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Mozilla "beta" Release Coming
Bruno Barreyra writes "I was checking out mozilla.org just for kicks and I found out that they are closing in a so-called "M3 Milestone." There was a feature freeze last Sunday and right now they are working at minimizing bugs for a distributed release. The M3 release will "provide enough basic functionality in place to allow everyone working on the product to use apprunner for their daily browsing and mail." "
"feature freeze"
The Linux and Mac builds are a week or so behind the Win32 effort but they ARE making enormous strides in EVERY area of development.
For example: the current Win32 nightly builds will load and draw Slashdot PERFECTLY for almost a half-hour before it tanks...
And ALL operating systems use the same layout engine, you get the precise same quality layout and rendering on every platform...
The *NIX development team could always use some more help, so get to www.mozilla.org and get on some mailing lists to see why the problems you see now are happening and when they will be fixed...
The user interface is on it's way folks, so don't be disappointed until it's working... The basic architecture of Mozilla is an ABSOLUTE GEM that must be seen to be believed....
If bugtesting isn't your thing, wait until M3 is complete and give Gecko a whirl...
Mozilla is going to stomp the everloving crap out of Netscape 4.0/4.5 and Internet Explorer 4.0/5.0...
Don't like Netscape 5? Roll your OWN copy of Mozilla and attach your OWN java machine and toys and script out your own UI... It's modular, logical, and reliable folks... Just like two certain operating systems that are in vogue today...
----
BTW: Mozilla stands at a million lines of code now, almost size-complete... This is down from 5 million lines of code for the legacy Netscape browsers...
I downloaded the latest Mac binary a few days ago. Far out! A bit slow of course, but fully operational for the basics. And it looks good, too. No IE-type eye candy involved (and I hope it doesn't creep in by release time), just what appears to be the foundation of solid code rendering.
It had a little trouble rendering news.com and a few others, but very simple things like table cell widths being off a little. Basically, they're definitely nearing a beta release.
-TheShrubber
Don't forget about Mozilla on the BeOS
See
http://reality.sgi.com/rhess_engr/beos/bezilla/
for details.
It looks like they really really really need the features in GTK 1.4 and are utilizing the development 1.3 libraries to develop Mozilla... This is a Big Problem that needs some more attention because if 1.4 isn't out with the needed features in a hurry, schedules will be broken further...
Good luck to them though...
I posted this problem as bug #3892 about a week
ago. Someone is working on the problem.
Mo DeJong
dejong at cs.umn.edu
cvs access checkout?
Not quite clear to me.
There are no 68k binaries because Mozilla does not support 68k.
SeaMonkey does not. SeaMonkey could perhaps?
I agree with how badass this project is. The incremental resizing reflow alone is much better than NS 4.5.x or IE 5.x. It's making very steady progress now.
Some other good resources are MozillaZine for general news and Netscaped.net for very specific information on daily progress of builds, including screenshots.
Looks like AOL won't be needing about 700 of Netscape's 2500 employees.
Netscape has received one humbling after another. It must hurt to go from the Ferrari dealership to the unemployment line in less than two years.
wonder how much of this is due to netscrapes decision to go Open Source(tm)................. just a thought.
mozilla *does* run on linux, i've built the latest cvs source and fixed a few bugs in nspr
to get it to run fine, although a bit slow, but that will come later.
if you're having problems with mozilla crashing upon running, try building mozilla with the additional
cc and cxx flag -DNO_TIMING
Wrong, to my knowledge it accounted up to 35-40% of their gross profit, that's back in 1996-97. They tried HARD to increase profits from their servers, but now that's dead too.
And now, the question of the day, why the layoffs? Because of duplication between AOL and Netscape. Happens all the time. Gee, what a wonder, eh?
-- HoserHead, who can't log in for some reason
GTK, GDK, X11...
.. I've found that a whole lot of them are not bugs at all. A good deal of rendering and layout problems are in fact correctly rendered, but eons of legacy functionality makes the expected result not happen. Mozilla is easily the most compliant browser out there -- I still don't know why IE 5 was released. What utter garbage.
Thanks for your answer ... how funny hahaha ...
