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Mozilla Foundation's Future: No Mozilla Suite 1.8
batb0y writes "The Mozilla Foundation has published its Mozilla Application Suite transition plan, confirming that there will be no official Mozilla 1.8 release. There will be a 1.7.6 release to be maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. All future suite versions from the Foundation will be minor updates only." Don't despair, however, as there is already a community effort underway to continue development.
Long Live Mozilla Suite!
Did someone say "fork" ?
Until it doesn't happen
I guess now we now for sure where the foundanion is headed. The new Netscape can probably take the place of a lot of the suite.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
So not all is lost :)
I may not use the mail, news or chat parts of the suite, but the browser rocks. Firefox has done wonders for popularizing the Gecko rendering engine, but Mozilla is still the better browser. Let's hope Firefox can come up to speed soon.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
More to the point, the Mozilla foundation is dealing with a whole bunch of products from the original Mozilla suite (Thunderbird, Firefox, Sunbird, and others). What would be the point of pulling Firefox away from that?
It seems like the Mozilla Foundation made a decision that they preferred the Firefox development model. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are set to be the *new* Mozilla suite, and the old one is in maintenance mode. It seems like this is comparable to people complaining that Microsoft isn't putting enough development into Windows 3.1.... Well, yeah, it's the old product that they've discontinued.
Now, it's all open source, so if someone wants to work on it, go ahead. But why people are trying to convince the Mozilla foundation to offload their new, exciting, successful, popular line-up of software and head back to what's become a bit of a dead-end, I don't know.
There is Firefox 1.0 and the soon to be 1.1 and if Mozilla 1.8 will not be there, theremight be 1.9 or 2.0 since development continues. Right?
For all the people complaining about Firefox/Mozilla being developed too slowly, the `interesting decision processes in the Foundation, the lacking of features needed for corporate roll-outs, the high barrier to entry to developing for it, how about an open mailing-list Linus/Linux-kernel development model KHTML-based browser for Windows which uses native widgets?
Another fine example of an open source business!
Another fine example of an open source business!</without_sarcasm>
From TFA:
Our primary concern in the short term is with being able to ship a SeaMonkey front end on
top of a Gecko
That doesn't sound like a developer's list, that sounds like a post on alt.sex.zoophilia.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Honest question. What does it matter? Is there some great advantage that I'm not thinking of to having a giant bundled suite of apps, rather than five or six individual downloads?
As long as there's good interoperability -- and I don't see how this decision is going to hurt that -- does it really matter whether there are five apps that each do one thing or one app that does five things?
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
All things that have a beginning, have an end.
"What the hell is an aluminum falcon?"
As I read this:
1) Mozilla (suite) is dead. Long live Firefox.
2) Gecko lives as the main development focus.
3) Mozilla (suite) will be born again as Seamonkey, but won't be high visibility.
From a development point of view, this may make sense. From a branding point of view, it seems odd. It appears that the Mozilla "brand" is being de-emphasized in favor of the individual component names. While Firefox is a memorable name, it seems like a loss not to take advantage of the Mozilla name recognition.
Jesus - It was coming from the minute the number of people supporting Firefox outnumbered Mozilla 2:1 - that was a while back now..
ah well - now lets see the spyware target firefox...
If Mozilla Suite had community enough to support it, they would have been integrated into the Mozilla Foundation to begin with. That it's been dropped like this shows there are plent of people willing to talk about supporting it, but not enough people willing to actually do it.
Mind you, maybe this will shake some supporters out that didn't realize things were in such rough shape.
Firefox was supposed to be the replacement for the Mozilla suite for a long time now, but I find it a tad lacking because the e-mail client is separate, and is the composer even being maintained any more by anybody? It wouldn't be such a big deal if Firefox had all of that included. (as optional components of course).
I am also still not crazy about some of the new features in Firefox 1.0, but I imagine these will be worked out in time.
Perhaps now that they are officially abandoning the suite and focusing in one direction, there will be more of a push to include or exclude features to make former suite users happier.
Can someone please explain what the Mozilla Foundation did, and why it is being discontinued? I thought, in the most recent versions, the Mozilla suite was Firefox and Thunderbird and the other mozilla.org projects bundled together. Or was Mozilla still the old Gecko code from before it was pulled out and put into a stand-alone browser?
Does this announcement mean that bundles of all the Mozilla suite pieces will no longer be created, or is the old architecture of the Mozilla browser going away? Is some other group or project going to do the bundling instead?
Thanks for answering my questions!
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Obviously the stand-alone apps like Firefox and Thunderbird are where the future's at. They aren't quite as bloatetd, and allow the user to choose what he wants. It also isn't as difficult for me to tell my friend to download a new browser (firefox) and try it out. Try telling him to download a whole software Suite when he might be using a webmail like outlook, and another calendar program! Never going to happen :)
Reading everything, this looks like a minor issue. They're just saying "Mozilla-the-suite is going away. If you want a browser, use Firefox. If you want mail/news, use Thunderbird.". The code isn't going away, if I read it right, just the one-big-suite front-end as a product on it's own.
It is natural that they would want to eventually stop maintaining two seperate product lines.
But, it was nice having an integrated suite. Perhaps they could offer a suite of firefox/tbird/sbird/composer? Preferably they would all share common code like Gecko.
But why? Before you mod me down, hold on a second...
Mozilla's suite, speaking just about the browser component, is FAR superior to what Firefox offers. Not only are there many more options for security, cookies, Javascript, saving form data, and many other things... that killing the suite, even if it was just this ONE component, would really be a bad move on their part.
