tweaks. Thank you oh so very much.
... to the Slashdot rendering problems I have with 0.9?
My poor F5 key is getting worn...
Sadly, I think it's an Old Skool Slashdot issue. Will anyone ever drag my favorite site out of 1996 and introduce it to some lovely CSS-P?
Yours, in hope...
The mozilla suite have literaly changed the face of the internet for me. Not just pop up stoppers, or tabbed browsing, or it being free. It just cooler, something that IE won't have. How can MS compete with a name like Firefox? Or Thunderbird
Karma whoring
The one thing I was waiting for in Thunderbird. Putting all your POP3 accounts into one main folder.
I couldn't believe they didn't have this feature earlier and when I switched over from Outlook Express I was severely disappointed that I had to look through two different folders for new mail.
Hopefully they'll upgrade the spam filter as well... because as far as I can tell it doesn't work too great, or maybe I'm just stupid.
Personally, I wish to wait until FireFox has a standard 1.0 release before converting a user to it. Yes, you did say Mozilla, but I prefer FireFox.
:)
Even though FireFox @ 0.9 is better than IE @ 6.0, Service Pack 2, I've decided to wait until it has a stable, 1.0 release to "convert" users. Doesn't seem like I will have to wait that much longer. The only reason I do this is because there are a few bugs, imo, that are confusing, to say the least. I can work around them, but at least with my friends using IE, it's not my fault if something goes wrong.
As for Mozilla Thunderbird... even though it isn't 1.0, I haven't had ANY problems with it. Converting my mom to that was simple enough. I just told her it didn't boot you offline like AOL.
Seriously, AOL sux. My mom is really happy with Thunderbird. It downloads her email, she reads the email, the end. No calendars, headline news, advertisements, etc. It gets the job done, and quite efficiently.
So: I accept the mission. But I won't carry it out... yet.
IE is no match for Firefox, but IMHO (and as much as I love it) Thunderbird still needs to catch up to Outlook. Outlook 2003 just has more features and a better interface. Major things I'm waiting on before switching to Thunderbird at work are integration with SynCE and the Novell Connector.
USE='clever' emerge -u sig
I'm a bench technician for a local ISP just outside of Omaha. 90% of my job is cleaning pron dialers/browser hijacks/etc off people's computers, mostly through Ad-Aware and AVG. Think as soon as Firefox goes to 1.0 I'll start throwing that in there too on the grounds (and rightly so) that it's more secure than Internet Explorer.
Doing my part!
However, two things that have kept me from making a greater push into converting folks have been Thunderbird's buggy LDAP support (our company email directory is LDAP) and the lack of a central calendar. Yes, I use the calendar add-on, and am aware of the stand-alone product, but until it can talk with our Exchange server, the conversion process will be painful. I was willing to do it because I prefer having the same system at work as at home (where I run Linux). Most folks here aren't going to be quite as motivated...
Obligatory Plug - Please read my online novel
Situation: If you type in an address in Firefox -- about:plugins, yahoo.com (with or without http:// and www.) -- and hit enter, nothing happens.
That's right the *enter key* is ignored.
Also happens for the search field.
Details: Windows 98 system. RC1 and other recient 9.x releases. Firefox was removed and reinstalled multiple times to avoid this. Works fine on all other systems I've encountered (Win XP, 2000, and Fedora Linux). I found one person who also experienced this, though they were planing the uninstall/reinistall tactic and did not report the results.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I just downloaded the new version, and all I can say is WOW!
/. as soon as the browser was opened, no waiting (previously, on the same connection, there was always some delay--and yes, I know network conditions make a huge difference for this).
Previously, startup times were less than that of IE, now I can honestly say that there is no noticeable difference. It also found
If I can show this to people and say, "hey, look, it even starts faster than IE!"--then they will be impressed!
Kudos to the moz team!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
The links to MozillaNews are dead currently, so I can't check, but here goes my biggest complaint with Mozilla/Firefox. If you know how I can do what I want, by the way, please reply so I can start using Firefox more efficiently.
Sure, it may render pages on all platforms exactly the same, and give the same Javascript behavior. That's great, and I appreciate it.
But what is really getting me down is that I cannot, to my knowledge, browse using keyboard navigation on MacOS X like I can on both Windows and Linux. I use Find-as-You-Type and navigation among links with the Tab key all the time on Linux and Windows, but when I start using my Powerbook I have to give most of that up and use the touchpad.