I have been waiting for this since I'm rapidly losing patience with 4.06 for Linux. Nearly every session ends prematurely in a crash. The nightly builds haven't been a good experience for me, the ones I tried didn't even run.
According to Mozilla itself, the purpose of the project is not to release a browser or application suite for Netscape or anybody else, but to play around with technologies which *may* be useful to specific applications.
I tried the latest "Gecko" version for Windoze and it crased when loading a new page after a few minutes. Not impressed.
This is all very scary because with both Windoze and Linux one's choice of browsers and other internet tools for non-technical users is VERY limited. For Windows, your only real choice is IE
or perhaps Opera if you don't want Java. Almost all Windoze browsers use the Microsoft IE engine even if this isn't obvious to the end user.
Netscape sucks on both platforms because it is butt ugly and slow, although it doesn't crash as often. There are several applications that can be used as browsers with Linux (kde filemanager, Amaya, etc.) but with the exception of Kde almost everything uses Motif. I am trying to find some way to get Netscape off my box entirely and may go so far as to remove all apps what use Motif and Lestif to make sure.
Kfm is pretty nice but has some limitations. No java support and incorrect layout of complex tables with backgrounds, for example. Otherwise it kicks Netscapes ass. Much, much faster and better looking.
Why should anyone support Mozilla? They have little to show after 1 year of writing position papers and justifying the use of Motif (read what
"jamie lee" zawinski, the world's leading apologist for motif and athena, has to say about that.) They may be using Gtk now, but do so reluctantly, and about 6 months too late.
AOL probably will allow the project to continue so they can skim off any technology deriving from it and patent it. But, what's it to them. It probably costs AOL very little and makes them look like nice guys.
Don't support Mozilla. They are just doing work for AOL and to advance their own careers (can't blame them for that, but they could give squat about useful products for end users).
There should be a number of independent projects not associated with companies like AOl to produce a decent browser and other web tools for Linux users who need desktop tools. The server side tools and scripting tools for programmers are excellent but this will not mean much to most users.
Instead of supporting Mozilla, support such projects which really are free of commercial guidance and help from the likes of AOL. Mozilla programmers, come to your senses and join such projects or start your own. Don't waste your time testing and reporting bugs, either.
Debugging info?
I don't know about Lose32, but none of the linux libs or bins are stripped. I stripped "viewer" and it dropped from 4M to 900K.
Agreed, I have an NT box at work and it is lightning fast. My old Mac, however, doesn't do so well. The nightly builds are dog slow on it... I'll have to try it on a G3.
What 'announcement'?? All you've seen is over zealous reporters. Even the executives don't know whats going on. Believe me I've asked them.
By the way, Netscape servers are selling just fine thankyou.
Netscape Employee.
seems to me that this is at least beta quality if I can post to /. without any problems. /. way faster
It only took 10 minutes to download on a 56k modem. And it does render
than navigator 4.0, so try it already!
Well the first Beta anyway.
Most of the Management will leave Netscape or AOL and a few developers for NS webservers will most likely leave, probably get jobs at SUN since SUN is taking those over.
Linux has debug code in it still and its about a month behind the rest of the platforms. Win32 has the mail portion too. All the major mail got included a few days ago, before they had parts. So half of the download is NS and the other 1/2 is mail, which still doesn't work yet. Composer is in their too.
The feature, turned on by default I think, will render pages like NS4 and IE4. Hopefully it will know when not to use it.
If the pie wedge for Netscape server market share gets any thinner, someone is going to cut themselves.
Netscape gave us a browser - for that I thank them. Everything else they did was a waste of time in the grand scheme.
Ooops, should have told Adam Lock that - there already is an ActiveX wrapper
The featured "M3" link is very old? The page says ... Last updatedMon Feb 1 20:11:41 1999
IE5 was a flop? How do you figure? Once nutscrape kicks out a version that has a decent interface, and doesn't take 15 seconds to start the program, I will *consider* downloading it. Netscape is an inferior browser. It has a crappy interface, every turn you take leads to Netcenter (which sucks too), its slooooooooooow, and mangles a lot of pages. And with this gecko thing. Who is going to be able to notice a tenth of a second faster loading time? They are just wasting their time. Netscape is going down, and fast too. Too bad....(not)
I just tried the 3/14 and 3/17 linux build, and both segfaulted on start. GDB'ing the core gave:
/lib/libnss_files.so.1...done.