Personally, I don't like Firefox at all. Even though they're both based on the Gecko engine, Firefox renders CSS much differently than Mozilla in some cases. Mozilla tends to be more accurate with placement. Its not as flexible, and it just looks plain ugly (as compared to Mozilla again, even with the same theme).
I can't speak for the other parts, because I only use the browser component of the Mozilla suite (and I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this; my internal QA/test suite includes 13 browsers before I release a site to a client). Firefox, while great as an MSIE replacement, can't even remotely compare to what the Mozilla Suite browser component offers.
Don't kill the Mozilla Suite, please, and if you do, at least keep the Mozilla Browser component around.
In Douglas Coupland's book "Microserfs", "Seamonkeys" is a term used to describe a project that is never going to be completed.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
The Mozilla Foundation has been looking for people to work on the Mozilla Suite for a while now. Nothing prevented people from doing work on it.
That it was killed indicates there just wasn't enough support to continue it.
Thus, the help for the community is limited to those who either were not aware help was needed, or are willing to work on a rebranded Mozilla Suite (it's trademarked, isn't it?) but not on the original Mozilla Suite while the Mozilla Foundation drove it.
In short, new developers and people who fork for the sake of forking.
We used to use Mozilla suite, now we use Firefox and Thunderbird. The migration was easy and we like Firefox + Thunderbird combination better than the original Mozilla suite.
Don't really see what the big deal is.
Josh (one of Mozilla's recent hires) posted what sounded like great news about Camino's short and medium term release cycle back on March 5. But these latest revelations may have raised some employment questions for guys like him and Mike. Camino is mostly (completely?) volunteer right now, but even in that light job insecurity can raise questions in how much one can volunteer.
It's got a great and long history, but I think the plain truth is that the word "Mozilla" sucks. It was funny in the Netscape 4.x days, "Huh huh, mozilla. Netscape rulez," but it now sounds like a nerdy in-joke. While valuable to the culture of the developers and OG users, there's just no way I could bring myself to tell people, "I use Mozilla browser and email." An irrational personal problem to be sure, but what's so wrong with the animals? Their icons are certainly better and more identifiable.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Does this mean there will be no more Firefox and the whole mozilla/gecko/whatever has stopped or that only the bundled mozilla suite will stop and it will continue as firefox, thunderbird etc? If only the bundled suite has stopped, how does this affect firefox etc? Doesn't firefox etc benifit from the development of the mozilla suite by taking much code from mozilla suite?
They announced 2 YEARS ago that this was going to happen.
People have had plenty of time to organise a continuation of SeaMonkey...now the time has come for them to take up the reigns, they are crying about it!
that the new tab button can be added to Firefox by right clicking on the button toolbar, customize and drag the button onto it?
Can someone please tie this into a Google conspiracy for me? I don't understand /. articles unless they somehow involve Google taking over the world.
That should be spelled as "congratumalations." FYI.
They should keep the brand Mozilla, by maybe offering a package of Thunderbird, Firefox, and friends, and calling that Mozilla (Suite?). It's not going to be as integrated, but at least they're not losing the brand name (for which so many people have fought for a long time).
Aren't they saying that they're transforming the project from an "suite" of Mozilla browser and Thunderbird mail/news, with lockstep releases, into ongoing Firefox development, and ongoing Thunderbird development? With ongoing maintenance of Mozilla 1.7.x, turned over to the community (not funded or directed by the old group)?
:(.) But announcing the transformation in terms of the demise of the organization, and "I'm sorry there will be no next version", is a total fumble. It will scare off consumers, and developers. I just hope that loss doesn't reduce Firefox's momentum below the critical mass it's developed, just before Microsoft releases their (probably competitive) next version of Internet Explorer. Accompanied, of course, by the maximum PR and documentation to exploit the Mozilla fumble.
All their announcements (posted by different people, linked to other websites for "clarification") talk about a failure to communicate expectations to developers, consumers, members of the team. Well, this announcement is confusing, and exactly the reason why corporations continue to consume inferior Microsoft crap: because Microsoft clearly communicates what will be released, so corporate IT can plan around it. Even when Microsoft lies about releases, they give a clear communication for PHBs to use in their management jobs. Which is the number one priority for success in corporate environments.
This transformation might very well produce a continuing improvement in Internet client apps, as the project team members claim. (Though the separation of the Internet Search field from the Get URL field from Mozilla -> Firefox will surely cripple my own productivity
--
make install -not war
I'm interested to find out what happens to the Composer (Mozilla Editor) component. Will this be avialable as a stand alone programs like Firefox and Thunderbird? I often recommended it as a free WYSIWYG editor. IIRC Nvu depends on a Mozilla installation anyway, at least for Linux.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
that the Mozilla Foundation will be doing bugfixes only to the 1.7.X version. That any major releases will not be done by the MF, but by any OSS group that wants to pick it up.
MF must have seen that having Firefox and Mozilla, that Firefox was the project to stick with for a browser. That Mozilla is bloated because it has the chat and email parts to it.
Whomever picks up the Mozilla will most likely give it a different name. Imagine if IBM or Novell picked up the Mozilla 1.7.X source and named it something else like Watsonzilla 1.8 (IBM named after a former executive) or Netzilla 1.8 (Novell, named after Netware).
This is a big step for anyone who wishes to have a top notch OSS browser as part of their company profile.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
They'll graft 4 butts on it. In fact, it's two cheeks per butt but the license model still treats it as 8. :(
Wait - is this all of a sudden? I mean there have been two Slashdot stories in the last few days, and now this?
