Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla 1.7.5 Released
shokk writes "Mozilla 1.7.5 is out for all platforms. See the changelog for more details. Quite a few bug fixes are in this. A number of the bugs are Firefox/Mozilla specific, so you can expect that these will be avilable in the upcoming Firefox 1.1 Deer Park (that's good browser!) release. Is the Mozilla suite no longer at the forefront of browser technology, long surpassed by Firefox and Thunderbird? Will we ever see a Mozilla suite composed of Firefox and Thunderbird to keep it all simple? What are your reasons for running the old standby suite over the Firefox/Thunderbird combo?"
Nearly all of the 1.7.5 Mozilla Suite fixes are in Firefox 1.0. Firefox 1.0's code is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0. This is a small upgrade for Mozilla 1.7 to reach Firefox 1.0 parity. Firefox v1.1 will be based on Mozilla 1.8 (currently at 1.8 alpha 5), and Mozilla 1.8 should be released first. I wouldn't say either one is ahead in terms of technology, since they share so much.
Whether we'll one day have a suite of applications replace the actual suite seems to vary month to month and depends on who you ask. Personally, I would've liked that as a goal for Mozilla's 2.0 release.
PS: Mozilla 1.8/Firefox 1.1 should have the new user stylesheet code to support a color override for it.slashdot.org!
Quite simply, it's a better browser. The killer feature for me is searching. I hate the wasted real estate in Firefox from having a separate location and search box, and ease of use is dramatically better in Mozilla than in Firefox. In Mozilla, I just hit Ctrl-L, type my search commands, hit up arrow and enter. I haven't found any way of achieving the same thing in Firefox, and I hate the small size of the box I'm given to enter my search terms.
For email, I don't use either. Until something else comes close to the power of mh, I see no reason to change. But I also found out a major failing in Thunderbird yesterday. My other third uses it, and it turns out it can only get mail from a POP3 or IMAP server. It can't read from a local mbox file. How braindead is that?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Might seem silly, but when upgrades come out for the Moz suite, IT teams need only upgrade/test one piece of software. Might seem insignificant, but at my school EVERY computer had Moz installed, and that would mean a lot of work.
Also, Mozilla suite has a higher version number which, for some reason, keeps ignorant IT managers more at ease.
I much prefer the suite to FF/TB.
I still can't stand FF as a browser - it simply isn't as good as Mozilla for my uses. If I'm going to use both the browser and mail components then why the hell would I want to sacrifice performance and features (such as opening email links in a new Mozilla tab by middle-clicking) by running two seperate programs?
Now that Firefox has become popular I have to use Mozilla to prop up my feeble ego by running against the current and sneering at those along the way.
Whatever happened to 1.7.4?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
The underlying rendering code might be the same, but the interface (and the features) are completely different.
Firefox is lightweight and quick and I use it on slow/low memory machines, but I prefer mozilla simply because it still looks and behaves like netscape. Firefox is for those people that use IE and switch over.
It might sound silly but there are subtle interface differences and keyboard controls, etc that are missing in Firefox. I went from using netscape to mozilla (when it was stable enough) and I've always disliked IE.
I'm sure Firefox will gain netscape behaviour features at some point, but I guess at that point certain users will start complaining about bloat.
Until there is a compelling feature to move I'm not going to, and I wish people wouldn't make it into some open source guilt trip not to use Firefox! Damnit! I only recently started using mozilla mail over PINE! (and that was for the junk filtering).
You can get Nvu.
1. I, along with a bunch of other people, funded a developer to add roaming profile support. It's in the 1.8alpha builds but AFAIK hasn't made it into Firefox yet. Roaming profiles was a huge loss for me when I stopped using Netscape 4. I'm glad to have it back and I'm glad that open source allowed me to do something about it rather than just sit around and complain about it being gone.
2. The new Google Groups displays messages in a proportional font and doesn't have a setting to display it in monospace. This really screws up messages that are meant to be monospaced such as source code. Google has some kind of algorithm that attempts to see if the line should be monospaced but it works poorly and shows a mixture of proportional and monospaced lines in some messages. That can make things more difficult to read.
As of Mozilla 1.8a3 I can limit stylesheets to a specific web site which allows me to fix my google groups problem. The following code in my chrome/userContent.css file lets me show google groups messages in monospace:
Right now the Mozilla trunk is where the action is for new features. Eventually new development will focus on Firefox, at which point I'll probably switch over. Until then, there are new features that I need and those needs aren't being met in Firefox (yet).
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
It's the third component to the seperated suite, financed by the Lindows team. Currently sitting at 0.60, it's looking better and better all the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Type ahead fine works better in the suite. I prefer a links only search if i just start typing, with / for the fulltext. Firefox always does fulltext.
Type ahead find doesn't work in the View Source window of FireFox.
Type ahead find doesn't work in Thunderbird.
Too many options have been removed from the preferences window in FF/TB. The new design isn't very usable for the more complicated tabs (such as Advanced).
I like right clicking a link in an email and selecting "Open in New Tab".
TB/FF don't have a window menu, making it slower to navigate between multiple windows.
Those are the main ones I can think of. Probably more that I don't run into as often.
Ad 1. The default button order on Linux is Gnome-ish, since Firefox is a GTK 2 app, and as such wants to conform to Gnome Human Interface Guidelines, which specify the button order. If you want the KDEish/Windowsish button order (OK|Cancel) on Linux (or Mac), just put this in your userChrome.css: .dialog-button-box { -moz-box-direction: reverse; -moz-box-pack: right; }
and stop complaining. :)
Ad 2.
So why don't you remove the Google search box by right clicking on it, selecting Customize and pulling it into the window? And then, you can make Firefox location bar act like Mozilla's, just set keyword.URL in about:config to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=
(The search box is much better, though, you just have to use it a few times ;))
Now, you have no reasons not to switch. :-)