Reading symbols from
#0 0x40246fbe in nsHTMLReflowState::InitConstraints ()
(gdb)
So far IE5 is probably the first browser that actually works the way it should. So far (no crashes and it's fast, although ftp has never worked right and I haven't really tested that yet).
That being said, it's sad that MS would never consider doing anything cross platform (at least not without tying themselves to a ported windows environment. It's astounding what MS has done to promote bad programming not just in their company but also by forcing these practices on the entire industry. How could any company today with a huge investment in Windows specific source code ever involve themselves in a cross platform strategy? If Netscape/Mozilla dies, so do a lot of cross platform hopes.
I used to think that Wine was going to be the saviour in terms of freedom of OS choice, but it's not going to be easy. A open source MFC implementation would also be nice. Up until now, I've been keeping out of Mozilla, but I did some reading today, and now I'd have to add NSPR to the list of important things to insuring cross platform choice. That's the reason to support Mozilla; it will prove that writing something with cross platform in mind really works.
I'm playing around with teh latest Mac Build on My Mac which has been upgraded to a 300Mhz G3. It is as fast as IE 5 is on My 333 PII. Stability still needs to be improved but in the past week the Mac Mozilla project has gone from "it's way behind Windows" to on par and almost usable. Keep going Mozilla!
but I downloaded the latest (win32-binary) build, and there
is no browser there... lots of tiny files named "testxxxxx"
and some DLLs, but none of the executables is actually a browser..
I looked around their site a bit (not much, but visited
most of the 'Documentation' links..) and couldn't find
any info on how to dload and test it...
The README on the FTP site says that there is nothing there for
end-users, only for developers...
So I guess my question is: how do 'normal' users download
and test this thing? (from the posts here, people are
obviously doing it, but HOW...)
It's pretty tough for people to contribute when they can't
get their feet wet...
Why is it that the only x86 Linux nightly builds of Mozilla I can find are for i686? I have a regular Pentium, and they won't run. And I don't really feel like installing all of that GTK+ stuff right now. Is there an Athena version of Mozilla (yeah right!)?
And I like 'em too! :P
Market share means NOTHING. It's all media hype. Media is covering the browser war like it was some kind of TV ratings war, but it's not. And for servers, it's even less important. The ONLY reason browser market share is important is because it shows how many people you are pointing to your website, but the media seems to think that if Microsoft beats Netscape in ratings, then they've won. What a load of crap.
Netscape is going after corporate intranets and extranet markets with 10's of thousands of seats of Messaging, Directory, and Certificates for each deal. They know they can't compete with Apache for internet hosting, so they don't even try.
Take a look at http://www.menk.com/dod_license/index.html for details about a 2-MILLION seat deal with the DOD. And show me any other vendor with a directory or messaging deal even a tenth of that size.
Moron :)
How about debugging info?
However much of the user interface is built with a cross platform widget set included with Mozilla.
No. The Unix/Linux interface is GTK+ 1.2 only.
yeah, but 90% of the bugs are so obvious the authors should know about them, plus are those bugs that are known published in a database, so we know not to double up?
yes its great, its small, but fix the bugs, i mean if they have 100 people working on it 9hrs/day, it should be fixed in a week if they really pull their socks up
A flop? it runs fast and nice on my NT box, its not a flop, it works
Your on crack
I manage a windows app that is quite extensive
and yet i still can manage multiplat form like netscape, so the front end GUI code is different, big deal, its easy to manage a code base that runs on mac/win/linux
BUt i wouldnt give gtk a high score, it needs a lot of work.
1mill lines?
I bet if you dont include empty lines, comments
etc.. it would be more like 600,000
Any one got a real line test program that dont count empty lines/comments?????????
Well, I've tried to run IE5 several times, but it doesnt seem to want to start on either Linux or HP-UX.
And, no, I'm not going to install some buggy fringe OS just to run IE5.