I'm going to RTFA now, but what the hell is going on? Didn't Firefox just pass 1 million downloads not too long ago? It seemed like there was a bit of a buzz - is this the beginning of the end?
Is this why Open Source can't compete with companies like Microsoft "commercially"?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
The Mozilla web page editor. I don't actually write web pages using it, but I do like to hit Ctrl-E every now and then to show coworkers the underlying table structure of a page. It's just a handy visual tool. Especially when I'm doing webdev.
The sidebars. I don't know about you, but I love custom sidebars. I have one for MapQuest, one for IMDb and one for Lorem Ipsum.
Edit->Preferences. The only reason Options is under Tools in Firefox is because it's trying to mimic IE. :)
Mozilla Tools:
Translate Page
Cookie Manager
Image Manager
Popup Manager
Form Manager
Password Manager
Download Manager
The File dialog. I'm sure the new open/save file dialog is easier for easily confused users, but I like having all the file managing options ready when the dialog first opens.
I guess you could call Mozilla the programmer's web browser. Feature rich and not ashamed of it.
Why are there always "community efforts" to continue the developement of things nobody wants any more? The reason they stopped is lack of demand. The reason there is no demand is because Firefox and Thunderbird do basically the same thing, with the same engine, but faster, simpler, and better. The Mozilla Suite showed the world that open source could be as good as closed source corporate backed software. But it saw its day, and newer, better things came about.
Discontinuing the Mozilla suite is good only if they would create only one Gecko runtime for Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and others. Right now, those products are using their own Gecko runtime libraries/environment. So, if you're running at least 2 of those (Firefox + Thunderbird) you end up using more memory and resources than using the Mozilla suite as your browser and email client. This is very noticable if you try running Mozilla suite, and the combination of Firefox and Thunderbird.
Take-off every
First time poster. Probably only time poster.
I use the suite simply because Firefox runs like a dying horse on my system. I have no idea why, and I've tried several different options trying to optimize it, but it's always so sluggish (not the web page time, but the program itself.)
Sigh.
There are extensions that add a new tab button in Firefox, but the easiest way to launch a new tab that I've found is to double click on the empty tab bar in Firefox. Not sure which they put that in there, but it works on all the recent versions I've used.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
I use Mozilla suite because the memory footprint is incredibly smaller than having FF & TB open at the same time. FF on my wifes computer if left running for long (which she does) consumes huge amounts or memory. I have heard this from many others as well.
It takes a village to write a browser.
I guess that would be another thing I would add to my list:
Menu consistency. If someone running Windows has a question about Mozilla, I am 100% where all the config options are. Just today, someone accidently turned their image-blocking on for a certain url and asked me why they couldn't see images on a certain website. He was running Firefox, so I had to dig around in his menus a little bit before I could find the Image Manager.
Don't get me wrong, Firefox is great. I just like having the choice of using Mozilla. Sad to see it go. :( Hopefully it'll fork.
One excuse for not ever getting involved in Mozilla/FireFox or OpenOffice is the ornate build system, tools, and dependencies just required to get off the ground as a developer. It seems inordinately more than your run of the mill open source app.
Not to sound like a rewrite-it-in-my-favorite-language drone, but I think if it was written in something like Mono, it would be much easier to engage third party developers. Are there any Mono-based browsers out there that happen to use the Gecko engine by the way?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
From what I understand, the Mozilla Suite is based off a toolkit called XPFE. This is not the case for Firefox/Thunderbird.
Could anyone please explain what toolkit these use and what has changed? I couldn't find this in the website/wiki/bugzilla.
For a third-party developper wanting to target the Mozilla platform, are there any deprecations they should be worried about from the technology at http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/ ?
Geezus you guys put out a Beta version and then
say "oh we never intended to put out a Final 1.8"
BULLCRAP...and they KNOW its bullcrap!
You have a 1.8 that is 99% done, FINISH IT!.
This is not Windows 3.1...This product had a new beta put out LAST MONTH! The nightlys say "Beta 2"
Take out the unimplemented features, fix the bugs release 1.8 and call it a day.
I like Firefox anyway, but it doesn't load certain sites well, so I still use Mozilla.
g =nl.e497
.... get the facts
;-)
http://www.cnet.com/4520-6033_1-5666404-1.html?ta
CNet editors seem to think IE7's going to kill firefox, though they present no facts at all or features for IE7, notice how CNet won't so much as let you submit a linux application.
Maybe they need to
http://www.msdn.org/
I have still yet to see a single, solid reason on why Firefox is supposedly better.
- Is 10 megs really that much harder to download then 5? Is it?
- Mozilla has about a 1.5 second dry startup time on my two year old computer, is that too much time to wait?
- Do you Firefox users actually prefer editing a 10 page config file rather than having a nicely-laid out preferences window? I hope you realize the only reason so many useful settings have been stripped from Firefox is because they think its users are too stupid to handle them. I don't know about you, but this is insulting to me.
- Why should I have to download 10 different inconsistently-maintained extensions for Firefox just to restore the functionally that Mozilla has had for years? And why do I have to redownload half the extensions again nearly every time there's a new release of Firefox that breaks them all? "but hey, extensions are l33t!" you say? Newsflash: Nearly every extension made for Firefox works fine in Mozilla, and has for a long time.
- God don't get me started on the "brilliant" idea of having a separate search box. I thought the idea of Firefox was making things simpler, not making them more kludgy.