For example, in the administration portion of a website that I work on, if I'd like to be able to make a new entry into the database, I can do it all without a mouse on Windows or Linux. I tab among the text entry boxes, dropdown boxes, and buttons and do my work. I can get to another tab and grab some text or a link, and then back to the tab where I'm doing data entry and paste the retreived information. All without the mouse.
Unless there is something big I'm missing, you absolutely cannot do this on MacOS X with the same efficiency.
I now work from time to time on all three major platforms: Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. While I like various parts of all three, I have to say that I find the keyboard accessibility of GNOME and Mozilla on Linux preferable to anything on the other two. Then again, Linux is also where I've spent the most time, but it sure was easier to find the keystrokes and customization options I wanted there than it is on Windows (and, so far, MacOS X).
Incidentally, I have also tried Safari (has the Option-Tab keystroke for navigating a page like I want, but even with Saft it doesn't have good Find-as-You-Type) and Camino (same problems as Firefox) and Mozilla (same as Camino and Firefox) all without any luck. Oh well.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
When will firefox allow me to save my tab settings? Or have I just missed the function? That's what keeps me with Opera. Opera remembers the tabs I used last time so I don't have to reopen every single messageboard everytime I go online.
Another thing is the speed under linux... Is there a way to make that thing load quicker? I don't like to wait a dozen seconds just for the browser to appear.
O.K so I know I'm replying late and I will probably be missed by the mods but who cares.
Firefox is getting big. I'm in Australia, so I know our Law & Order episodes are behind you in the Americas, but a few nights ago watching an episode of SVU I saw one of the detectives pull open her laptop, and run a google search. As soon as she did it, I noticed she was using Firefox for win32!
If it's getting used in show props as a realistic tool, it means people in non-nerd industries are looking at it. That means its getting really big!
--
The last digit of pi is four.
check it out.. the rendering of the left column of Slashdot has been corrected in this release,
/.
...I'm so conflicted.
as noted under "Major Bug Fixes" #217527
I don't know how I feel about that
or what that says about the prominence of
or what that says about the priorities of the moz devs
I used to think PDF Creator was fantastic, but when I tried deploying in the office it had problems I hadn't encoutered in my limited use of it.
The worst of these was in the save dialog where if you clicked on a directory shortcut - to jump to a directory - it would save over the shortcut instead of opening the directory. The sad thing is I reported this bug over two months ago, and it still hasn't got fixed.
In the end I went with the free but non-open source alternative of CutePDF
aus.music.scrapbook
I've had no problem with my parents (both almost 70). Here's what I did;
A bonus was pointing out that popup blocking is included.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I recently started working at the Support Desk at school, and sometimes there are some obscure problems with MSIE that we just can't work out over the phone. We usually have them install Firefox, and sometimes I have people install Thunderbird if their other mail client is giving them problems (or if they want good spam filtering).
I haven't had any calls yet this year of people having problems with Firefox.
Did I mention that Adaware is our savior here too?
Ok I'm 15 and I've been using Firefox for like an year now.
I have IE 6 on my computer too but I never use it. I've already converted three of my friends to Firefox, they aren't power users or anything, they don't know jack about computers...
On the other when I tried to convince my Dad (he's a web-developer, 44 yrs)to switch to Firefox, he's like no way (!) - Firefox is still in beta and unreliable, unstable blah blah blah... (BTW, this was before he had used it)
I showed him all the cool features like find as you type, google search built-in to the toolbar, tabbed browsing, popup blocker, adblock...the works.
I really can't see why my dad doesn't use firefox. I showed one of my relatives Firefox too, but he wasn't too interested - even though he had reformatted his HDD twice or thrice cuz of spyware and scum coming in thru IE. So yes converting someone over 30 is damn hard even if they despise spyware.
I'd like to hear from fellow slashdotters if they've faced similar problems in converting people to firefox.
Really, the state of computer literacy, at least in India (my friends in the US say its equally bad there) is really appalling, and I'm talking about well-educated,smart people not the poor people. I mean look at my Dad he's really smart, he graduated from the top colleges in India and still never bothered to install a firewall on our computer even though we have ADSL, doesn't want to use stuff like Firefox...
Basically converting people to firefox or linux is hard for two reasons - people are averse to change and mainly because most people are stupid.
P.S - I know somebody in my family who put a folder named 'sex' on the fucking Desktop, it had loads of porn, about a gig, and he has two kids (10 & 13).
Went back to school yesterday and to my delight discovered that the University of Guelph is now running Firefox on its computer systems!
spend money here
I'd love to convert a couple of people to Thunderbird at our office, but there is a problem.
