Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 5 Out And About

asa writes "Today we've shipped the latest Alpha release on the road to Mozilla 1.8. With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work. You can help the Mozilla team as we drive toward 1.8 by downloading and testing this release. Get the release builds and notes at mozilla.org."

Comments

Seamonkey over Firefox

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

I probably belong to the minority of people who prefer SeaMonkey over Firefox, even though I've tried Firefox 1.0 final.

I sincerely hope that Mozilla.org does not stop supporting the suite, as most of the users of the suite have been Mozilla supporters far longer than the current influx of Firefox fans. Hopefully, our dedication in testing would convince them that seamonkey is just as important as Firefox.

Re:Seamonkey over Firefox

[oojah]

I completely agree. I really don't get on with firefox. Besides, I use the browser, mail client and the calendar so getting the suite would make sense even if it wasn't better.

I would be mortified if they did stop supporting the suite.

> Hopefully, our dedication in testing would
> convince them that seamonkey is just as
> important as Firefox.

Hopefully so.

Cheers,

Roger

Re:Seamonkey over Firefox

[deadlinegrunt]

" Not to troll, this is just out of curiosity ... Why do you say it's better?"

Maybe some people think that mozilla provides better integration between browsing, mail, news, organization, and even HTML page creation as opposed to having different apps like Firefox and Thunderfox to do the same thing.

Choice of course - some people may prefer links/w3m/lynx/surfraw, vim, tin/slrn, and mutt to do the same thing as well.

Perceived benefits are what makes the determination of what makes something better because their needs are the one being addressed.

future roadmap

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who complain about losing support for the Mozilla suite - the plan is that all separate apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, NVu) will use the same shared libraries (currently these libs are staticaly linked and running firebird+thunderbird will result in having gecko to be loaded twice).
So installing compartible versions of Thunderbird+Firebird+Nvu, etc will be the same as installing the whole suite.

Re:Who uses this anymore ?.

[LizardKing]

Mozilla is still the testbed for new functionality that may make its way into Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. A sort of Debian testing of the browser world.

I do

[thelexx]

And so do many others who:

1 - Find Mozilla more mature and stable
2 - Aren't driven to use the newest thing just "because"
3 - Use MozMail as their main client and don't feel like switching
4 - Don't want to keep separate apps updated/tinkered with

How to turn off URL autocomplete in Firefox?

[jbn-o]

I prefer Mozilla Suite over Firefox for one reason: I can't turn off autocompleting URLs in Firefox. I want to keep a history of where I've been, but I wish to turn off autocomplete. I know of no way to accomplish this in Firefox, but it is quite easy to do in the Mozilla Suite. Every extension I use has been written for Firefox, Firefox does some things a little differently but not so much that I can't get used to the Firefox way of doing them. However, I view the autocomplete issue as a security problem because I'm not interested in revealing where I've been to onlookers who happen to watch me browse with a laptop computer.

If any of you know how to turn off URLbar autocomplete in Firefox, I'd appreciate telling me how to accomplish this.

Re:How to turn off URL autocomplete in Firefox?

[OldMiner]

I checked about:config on an old version of Firefox I had lying around and saw that, indeed, browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled no longer existed (neither did browser.urlbar.autofill, but it appears that the behavior for that it is now fixed to its default "false"). So the answer to this is, it's possible, but you would have to play with XUL. If someone would care to make a plugin to do this, you could get the feature that way.

Short of that, you can reduce the annoyance by setting browser.urlbar.matchOnlyType to true. It appears to default to false.

Re:Who uses this anymore ?.

[sleepingsquirrel]

Off the top of my head, here's a few of the reasons I'm thinking of switching back to mozilla from firefox.

• More consistant keyboard shortcuts. For example, in firefox, if you are typing in the address bar and you want the page to open in a new tab you use ALT-ENTER. If you've highlighted a link with type-ahead-find and you want a new tab, you have to hit CTRL-ENTER. (mozilla is consistant in both cases)
• I seem to prefer doing searches from the address bar, and not a separate (tiny) search box
• Type-ahead-find in mozilla only searches through links, not all of the text. This makes keyboard navigation easier (and you can still search through the text just fine by using the '/' command).
• Easier configuration. For instance turning off animated images in mozilla was a lot easier (it was an option under Edit->Preferences). Firefox makes you do the 'about:config' thing, which give you an alphabetically sorted list of options where it not exactly obvious how to change things, or even obvious that you can change things.
• My observation from everyday use is that firefox doesn't apprear to render things faster/better or start up faster. If firefox is less bloated, it must be something like 15% less bloated.

And I don't use (or would ever want to use) the extra applications in mozilla, like the mail client.

Re:SVG?

[bunratty]

They've been working on building it in for years. Just download an SVG enabled build. Maybe you can find one most easily in the MozillaZine forums.