Plain and simple, Firefox is a dumbed-down toy to satisfied the 10-second-attention-spanned mouth breathers. Firefox will not, and never will, fill the void left by the disbanding of Mozilla.end rant, commence modding
coincidentally, i just downloaded the nightly build last night after reading all the great stuff about it few weeks ago,and was amazed by the speed improvements. i had a bunch of apps (pdf viewer, thunderbird, licq, multiple konsoles) running while running kde, and the mozilla nightly build started in no more than a second, and page rendering was even faster than firefox. i run firefox mainly as a browser, and i do prefer the UI in firefox, but the mozilla nightly just absolutely wowed me.
my blog
My mistake. Just tried out the latest version of Nvu and it seems much improved (PHP handling at last!). Pity the site publishing supports only FTP and HTTP. Would be nice to publish to another drive share. Still, it is better than Mozilla Composer.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
It's not the bundling or lack thereof that is keeping me from using Firefox. It's the design decision to remove features from the UI - features which I use. Sorry for the inflamatory wording, but it's the dumbing-down of mozilla browser that I don't like, not the breaking out of the applications. Heck, I like the idea of breaking them out with good interoperability. What I really want is for Firefox to be a standalone version of the Mozilla Suite browser... alas, it is not.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Well, this sucks. I originally read the topic as "Mozilla Foundation's Failure, and it sounds like I wasn't far off.
Firefox has a lot of "features" that I don't like, such as the terribly unfriendly download manager that you can't turn off (I prefer single windows per download, with prompts asking me what to do first, thanks!). I use Firefox at work because I only need an MSIE alternative, but at home I use the browser and mail/newsgroup components of Mozilla all the time (almost never close them in fact); I have to say that I prefer Mozilla in general.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Probably because the scheme ("http://") is *not* an optional part of a URI. If you do not have "http://" at the beginning, it's not a valid URI and would be rejected by any strict browser (Konqueror Embedded is one such example). Of course, I like shortcuts that allow me to omit semi-obvious things, so I rarely ever actually enter "http://", but I think it is important that people are aware that it is technically required.
Luke-Jr
Ending the Suite is a "good thing". As mentioned before, focusing on a centralized GRE offers performance increases. Firefox and Thunderbird (and whatever else that uses Gecko) will be modularized frontends to the GRE's backend. That would be the first step to Mozilla 2.0, the virtual machine.
I can't believe how many people I am seeing, on Slashdot no less, saying something along the lines of "What's the big deal if there's no Mozilla suite? Just get Firefox and Thunderbird! It's the same as Mozilla, just separate!"
No. Actually, the Mozilla browser and Firefox are quite different. This is the main reason that many people (myself included) don't want Mozilla to be discontinued. We prefer the Mozilla browser over Firefox. To some of us, Firefox feels like a "dumbed down" version of the Mozilla browser. Now, I understand the intent is for Firefox to appeal to a much wider audience, and that is fine. Believe me, I am behind the Firefox effort 100%, and I install it for people all the time when trying to wean them off IE. But many of us still vastly prefer the Mozilla browser for our own personal use.
There are many other reasons I prefer the Mozilla browser over Firefox, as well as many reasons I enjoy the full Mozilla suite. But that is not really the point of this post. The point is that the Mozilla browser and Firefox are two different things.
... at once. Perhaps under the hood somewhere Firefox is an admirable improvement. But:
a) on the surface where it counts to the USER, what's the improvement? None.
b) now you have to download several software suites where before, one sufficed.
c) now you have to keep track of updates to several packages instead of just doing the one download.
Conclusion: the complexity to the user has increased. Why is this better for the USER. Ah, it isn't. It's better for the developers. Rock on, folks.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
There is one other great joy about the suite that FF/TB do not have: clear, sharp, crisp fonts.
I realise this is personal, but cannot bear antialiased fonts - they appear blurry and out of focus, and they give me eye strain. Yes, FF/TB let you switch off antialiasing (as configured by the gnome control panel), but then you get the spidery mess that results from scaled, non anti-aliased true type fonts.
BUT, in the suite, (using then non-XFT builds), I can have perfect, sharp fonts using the old fashioned 100dpi (bitmap) fonts. This makes Mozilla so much easier to read!
Other problems with TB/FF: the extensions do not play nice with rpm/urpmi; the keys (Ctrl-[1-5] and Ctrl-N/M don't work (eg no keyboard accelerator in TB to open a new window in FF); less functionality; hidden dependence on the gnome-control-panel (for default browser/fonts); less effective toolbar (google/URL are in separate bars).
Actually, I recognize 5 of the 10 names at the bottom of the open letter from Mozilla related stuff, and I'm just a guy that watches from the sidelines. And the guy that wrote the letter (bz) is like some super-developer or something - he seems to touch the Mozilla tree all over the place (in a good way), is responsive and gets lots of stuff done. He's also expressed the desire to keep the suite before, so I'm not exactly surprised to see him being part of the effort.
I'm guessing the lack of interest before the offical "we're killing Seamonkey" announcement is because there seemed to have been no reason to step up while the situation was in limbo - backend stuff (shared w/ Firefox &c) was being done, there really wan't that much need to change the frontend drastically. Other than porting XPFE to the new toolkit I guess - not sure why they weren't majorly working on that beyond "sync blah with toolkit blah" bugs. Totally unfounded guess would be NIH.
(As I noted - I'm just a random bystander; heck, I don't even hang out on their IRC server)
To those whose only complaint about the Mozilla Suite -> Firefox switch is the separate searchbar in FF, have a look in about:config for keyword.URL. Personally even in Mozilla I still used a keyword when searching in the URL bar, go for a google search, gi for a google image search, so the switch didn't affect me at all.
