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

Are they saying...

[goofyspouse]

...that Firefox 1.0 can be improved upon?

Re:Are they saying...

[gothzilla]

They better be. Go read the support forums for firefox if you want an idea on what could be improved. Also look at how many posts there are per day. There's a lot that can be made better. Personally I'm tired of the hype. It's a good browser but until it gets better I'm sticking with mozilla.

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

[BW_Nuprin]

The Mozilla Suite may not be disbanded, but how many people even know about it anyway? Its got its little niche, but whether or not it truly "goes away" now seems irrelevant. Firefox is the focus of all the publicity, and the Suite goes on about its business on its own.

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.

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)...

Re:Composer?

[Jack Comics]

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.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[goofyspouse]

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)

The Roadmap Made Easy...

[ackthpt]

The Map

Wee:)

[B3ryllium]

They should make the gecko do the robot in the about window.

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.

but but but...

[temojen]

Still no SVG?!?!

Re:Mozilla vs FireFox

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Firefox is an attempt at seperating the browser component of Mozilla, and hopefully making it smaller, more portable, and more memory-efficient.

The rendering engine for both Seamonkey (the Mozilla Suite) and Firefox remains the same, the Gecko rendering engine. What differs is the UI, the functionality and large parts of the codebase.

Originally, Firefox, and Thunderbird, were scheduled to replace Seamonkey, but after some developers voiced their concerns over this, the Mozilla Foundation has decided against this move.

In short, it's not so much as code fork as it is a functionality fork. Firefox is geared towards IE/Opera/Safari users, while Seamonkey is geared towards old school Navigator/Netscape/Mozilla users.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[davron05]

From the Unofficial Firefox 1.1 changelog:
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 - :active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated.
* 175893 - Make XUL 's focusable.
* 20022 - :hover state not set until mouse move.
* 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 .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz.
* 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=2175 27). Copy&paste the link to your browser since diredt linking to bugzilla from slashdot doesn't work.

Firefox security updates?

[sjonke]

The only official release of Firefox is 1.0. There are a number of outstanding security flaws in Firefox 1.0 as reported by Secunia and none have been addressed yet. I don't know if there is a nightly release that fixes these flaws, but even if there is, those are not the releases that Mom and Pop download, and it is that type of user that tends to be affected most by security flaws. Doesn't the Firefox/Mozilla team need to release a version 1.0.1 that fixes these flaws sooner rather than later? Unfortunately there is no 1.0.1 on the road map, and version 1.1 is not scheduled to be released until June, if it is on time. By then the oldest unpatched flaw, from August 2004, will be 10 months old! While the severity of current flaws is nowhere near MSIE territory, the age of unpatched flaws will be getting into MSIE territory (well, somewhat, anyway.)

Re:Firefox security updates?

[algae]

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.

Re:But can it render Slashdot?

[md27]

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.

Where's the freakin' roadmap??

[amake]

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.

Re:Safari Innards

[TheRaven64]

The rendering engine in Safari is WebCore, which is based on KHTML, from the KDE project. A large number of changes have been made by Apple, many of which have not found their way back into KHTML yet (because KHTML is understaffed and can't handle the merging, not because Apple is hoarding them). While it is similar to Gecko in terms of features, I have found that it has slightly better CSS support[1], and produces nicer looking[2] output for several attributes (I seem to recall that bevelled boarders being one of them, although I may be wrong).

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.

Re:SVG?

[wikinerd]

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.