Unfortunately they can't read those stupid "winmail.dat" files that Outlook loves to send out.
If anyone has a suggestion to allow Thunderbird to automatically read/open these stupid winmail.dat files, I guarantee two new converts, AT LEAST!!!
On most Windows networks that utilize MSI installers Firefox will not work anyway - the reason, Roaming profiles.
Currently no mozilla based browser will work "automatically" with roaming profiles. What happens is that a user will create his profile on one computer, move to another, then Firefox (Mozilla, Netscape, etc) will continually ask for a profile since it does not find the one that was created previously.
This is a major stumbling block for Enterprise acceptance of FireFox. Currently you can get around this by specifying a profile in the command line that launches firefox (make a batch file), but unfortunately every user that uses a computer will use the same profile. (Unless you have an extremely fast network and server which can sufficiently serve 100+ profiles at the same time).
Another complaint I hear from fellow Adminstrators is the fact that you can easily "lock down" Internet Explorer by using Group Policies through Active Directory. Example, you can easily change the home page of every user by simply creating a policy object and applying it to an Active Directory User Container that includes all of your users. To do this with Firefox would take hours (if not days) depending on the number of installations.
You've got add it yourself. Choose Tools->Account settings->Add Account->RSS News & Blogs.
I think that's just stupid, there's no excuse for not including this "account" by default. There's not even anything you can configure in the Add Account step, you've just got to confirm it.
On the other hand they still include crap like "Local Folders", even though there's a million dupes in Bugzilla with pleas to get rid of it. I mean what the heck are you even supposed to do with those? The only reason they can't be removed, as explained to me by a developer, is because Thunderbird depends on them for many background tasks even if you never store a single message in them. Nice job of separating the backend from the interface there...
Though I bitch, I still love Thunderbird. The UI is getting a bit bloated though (I mean do you really need a Javascript console in a mail application, what a waste of a menu entry position)
It's like deja vu all over again.
I've already converted a bunch of them at work. Microsoft made it really easy for me what with all the ActiveX exploits, lack of features updates, etc. The process is always the same:
COWORKER: My computer is really slow all of the sudden.
... 30 minutes later ...
...
ME: Have you checked for spyware lately? Run Ad-aware and Spybot lately?
COWORKER: OK...
COWORKER: Wow, there sure were a lot of nasties on there. I've removed them all and things are running much faster. Thanks for the tip!
... The next day
COWORKER: My PC was slow again this morning, so I ran Ad-aware and Spybot again. They found all sorts of new stuff. Is there any way to keep this from happening?
ME: There's three ways:
COWORKER: Oh, option 3 sounds good. I'll install it right now.
The good thing is, my upgrade today to Firefox PR1.0 seems to work on a lot of sites that weren't working with Mozilla, so it's only going to get better. However, the realist in me says that once Firefox really takes off, we can look forward to people finding security exploits in it too.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I'm going to add myself to the list of help desk technicians here advocating Mozilla. I work as an escalation technician for a third-party company who provides support for MSN users, and I would have to say a good 75% of my calls involve browser-hijacking spyware. By the time people come to me, their IE is usually so hosed that it's almost less time-consuming for the customer to reinstall Windows. Spybot S&D, AdAware and other similar programs are the only things that keep me from going aboslutely insane as well. "No spyware" is not the only reason to use Mozilla, but it sure is a compelling one. I use the Mozilla suite as my default browser and love it. With Quick Launch enabled, the first browser window comes up faster than IE's - my only beef with Firefox being that the first window often took a while. I've never been one to care for tabbed browsing (just so used to using alt-tab to switch between browser windows) but it certainly takes less RAM to have 10 mozilla windows open than 10 IE windows. I use IE very little anymore - just for Windows Updates and sites which decide to be buggy with Mozilla for whatever reason. These sites are getting fewer and fewer as Mozilla gets better. So take it from a guy who works for MSN - Mozilla is the browser of the future. Without some major security overhauls to IE, it just won't be able to compete.
"I don't use firefox because it's unstable." "I prefer IE." Are these the same person? Web developers, expecially. I use firefox to develop web sites, and then add in whatever "fixes" are required to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser. Most of the time, this saves me lots of time. Sometimes it saves only a little. If for no other reason, there's an actual useful javascript error console and debugger (much like most netscape browsers)! Have you ever tried debugging javascript errors in IE? It's a nightmare.