I hope you're right. I don't use the suite myself, but I think it's important to have. (At least for a few more years.)
I'm sure Firefox is nifty, but it sound like it's not all that mature yet, and I don't want to regress, yet again. I definatly am not ready to trust thunderbird. I'm still pissed from when I experimented with a maturing balsa, just to have it mangle my mail files, hose it's indexes, and start deleting the wrong messages.
My desktop is not a toy and there are certain function that should not be in constant beta. Email is one of them. Now I have to find a way to migrate, yet again, to something stable and functional for a mail and news reader.
And yes, I know there will probably be a community project that takes over. There will be a question of migration since we already know they can't use the same name, it's safe to say the dot directory will change and probably some of the files there in. And then there is a question of how smooth the transition will be. Will the software stay stable through all the churn. Will it stagnate like the old netscape suite? Do I want to bet another mailbox on it?
If there's going to be a migration, I want to at least be sure that the there is a stable program at the other end of the migration. Right now, the suite soon to be formerly known as Mozilla is an unknown.
There is a longer piece in article format here.
We have spent years building up the Mozilla brand name to the point now where the average uninformed non-techy Joe Sixpack types are starting to recognise the name- so what do the brainwaves at the foundation come up with? "Lets drop that widely known brand for no good reason, and bring out a new one no one has ever heard of-yeah, that will help us get an increased market share for sure!" This will be taught in future business classes as one fo the great strategic blunders of all time, right up there with "New Coke". I for one, have turned hundreds on to Mozilla, now I will have to explain why even Mozilla won't be supporting their own name sake product anymore - doh! It is a much superior browser to Firefox, FUD not withtsatnding. Let's take an IQ check at the Mozilla Foundation, and fire everyone with an IQ below their age or shoe size -probably everyone in charge, looking at this announcement.
Firefox has not achieved everything it must to replace the suite browser. The dumping of the suite browser should not occur until firefox has a plugin so that suite users can have their extended feature set and ungodly bloated menus. I agree that many of these features are not needed for the general population but the obsessive technologists want them along with experimental code and it will keep these people around where some of them may contribute. Also, although it has not advanced that much in a while the suite browsers code seems to be "smoother". I remember the 1.0 version of mozilla suite was twitchy and slow and I get the same feel of hesitating menus and such in firefox still sometimes. Wisdom from moderation level 0. As an aside, shouldn't slashdot be Pink instead of Green?
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
I really like Mozilla. I was just thinking last night how irritating it is to use Firefox.
- The configuration options suck.
- That image minimizer thing is just incredibly annoying... and it cannot be disabled.
- There is also the absence of a button to create new empty tabs.
- Also, new empty windows always have that stupid "About:" address in the URL entry window.
Maybe this is good for Windoze users, but it sucks for those of us who are not under the influence of the Beast at Redmond. I hope something is done about this. In fact, I am using Mozilla right now to compose this.I have used many browsers in the past (Firefox, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror, IE, Netscape, NetFront, Lynx... you name it), and I keep coming back to Mozilla. Every time I get frustrated with another browser, Moz has a way to solve the problem. Sure, it is not perfect, but it is way better than most I have used.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I could not have said it better myself!
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
"Windoze"...check.
"Beast at Remond"...check.
"Moz"...check.
You are on your way to becoming a full-fledged Slashbot! Meeting at the docks tomorrow night at 7.
I wouldn't be so sure... the number of critical bugs in the bugzilla for both Firefox and Mozilla reflects the total mismanagement of the projects. New management might be a good thing, and I'd be a hell of a lot more likely to contribute if I didn't have the feeling of total helplessness caused by bugreports ignored for 3-5 years.
A short list:
You can't download more than 2-3 files at once in firefox. Trying to download more causes the dialog to come up when another file finishes.
Mozilla/Firefox store your credit card numbers in plaintext if you don't completely turn off autocomplete. (They closed this one WONTFIX)
Browser blocks a ton of ports for "Security reasons" that no other browser does. (I guess plaintext credit card numbers aren't a security problem, but somehow this is??)
And that's just off the top of my head. All these bugs have been around for at least 2-3 years.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I've been utterly unable to import Mozilla Mail data into Thunderbird. Until I can, how in hell am I supposed to transfer away from what they're "killing"?
I've got mail archives going back to...God, 1999 (originally OE, imported fine into Moz).
Jesus, this is just dumb.
...AOLzilla anyone? ;)
I read the names immediately, but it took a while for me to recognize them. Yes, it seems likely now that the foundation has somehow been blocking these things. New management will help.
Not that they ever did a decent job of promoting it, but one of the cool things about mozilla was that it provided a development platform for cross-platform, stand-alone applications that were capable of a wide variety of rendering and communication tasks. XUL was/is cool.
Unfortunately, switching to a Firefox/Thunderbird model of stripped-down applications means there's no longer a single place where a developer may write a XUL application and have access to the full range of XPCOM objects and rendering abilities that were present in the suite.
I have written complex XUL clients, only to find out now that the primary development platform is being trashed. My applications won't run in Firefox, mostly because of missing capabilities. Guess I could write my own objects to replace all the ones being lost with the suite, but since all those objects were the reason I chose to develop on mozilla, I see little point.
I can see I made a mistake in choosing my technology.
On the bright side, the books "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" and "Creating Applications with Mozilla" should be hitting the clearance shelves in no time!
Unix applications have taught me: "Do one thing, but do it well." Therefore, I consider application suites to be flawed by nature.