Stactically linking Libs is better for Devs just incase someone has a corrupted file. They all develop on the correct version which should of been included.
Ummm... I think the better question would be "I wonder how much of this is due to Micro$oft eliminating Netscape's browser income stream?"
Only 25Mb? Quite often, it's using over 256Mb at my machine...
GO GET MOZILLA 5 M3
I never had this problem with netscape 4.5 for glibc2,
however I started noticing it with after downloading 4.51 for
libc5. For now I just use kfm to browse the web. It's a whole
helluva lot stabler.
gzip barks "unexpected end of file" but is this harmless? It creates a directory "package". Can anybody verify if it's okay anyway?
Yeah, it gzip decompresses some files but , at the least, "apprunner" is missing. Maybe the documentation at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/release- notes/m3.html is missing something? What does the nsinstall program do?
Mozilla Classic too :)
I prefer not to download news & mail & chat with browser. Let download of browser be quick. For M4 M5, write an interface which enables dynamical load of mail & news & projects at mozilla.org...
and enable Mozilla/Gecko...with flexible "plug-in" API compatible with current Netscape plugins and any seperate functionality...wget, ircII, Jikes...
I found that netscape often keeps running, and
consuming huge amounts of mem *after* X was killed.
This happens when I close the communicator cleanly.
submit the code...
or help yourself?
Download M3.
The Icab browser supports 68k though, and it's shaping up to something special too!
Mozilla is turning out to be something wonderful for the entire open source and otherwise community... PLEASE show your support by getting the nightly binaries and reporting all the bugs you find...
Although Mozilla has taken a long long time to product results, remember everyone's starting from scratch with an entirely new layout engine that will knock your socks off...
Just WAIT till you see what you can do with a COMPLETE implementation of CSS1 and XML and all the other toys that Internet Exbloater 5 STILL doesn't do correctly!
Please support this project folks! They really really need bugtesters and supporters and developer help and some press and some old fashioned rah-rah-going...
This is an ENTIRELY open source effort with a very fair license, and AOL/Netscape is VERY GRACIOUSLY donating more than 100 developers to this effort...
Tired of Netscape 4.0 or 4.5 crashing every five minutes or eating up all your resources? You've got an option now along with Opera and Lynx that is truly world-class coding...
PLEASE SUPPORT MOZILLA IF YOU CAN!
Thanks
:)
Slashdot lost my original post, so I'll keep this one short...
SUPPORT MOZILLA PLEASE!
This is a wonderful opportunity to help create a modular, extensible, flexible, resource-efficient web browser that incorporates all current open web standards, standards which Internet Exbloater 5 is still lacking in...
AOL/Netscape has graciously donated 100 developers to this effort, and they have done almost 80% of the work. If we want future open source projects of this magnitude to happen again, we need to support www.mozilla.org NOW!
Visit the website, read some newsgroups, and get involved!
The Unix builds are a few days behind the Win32 builds, but they're rapidly getting there in terms of feature parity and DEBUGGING HELP IS NEEDED!
ESPECIALLY the Linux builds...
The underlying architecture is almost complete; once you see what Mozilla can do (go see some of the w3c.org CSS1 tests, or the mozilla.org XML/CSS tests!!) you will be blown away at the power of the internet...
It's up to us to make Mozilla a success folks, and technically, there is not a reason in the WORLD to not support such a project...
Get involved please!
P.S.
Mozilla just hit 1 million lines of code and is rapidly nearing completion.
Netscape 4.x required 5 million lines of code.
You have a point, especially because you can only run one instance per user on the linux version (if you want to use the cache anyway). On linux there is a method for programs to tell netscape to utilize an already open window to display a link (Licq does this for ICQ'd URLs).
Also, something to realize is that different people have different browsing styles. I follow links by opening them in new windows so that I can check them later and they don't interrupt what I'm currently reading. In linux I can just middle-click the links, but this doesn't work in windows (possible because I use Emulate3Buttons for my two button mouse). It takes too much effort to right-click and hit open in new window. My streamlined browsing becomes clunky, compounded by the fact that IE doesn't even open new windows fullscreen.
