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

Who uses this anymore ?.

[Gopal.V]

I realized that all I need is a Browser....

I read my mail in mutt and I like that (*hint* , it lets me use vim to compose) , chat with xchat etc.. Mozilla Suite might have been overshadowed by it's leaner sibling :)

But Gecko improvements are GOOD (TM)

Re:Who uses this anymore ?.

[Flooded77]

My father-in-law for one... He loves how everything he needs is in one app and is fast (/.'s opinions aside, this is what he thinks- and that is what is important). After cleaning up his windows box a year ago, I suggested Mozilla. He hasn't looked back since.

Roaming Profiles

[Matt Perry]

This release is supposed to have roaming profile support like hte old Netscape 4 had. If you've been waiting for that, give it a try to help shake out any bugs.

Correction

[JavaRob]

With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work.

This should read "...since Alpha 4, A5 contains some..."

I don't use the Mozilla suite anymore (moved to Firefox), but the Gecko improvements will of course end up in Firefox as well, so it's all good. Time to browse over to the roadmap to figure out how that development path actually works nowadays...

Re:Seamonkey over Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Only feature firefox has which I feel is lacking in Mozilla is the ability to right & middle click bookmark menu entries to change or open in a new tab. Of course, for all I know, that's in the 1.8 series, since I stopped updating to every alpha and beta back around Moz 1.4...

Re:Seamonkey over Firefox

[edwdig]

I've been using the suite for years now. A few weeks ago I decided I'd use FireFox and ThunderBird at work to give them a chance. I'm still using the suite at home though. I'm currently still prefering the suite over the FF/TB combo, altho it's much closer now than it was even a few months ago.

Here's a few things I like better in the suite:

1) Type ahead find is nicer in the suite. I prefer it to only search links if I start typing. Even messing with about:config, I haven't gotten FireFox to work like that. Closest I can get is to hit ' to start the links only search.

2) In the suite, type-ahead find works everywhere. That includes the View Source window and email messages. In the seperate apps, it only works in the main browser window.

3) With the suite, I can right click a link in an email and choose "Open in New Tab". I can't do that in Thunderbird.

4) It's easier to find stuff in the suite Preferences window than in FF/TB. FF/TB group half the options under the Advanced tab, making it a huge scrolling mess. The FF/TB Options dialog is awkward when you have to scroll and/or collapse the right side.

5) The History window in the suite is much easier to use than FireFox's sidebar when you're searching for something you're not totally sure of. OTOH, the sidebar is easier when you want to go back to something near the top of the list.

6) Thunderbird doesn't have a clear button next to the quick search field. That gets annoying fast.

7) The lack of a Window menu in FF/TB is annoying. When I've got a lot of Windows open, the Windows taskbar is a pain to find things in.

The startup time isn't really an issue. Since I have email and/or the browser open the vast majority of the time, I just turn on the preload option. It makes Mozilla come up instantly - faster than IE or FireFox. It's certainly worth the unnoticable increase in system startup time, and I have enough RAM that it isn't an issue.

I don't notice a difference in response times between the suite or the individual apps.

I will agree that FF/TB have cleaner menus than the suite, but that's mainly because the Privacy tab of the Options window is a mess instead.

Broken edit:proferences ?

[nri]

This has happened to me before. When I upgrade the Edit:Preferences window is totally blank. Everything else works fine. All my profiles are intact, themes remain installed (pinball), extensions are there (prefbar). I can still get to my pregerences via about:config.

Anyone else have their preferences dialog box broken with this release ? I haven't seen a bug report for this version. Older versions bug reports have 'apparently' been fixed.

FYI, for those who do install the tar files. I wrote a little shell script that I called mozbak, that I always run before installing any theme or extension or upgrade. So I can always roll back :-)

[07:58] [nri@sammy:bin] $ cat mozbak

date=`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`

cd /usr/local
echo tar cvhfz mozilla_$date.tgz /usr/local/mozilla
tar cvhfz mozilla_`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`.tgz mozilla
use
cd /home/nri
echo tar cvfz mozilla_$date.tgz .mozilla
tar cvfz mozilla_$date.tgz .mozilla