;-)
Consider: Do I really need an IRC client packaged with my web browser? Why is the Moz dev team developing an IRC client when many quality alternatives already exist...? HTML Composer? I use vim. Mail Client? I use mutt 80% of the time.
There's no reason to assume that a development team that creates a quality web browser could also write a quality e-mail client. Why can't we just accept application-specific forks (FF/TB) and move on?
There appear to be two main reasons: "Mozilla Suite is better because of [feature or lack of problem]" and "A suite increases inter-app compatibility."
For the first, allow me to state the obvious: It's OSS. If Mozilla has a feature or quality that you feel is superior, why don't you file a suggestion or submit code? (Yes, this is a standard OSS shoot-footing attitude, but damnit I believe in it. TANSTAAFL.)
For the second, compatibility should depend upon open standards and protocols, not the fact that the same dev team wrote most of both.
My simplistic suggestion? Let MoFo focus on Gecko and on pushing forward web technologies and standards, but let the FF and TB teams focus on the applications themselves. Maybe we could fork the IRC client too?
Disclaimer: I'm a coder and power user. I've used Netscape since 1.1N and Moz for so long that I can't remember when I started.
...you will pry the Mozilla Suite from my cold dead hands
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
Where where?
Problem solved.
I suggest you migrate to it as well. I have an archive back to 1999 accesible anywhere I have Thunderbird, Mozilla, or a web browser (thanks to Squirrel mail).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Microsoft is going to buy Google. Then ./ will buy M$.
I've been utterly unable to import Mozilla Mail data into Thunderbird
According to the changelog (sorry, can't find the link), Thunderbird 1.0 can import Mozilla Mail data. Alternatively, if you're running on Linux, make a local IMAP server and stick all your mail on it"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
Subject.
- "Open in new window" popup menu option on Web links in emails in Thunderbird
- CTRL-M shortcut in Firefox to send an email
- The problem that sending a link via email from Firefox does not append the email signature
These small things were supposed to be addressed/solved by the integrated suite, so that each project could concentrate on its core project domain.Now it looks like that won't happen. Pity!
D.
Well, honestly, why the hell do you need email that old? Step back and see if you're just being a pack rat.
If there's something critical, print it out, and then nuke it.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Just shows how "good" the F/OSS actually is from a continuation point of view...if the people on the project lose the interest in developing it they can just forget about it. Once boredom and apathy sets in there is no point continuing because there's no reward anymore.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
In companies, mail may need to be kept for legal reasons.
Mozilla just proved it is unusable for the corporate world.
Sad.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
...it is a suite...
Most people are usually fixed to a mail app. by their company... Company got MS Exchange u've got MS Outlook... Company got Lotus Domino... u've got Lotus Notes... etc. What I'm trying to say is that there is no need for a full "Internet suite" any more...
Maybe the name recognition is being deliberately dismantled.
The people behind the wheel have decided to pimp the same thing branded as Netscape haven't they?
I think mozilla 1.8 has been nuked because it is too fast :)
Since when? I tried it a couple of weeks ago and it said that it had but it failed miserably. It copied over the folders but not the contents.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
There may not be an import option, but have you tried just copying the mailbox to the right folder?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Would it be something men with thinning ass hair wear?
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
Personally, most of my old mail is either short stories (in some cases series that have been ongoing for years) people have sent me that I like to periodically reread (especially if someone who hasn't published in a while sends out a new part) or old tech stuff that I still need to refer to occaisionally (I still have to maintain some pretty old kit). It's eaiser to store that stuff in my mailbase.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Microsoft UI's are generally lousy.
I'm not going to hash the ugly bits here in this thread again, but lets just say there is PLENTY OF SUPPORT for this view. Look around the net, it's not that hard to find.
Ok, so why are their products accepted as easy to use?
The crap is common knowledge. A significant percentage of the computer using population has just simply learned to deal making ease of use happen through sheer brute force. --That's not quality UI design, it's mass brainwashing one dollar at a time.
XP has a better UI than many other win32 varients do, but it has a lot of work left before it gets past the lousy mark.
Blogging because I can...
looks like the Mozilla Gorilla's been up to his old tricks again.
You can't download more than 2-3 files at once in firefox. Trying to download more causes the dialog to come up when another file finishes.
That is sort of by design. The browser limits the number of concurrent connections to a single webserver in order to avoid excessive server load. The default maximum is 4. If the browser is maintaining one connection for the page, then there are only 3 left for downloads. It's a user interface deficiency, not a "programmer error". You can increase the number of connections in about:config (network.http.max-connections-per-server, network.http.max-connections, network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server ).
According to this FAQ entry it does so, and this FAQ entry describes how too.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
Hmmm. Ok, if you want more configuration options I guess you wouldn't like the current ones. To each their own. That said, disable the image minimizer - Preferences, Advanced, Browsing - Uncheck "Resize large images to fit in the browser window". If you want a button that creates new empty tabs, View, Toolbars, Customize and drag the "New tab" icon onto the toolbar. "About:" addresses aren't stupid. They don't even show up for new tabs. I'm using Firefox 1.0/Linux, so I don't know where that came from.
Regards,
Christopher.
After some searching I came to the Thunderbird FAQ that says: "you can import your Mozilla Mail settings", but it doesn't say how. It turns out that ONCE during after the install of Thunderbird you get an option to import settings from Mozilla Mail, but the option then disappears from the "Import" dialog box.