Laters,
Rick (rick at chillin dot org)
It works fine here. Slashdot renders flawlessly.
I'm using win95 OSR2. What OS are you using? Supposedly it will be identical for all OSs when it's released, but I suppose the various ports may be at slightly different points of the development cycle right now...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
1) The Linux port doesn't run. Period. I've RTFM'd every damn thing in sight and nothin'. Just "can't load library" messages. Yes, I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or whatever it was.
2) The Mac nightly build is actually just a bunch of C header files. Where's the Mac (68k) executable?
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Or are you talking about PPC? I need the 68k binary(ies).
Posted by Tony Smolar:
How will the Unix versions be built? Are they sticking with Blotif? I thought I heard them talking about using GTK awhile ago.
Posted by Surzer:
Teach yourself C++
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I dl'd twice but both times gunzip said "unexpected end of file". What up?
The one thing I cant stand about ANY of the current browsers is when I open up a new browser,it pops up a completely new window. Why? I think the guys designing mnemonic got this one right. They use a "notebook" widget at the very bottom of the browser where you can tab through all the different sites. Check out for an example of what I am talking about. Does anyone know if this functionality is being added to mozilla? _Underflow
http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/mnemonic/ is the correct link. Sorry
1) my gtkstep theme makes it segfault; then
2) unthemed, it launches but can't figure anything
out about its environment and just sits there.
D'oh. Maybe I'd better wait until M3 to try again.
(yeah, I built the NSPR libs from the latest snapshot)
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
It's been that way for a while (using the GTK+ 1.1/1.2 series for Seamonkey).
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
TedC
Is it just me, or does the term "beta" seem vaguely inappropriate for open source projects?
:).
"Feature freeze" and "stable snapshot" carry more meaning: "beta" is a _marketing_ term, used, I think, to make the public think that an overdue product is close to release. How long has WinNT 5 been in "beta" now? About as long as I've been reading "reviews" of this OS, I'll wager.
I don't feel any compelling need to come up with new terms to replace "alpha" and "beta"-- the phrases above work well enough for me-- but it's something to think about. Maybe Perens and Raymond could come up with competing terms. That would be fun
A ".bin" file extension on a file known to be a Mac file signifies that it's been encoded into MacBinary format. This is necessary because most filesystems can't handle the dual nature of Mac files, and the resource fork gets destroyed (this is a Very Bad Thing for applications, though for most data files like graphics, text, and MP3's it is no big deal). The MacBinary format combines the two forks so that it can safely be stored on a non-Mac computer without having to worry about the application's integrity. This is, by the way, why the gzip format will never take very much of a hold on the Mac platform (outside of emulation, where it is popular to gzip a ROM file to save space); that format can only handle one file so it can't handle resource forks at all.
Anyway, there are indeed two Mac files in the build directory: mozilla-mac.sea.bin and mozilla-mac-headers.sea.bin. Gee, I wonder which one contains C++ headers? Gee, I wonder which one contains the application?
Come to think of it, I really do wonder why they put the headers in their own file; they're not even needed to run Mozilla and they don't seem to do this for any other platform...
Ever since freshmeat changed their design, the homepage causes an instant browser crash on two of my PC's, this one (Netscape 4.5, RedHat 5.2) and mine at work (Netscape 4.5, mutilated RedHat 5.0...)
:)
At least Mozilla's getting better. One of these days I might get to look at freshmeat again.
The menu is in the wrong place (bottom) and it's really really slow, but other than that it renders everything perfectly!
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I would check your environment variables again on the Linux side. Run the command 'env'. Once I set my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the directory with all the .so libs, it started up fine, although seg-faulted after running for 2 seconds :(
There ware 2 mac executables in the directory I snagged my linux binary from, as well as the mac headers. Search their site a little more.
I just CVS'ed a copy on 3/21 morning, compiled it, and it's working fine for me in Red Hat Linux 5.2 with kernel 2.2.3-ac1 and gtkstep 1.5. I don't know what's wrong with your build, but so far mine hasn't crashed (only been running it for a few minute though), it can render Slashdot and Freshmeat fine (except forms sometimes get put way in the wrong place), microsoft.com looks beatiful in it, and it's snappy.
