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."

Comments

Wasn't Mozilla

[The Grey Clone]

Wasn't the Mozilla All-In-One browser supposed to be disbanded and effort placed into Firefox a while back? Are they going to continue delaying and delaying this? I tried to read the article, but it didn't seem to say. I'm curious as to how many people still use Mozilla, anyway.

Re:Wasn't Mozilla

[EzInKy]

I'm curious as to how many people still use Mozilla, anyway.

I doubt we can know for sure but I'm sure there are quite a few, possibly even more than use Firefox. One of the reasons I stuck with Netscape when IE came out back in my Windows days was its integration of common tasks such as browsing, reading email and newsgroups, etc.

Re:Wasn't Mozilla

[Omniscientist]

I still use Mozilla, Mozilla 1.7.5 with gtk2+xft x86_64 build. The reason I use Mozilla is because all I have to do is download one program and I get the browser and an email client.

Now the reason why Mozilla Foundation is still making Mozilla is because Mozilla is aimed at vendors who will customize Mozilla to include the necessary or wanted features. We all know Mozilla has an big amount of features, many of which we never use, so the idea is that there would be some sort of vendor or someone making a distro who would customize it properly for its users/customers. Firefox is aimed at the end-user exclusively.

Re:Wasn't Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla Suite may not be disbanded, but how many people even know about it anyway?

Maybe that's because the Mozilla Foundation decided to put DOWNLOAD FIREFOX as the most prominent link on mozilla.org while it was still in 0.x stages? Or because they supported the Spread Firefox campaign without any Spread Mozilla campaign? Or because they spent lots of money on a Firefox advert but nothing on a Mozilla advert?

Composer?

[slim]

Now we have Firefox, the only time I load up Mozilla is when I want to use Composer. It's far from perfect (that poxy

$lt;br> problem!) but it's a free WYSYWIG HTML editor withoout too many frills or complexities, and it throws out reasonably tidy HTML which can be cleaned up by hand much more easily than (say) Frontpage output.

So what's the future for Composer? I'd love to have it either as a standalone alongside Firefox and Thunderbird, or as an extension to Firefox.

I notice that Thunderbird contains vestiges of Composer (e.g. CSS styles for display modes no longer available)...

Mozilla vs FireFox

[martok]

I recently started using FireFox at home and am wondering if someone would mind explaning the difference between Mozilla and FireFox. I understand they're both free software projects and are based on the same core technology. Why are there then two browsers? Is it simply a code fork?

Re:Mozilla vs FireFox

[pLnCrZy]

Can anyone explain why the developers continue to pour effort into two separate browsers that are, at their core, the same thing? Why can't development be focused on one or the other... let's say FireFox, and have FireFox be the "browser component" of the Mozilla suite instead of having a totally separate browser?

I hope they improve on the Mac version

[slutsker]

I use Firefox for my Mac, and I have used it for a while now. However, I have found it to use up a godly amount of memory, which sometimes leads to crashes on my mere 512 MB machine. I noticed the 1.0 version was better than the 0.9 version at this, and I hope the 1.1 version is even better.

Anyway, I'm just wondering... does anyone else have these memory problems on their Mac's, or is it just me?

Graphical display issues

[kryocore]

I'd like to see more websites displayed properly in the next releases. As much as I like Firefox, it's not my favorite when it hoses up the look/feel of a website. Even if the problems are due to the author and not the browser, end users don't care and they know IE displays it better and think of IE as a better browser. I'd like to see firefox deal with these issues in the same way so more end users switch to firefox.

Re:Graphical display issues

[Anonymous Coward]

> more websites displayed properly

Any examples? I'm not saying that FF displays every page perfectly (Slashdot is an example, but a fix for this has been in the development trunk for some time now), but messed-up pages are far-and-few between for me.

Re:Graphic

[Verteiron]

In order to attract attention from anyone not already familiar with the concept of a software roadmap, you need pretty pictures. Think corporate decision-makers, executives, rich people that want to give Mozilla some money, that sort of thing. Presenting yourself and your product professionally is important, even if it means extra useless charts and diagrams.

And where does Sunbird fit into all of this ?

[DARKFORCE123]

I don't see Sunbird in any of those slides. We still seem to be far away from a complete Outlook replacement that is stable enough to pitch to people. I would think replacing Outlook would be a good investment of resources.

Re:And where does Sunbird fit into all of this ?

[SilentTristero]

Doesn't run on Windows, perhaps. We've all migrated over to Thunderbird but are still using Outlook for calendar management.

Re:Why not dump Mozilla for Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Demand. Many people still want the suite. I imagine they will stop developing the app suite when demand drops to near zero.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[WaterBreath]

I use Firefox (v1.0) exclusively, and load up slashdot several times per day, yet I have only encountered the bug maybe 3 times since the release of v1.0. Who are these people that see it all the time, and what are they doing with their computers?

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[a20vertigo]

I have a Very Slow Connection relative to most Slashdot users, and I see it all the time. It's related to reflow, so people who have lowered their reflow delays will see it on much faster connections; I see it with the standard reflow value. There's an extension called "SlashFix" that initiates a reflow as soon as any page from slashdot.org has finished loading, which is an elegant workaround (even if it makes those of us on slow connections have to wait for the whole comments section to load before seeing anything.) It's as much Slashdot's fubar HTML as a Mozilla bug, really.

Re:Composer??

[digitalgimpus]

NVU is by Daniel Glazman, and based on Composer.

Much better.

Re:Firefox security updates?

[mr_jrt]

Would you prefer non-root users to be able to overwrite your browser binaries? I've not used firefox on linux, so I'll assume the situation could prehaps be more highlighted to the user, but it's hardly a bug.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[omarques]

* 151249 - [Mac] Middle click on link does nothing on Mac OS X (should open link in new tab).

I don't like this idea. My mouse have JUST THE MIDDLE BUTTON. All links will open in a new tab?

It's a unfunny joke. Do NOT laugh!

Re:Firefox needs better OS X support

[Blakey Rat]

It also doesn't use the OS X spellchecker in text fields. If it did, I'd never have to use Safari for things like, hmm, this forum post for instance.