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 ?.

[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.

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...

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.

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