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Mozilla Roadmap Update
wikinerd writes "According to a recent roadmap update for Mozilla, the beta 1.8 version will be unveiled this month, while in the next month a second beta will be prepared. After the Beta2, Gecko engine 1.8 will be finished and it will power Mozilla 1.8, Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1. The developers will then start working on Mozilla 1.9. Here are some nice graphics depicting the roadmap."
Most likely the primary feature will be the Gecko 1.8 engine. It seems to be the primary purpose for the release, and there may not be any other new features at all except maybe some scattered bugfixes.
From http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml :
... ?
We are still working on goals for 2.0 and are drafting a PRD for its development. Some likely goals include:
* Improvements to Bookmarks/History
* Per-Site Options
* Enhancements to the Extensions system, Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search and other areas.
* Accessibility compliance
* More
(Note: placing an item on this list does not mean it will not be complete until 2.0, rather we would like to be done by 2.0, it may be implemented by 1.1, 1.5 or 2.0)
Your solution is at hand. NVU is a multi-platform "spin-off" of Mozilla Composer, based on the Gecko 1.7.5 engine used by the Mozilla Suite and Firefox 1.0.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Firefox is a browser. Mozilla is a Browser, Email reader, usenet reader, page composer, IRC client, and a few other things.
Before anyone evens grabs the oblig. "Yeah but it still can't display Slashdot right!!oneone!1" post, the fix is in the pipeline for 1.1. And it's a race condition with Firefox, not with /.
Slashdot sucks
From the Unofficial Firefox 1.1 changelog:
:active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated. :hover state not set until mouse move. .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz.
5 27). Copy&paste the link to your browser since diredt linking to bugzilla from slashdot doesn't work.
New features
* 245392 - Installer options for where to put start menu / desktop / quick launch shortcut icons.
* 231062 - Provide Firefox MSI package.
Major improvements
* 124561 - Anonymous ftp login failure should prompt for username/password.
* 98564 - Caret overlaps the last character in textfield (if positioned after the last char).
* 151375 - Focus outline should be drawn outside of element.
* 133165 - Focus outline should include larger descendants of inline elements.
* 65917 -
* 175893 - Make XUL 's focusable.
* 20022 -
* 276588 - Rework toolkit command-line handling. You can now open local files easily from the command-line (e.g. firefox.exe README.txt), and command-line switches should do the same thing whether Firefox is running or not.
* 95227 - Make it possible to set different default font type (serif vs sans serif) for different languages.
* 16940 - [Windows] IME is now disabled for password fields.
* 151249 - [Mac] Middle click on link does nothing on Mac OS X (should open link in new tab).
* 242845 - [Mac] Firefox disk image should use
* 238854 - [GTK2] Changing GNOME2 theme doesn't apply until restarting Mozilla.
And yes, they are also targeting the famous Slashdot rendering bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217
There's actually a bug in Gecko that causes the mis-render, and it's fixed in the code that will be 1.1. I saw this on the burningedge 1.1 fix list.
If you wanted to see the actual roadmap itself, starting at this /. article you had to wade through not one, not two, but three intermediate sites to get to it. Thanks a lot for not putting a direct link anywhere in the article, guys.
The memory consumption issues kept me away from firefix for a long, long time. Whether on MS XP or GNU/Linux systems, the result was always the same: after a day of heavy usage, Firefox was slow, slow, slow. Memory consumption was always higher than any other program I used. As it neared the 1.0 stage, the memory usage became better. Not ideal, but better.
Sorry I cannot corroborate your Mac usage, except state the same happens on other platforms.
I'm using FireFox 1.0, and everytime i've seen a security hole announced, an auto-updater pops up within a day or so to install the hot-fix. It's a little green arrow right under the title bar.
Causation can cause correlation
WebCore is open source, but it is written in Objective-C++ (core is C++, interface is Objective-C), which is currently only supported by GCC on OS X (mainly due to the size of the maintainers' egos). Once the main branch of GCC gets Objective-C++ support, it is probable that the GNUstep project will gain a WebCore based browser.
[1] Not in any way an objective measurement, I've just found that a few CSS tags I've wanted to use have been supported by Safari but not by anything else including Gecko.
[2] Again, 100% subjective.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
About SVG: If you read my article on Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 6 you will see that I mention "Improved support for SVG". So, Mozilla 1.8 already has better SVG support.
Ummmm, haven't you seen Evolution? Or is there some other reason that's not what you're looking for?
Examples:
The bluetabs template for Mambo CMS:
http://www.mambohut.com/content/view/367/
Slashdot
It will hide results from this search tool, despite showing up fine in IE:
http://windowssecrets.com/winfind/
Anything with ActiveX or VBSCRIPT (not such a bad thing, but people will still complain about it)
Windows Update - A very important site for any Windows user (not firefoxes fault, but this is still a disadvantage to illiterate users)
Sites with the Invision Powerboard have been noted to display threads with lots of posts incorrectly.
Some of these are no big deal, and there are just as many sites that IE displays incorrectly, but it will still be an advantage for IE if firefox displays the same site incorrectly, because people are switching FROM IE, not from firefox.
It's not a matter of whether you or I who are fully capable of finding what we need are able to workaround Firefox not working with Windows Update, it's a matter of whether "Cletus" from the sticks of Mississippi can figure it out.
Why do you think you get the "You must upgrade to IE..." page when you visit Windows Update with FireFox?
If the page wasn't handled correctly, you'd see garbage on the screen. Or an empty screen. Or half of a screen. Basically, you would see the elements that FireFox parsed correctly.
What you're seeing on Windows Update is the result of a script that checks if you're using IE. If you are, it lets you access the main page. If you're not, it tells you to switch to Microsoft's browser. How does FireFox get past this? Clearly, it can't change the script on Microsoft's site. Should it use some fancy algorithm to try and decide which scripts it should ignore and which it should obey? That's opening a whole new can of worms.
It's not an issue of FireFox displaying the page incorrectly. It's an issue of FireFox being blocked at the door.
If you have an example of a page that displays incorrectly without such a limitation on it, then you've got something to discuss.