The solution is to open the Thunderbird Profile manager (on windows it's a shortcut in the Thunderbird Start Menu group) and delete your Profile. (be sure that you don't have any data in that profile you need to maintain, back it up) If you now start Thunderbird it'll ask you if you want to import settings from Mozilla Mail. Works like a charm.
But, it's possible that it won't actually ask this; in that case, close Thunderbird, go to the file system (windows explorer) and navigate to:
c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\ and delete the file profiles.ini and registry.dat . This will effectively erase all knowledge that Thunderbird has about your profile.
Start Thunderbird again and it should ask you if you want to import Mozilla Mail settings and email.
Obviously they should just give you this option on the Import dialog of Thunderbird, who knows why they opted to leave it out there.
My Mozilla Foundation President is Charlton Heston.
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
FYI, I just migrate from Mozilla 1.7.3 suit to Firefox/Thunderbird TWO hours ago. They imported all my Mozilla configs, including preferences, bookmarks, email accounts, userid/passwords, histories, ...
I am extremely satisfied about this smooth migration. This is what I call a job well-done!
n/a.
But I'm going to hold off on converting people to Firefox from IE until they figure out how to prevent it from automatically deleting bookmarks! Check out their bugzilla page and look for bug# 279339.
Well, thanks for the explanation. I'd still call it a "bug" since most of the things I listed could be framed as UI deficiencies. The port blocking for instance could be made a lot less obnoxious if you didn't have to dig in about:config to fix it, etc.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I must say that I like the WinXP Luna UI among the many from Win95 to Win2000. But this only pertains the Windows Explorer & Internet Explorer. Luna has mainly flattened the text blanks, dialog boxes and buttons to give it a very modern feel. After using this for a while, I find the classic feel (3D buttons, 3D dialog boxes, etc) ugly.
.Net-style interface, toolbars are ugly tubes and depressed-buttons are highlighted in orange. I wonder what happens in Longhorn. Think of all the changes from Office 4 to Office 2003.
M$ however didn't extend this to Office XP fully. As far as the toolbar buttons on Office XP is concerned, M$ uses "blue highlight" for a depressed-button vs the "bright-highlight" on Windows/Internet Explorer. This is still acceptable. But Office 2003 is worse. With the
Not to mention many 3rd party software manufacturer use a myraid of different UI widgets when writing applications for Windows XP.
I am still glad that my favourite applications like Mozilla suite (classic theme), Firefox, Thunderbird, Openoffice 2.0 beta look quite consistent and pleasing to the eye. In particularly OOo2beta. In pre-beta versions, it uses the "ugly tube" as toolbars. Now it is so much nicer.
This is an outrage that is taking place within the Mozilla community. The "Mozilla Foundation", the folks who took over Mozilla and subsequently developed it's ugly stepson, Firefox, have essentially cast the "Mozilla Suite" over the side. This has the effect of tossing aside the estimated 40 million Mozilla Suite users worldwide. As you are surely aware, the Suite is the heir to the Netscape legacy, upon which millions of the original internet pioneerscut their teeth. Despite desperate appeals from many of us, the Suite users who stuck with Mozilla during its rough patches, all of our appeals have meant nothing to these egotistical and self-centered bastards. Needless to say, our sense of betrayal is profound. I am asking you to make your readers aware of the treachery taking place. I will provide you with some links. Newsgroup, where much info can be found. netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey Official announcement..final nail in the coffin, if you will. The claim that they had always planned for this, and that everybody knew, is complete bull. There was never any hint that they would abandon the Suite. http://www.mozilla.org/seamonkey-transition.html This next one is a link to where a group of folks plan to try to take up development of the suite. If you wanna help, here's where. Note...programmers etc. are needed and all are welcome. http://wiki.mozilla.org/wiki/SeaMonkey:Home_Page "Mozilla's" semi official forum, where even the name 'Mozilla' has now been stripped from the suite, having been replaced by the once internal name for Mozilla Suite test builds. http://forums.mozillazine.org/ We urge you to make your readers aware of what is happening. Thank you for your time.
As a Firefox user (and, dare I say it... 'fan'), I totally agree with you.
I've always viewed them as separate products, united by common technology (Gecko) and a common organisation (Moz.org -> MoFo).
From a lay-developer's POV, I'm really keen on getting the GRE fully componentised. I can imagine a time when GRE's made available as a discrete product in and of itself. Perhaps this would help contributors focus on the area that they're most keen on. App developers would work on the GRE client apps, layout and rendering gurus who know the W3C's publications like the backs of their hands could get their kicks working on GRE.
Updates to the GRE could be pushed via Mozilla Update, and *boom*... every installed GRE client gets the bugfixes and enhancements, without the client's developers needing to touch a line of code.
From what I've heard, the build system's unpleasant to say the least. It'd be cool if a dev interested in the GRE could get the GRE code from CVS, complete with a really basic GRE container app for testing... all ready to go.
Likewise, those interested in Client X (Seamonkey, FF, TB, nvu, SB, Camino, etc.) could grab the client source from CVS and hack away.
Apologies if I'm spouting nonsense. I can code, but never tried tinkering with something the size or complexity of Mozilla. I think the real question I'm asking is:
Would some behind-the-scenes code reorganisation (possibly centred around componentising the GRE) make supporting the development of multiple projects that much easier? If the project inter-dependencies were minimised, would there be more freedom for devs to scratch their itches with the projects they like, whilst remaining under the umbrella of the Foundation?
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Is this going to look bad to companies considering open source products? I can see a lot of FUD being generated as a result.
What do you all think?
My lame blog.
Then...get a playstation? Because I remember that whole "diagramming sentences" thnig from freshman year in high school, and I don't think I ever associated it with "fun."
I couldn't agree more. Both FF/TB and Mozilla/Seamonkey have advantages and browser diversity is good for everybody, so it's really silly IMHO to side with one solution when both can co-exist.
To those who are arguing that the suite is better: a number of areas where the suite is more mature (find as you type, download management, etc) should be integrated into FF.
However, saying that more features and all-in-one approach = "better" or "more professional" is not convincing to me. I like my apps seperate, thank you, and I'm not "less professional" because I do.
One man's feature is another man's bloat.
Wait, that looks weird now that I read it...
Wow. You ought to actually know what you're talking about BEFORE you post. Firefox does not equal Mozilla browser. Firefox is a greatly 'dumbed down' version of the browser in Mozilla Suite. Best suited for kids and/or beginners.
In companies, mail may need to be kept for legal reasons. Mozilla just proved it is unusable for the corporate world.
Corps w/ email retention poilicies will save email in a central location by grabbing it as it moves through the SMTP server. No one in their right mind relies on end users and email client software in order to meet retention policies.
FreeSpeech.org
They don't have to present facts of features for IE7. MS will have done what they do best: copy all nice features FF has over IE and if possible improve them. They WILL kill FF on the Windows platform with IE7. Luckily there are two other platforms on which FF is big, but unfortunately these platforms have a negligible user base. SO the Mozilla team has to come with some really great new features really fast for the next version of FireFox to have a chance of overthrowing IE.
-- Cheers!
Nowadays, any e-mail over 30 days old is deleted automatically. And we all have 10MB mailboxes. Our marketing director can't get image files of upcoming campaigns in e-mail, nor can he receive media files of upcoming radio/tv commercials. But I still get my daily dosage of male enhancement spam.
By the way (warning; off-topic antecdote), I got one the other day that claimed to increase the size of the "male penis." I told them to get back to me when they had a product that did the same for the female penis.
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
The search bar thing has been my issue, too. In fact I was planning on posting an Ask Slashdot about this, so I was very interested in this thread.
But I still didn't see anything mentioned here that solved the problem (or maybe I just didn't understand the solutions).
Then I found this: http://www.petersblog.org/node/464
The solution posted there worked like a charm for me. That page also mentions the googlebar extension http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ which, like that poster said, makes me rethink not wanting a separate search bar. Currently, I'm using both, and either one solves the Firefox "search bar" issue for me.
I thought I was done commenting but I came back to add this. From the two slashdot threads I've read in the last few days and all the links to Mozilla dialogue, I thought Mozilla/Firefox defenders did a good job explaining how to soup up Firefox to do the things being complained about as missing, sometimes with a config text file option, sometimes an existing plugin, and sometimes just a setting from an FF menu.
What little that couldn't be done was attributed to Firefox UI decisionmaking frustrating those who wanted to add professional features, along with some dislike for people having to piece together all these tweaks and plugins and redo it on every update, and even then not having some patches in there that they would want.
So I posted the blurb at bottom here this afternoon, but I wanted to add another thought. The distro would have -
all the config settings, UI changes such as pulling the little search field off the UI, classic skin, etc., and everything else described as how to implement what was wanted,
with all plugins installed and configured that add the Mozilla Suite functionality and usability desired,
and all the patches implemented to this branch that FF WONTFIX to add all the advanced keyboard behavior and such for desired Suite functionality. My understanding from reading is that most of those patches are already done or not that hard but just refused to be implemented in FF.
This would be a CVS branch of FF, TB, the new composer, etc. where only these functionality patches have to be reapplied to new releases. Most seemed to be triggered by keyboard shortcuts or additional menu options so seem fairly external and addon to core code.
In addition, with a classic skinned, UI tweaked FF and TB then create a shell menu control that FF, TB, and other Mozilla apps plug into, who knows, maybe a defined plugin interface that allows Suite users to plug other interoperable browser related apps made available for it by third parties. At that point you should have essentially classic Mozilla Suite (I'm a real classic Netscape 7.02/Mozilla 5.0 user, I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming from it) with only an outer menu shell and mostly keyboard triggered functionality tweaks to merge to current Mozilla components FF and TB.
That's a distro that should be able to ship with each new release. However, in my opinion if that is done by Mozilla Suite advocates my opinion is that Mozilla Foundation should put their stamp of approval on that and call it Firefox Classic.
I would even upgrade off of 7.02 for that.
rd
My previous post:
"I would say after reading all this that it possibly makes more sense to have distro of FF, TB, etc. with extensions that do such things as provide a GUI options panel and every other thing that brings FF up to Navigator standards, even patches that FF WONTFIX like CTL-ENTER preference to match Navigator.
They should bundle the distro as the equivalent of Mozilla Suite (with a different name) with all extensions included and tweaked, which is the whole point of a distro.
This makes much more sense to me than the more massive effort required to maintain and enhance SeaMonkey."
off-topic antecdote), I got one the other day that claimed to increase the size of the "male penis." I told them to get back to me when they had a product that did the same for the female penis. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=size+%22female+pe nis
Compared to Mozilla 1.7.5, Firefox is a childish piece of junk. I can't stand IE, but after trying Firefox, I'd rather use IE.
Firfox is missing the most basic of usability features. No "ctrl-f" find in the Bookmark Manager... what the f*ck is up with that?
Mozilla 1.7.5 rocks. Firefox is a sick, sick joke.
My only possible response to the demise of Mozilla 1.7.5 would be:
What The Fuck? You MUST be kidding me.