;-)
Try again...
(PS: I'd post this from within Mozilla, but the submit buttons in Mozilla don't seem to do anything at this point).
I wouldn't say that stripping out the comments makes for a more "accurate" line count. The fact is that source code with comments takes longer to write and is worth more than the corresponding commentless source.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
take ActiveX off of the list, its dangerous crap and should never have been created or should be used, the security hazard of it is beyond limit.
Anyone who even speaks that name should be nailed to a wall, and his rights to use a computer revoked.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
fine, live in a cave with a browser nobody knows about and let MS take over the web virtually unchallenged. Kill mozilla and MS _will_ be the only option
---
well windows in general sux and msie isn't even available on _real_ operating systems. That's another reason to ignore ie5
---
it's all about the long term. And you're right about the cross-platform stuff too. MSIE doesn't run on the operating systems of the future (linux, BeOS, java AOL platform,etc)
---
The original post WAS moderated to -1. It now seems to be up to +2. Apparently moderators have been busily disagreeing with each other. :-)
:-)
The "down one" link at the top of the page is how I find posts that have been moderated away. Generally there is no point hitting it since most of the posts moderated down really did deserve it. Now what I would like is a way to know, before I click on a sub-discussion, what the moderators think of it. Something a little finer grained than, "Nobody nuked it yet!"
Regards,
Ben
PS Is 4 the record? I haven't seen any higher than that, not that I have been looking.
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Why is the linux binary so much larger than the win32 binary and for that matter I noticed that the win32 binary went from 2.0MB to 2.5MB in just one day.
-Steve
They are; That's why I think it's so odd that the binary size is so different.
-Steve
They are; That's why I think it's so odd that the binary sizes are so different.
-Steve
Yes, that was my first thought. But doesn't the idea of statically linking libs that are included by default in Windows strike you as odd? I should mention that the download includes lot's of libs. Perhaps some of the libs implement windows calls. But which ones? It just seems strange.
-Steve
M3 is not a beta. Its just a development milestone. They have no intention of creating something that can be used without knowledge about known bugs and problems.
IE5's CSS support sucks very badly. Mozilla already has better support. Same for DOM support.
Superficial bugs are often the last things to get fixed. The development team has more important things to do than bow and scrape to you.
However, the builds of the last couple of days have been eye-openers. If it's not exactly stable, it is running for extended periods of time on my machines and doing better at rendering bad HTML (compliant HTML was never a problem, of course, but what mainstream website is compliant?).
And the new widget stuff is looking snappy, if incomplete. And the whole thing renders about as quickly as IE5, even with all the debug code in place. Something good is going to come of this after all. Eventually.
Given that NS5 is going to hit the mainstream some 6 months after IE5, the two things that work in Mozilla's favor in the long term are
Unlike IE5.0, Mozilla/Netscape 5.0 will be what we really expect from a next version release. Haven't had time or skill to directly contribute to the project, but I'd built releases on a monthly basis, run through tests, submitted bug reports, and followed the development...
:)
Some very exciting things. Like the whole UI specified in an XML document, and dialog windows defined in HTML. Like having the architecture componentized (one of MS' bit bragging points) and able to be updated incrementally, rather then d/ling an entire new install for a 0.1 version increase. And amazingly complete standards support.
And on top of all that, it'll be nowhere near 100MB to download. I think if they get a beta out early enough this year, they might be able to take 5.0 share, just on the lack of d/l time alone.
I'm excited, being a web developer, that there might be hope in using these whiz bang things like DHTML in a general audience soon.
Well, do you have CVS access, or are you using anonymous access? You can checkout a copy of the latest tree, but obviously not update it unless you're one of the developers with tree access...
Perhaps questions regarding building should be researched at mozilla.org, not posted on slashdot where they get in the way of discussion about the product?
I'm using the Mozilla builds to hit slashdot daily; a number of image rendering bugs exist, but it's -already- nicer to look at than MSIE 4.5 (the Mac equivalent of five). The UI may 'suck' now, but take a gander at how easily it can be changed... the toolbars are CSS/XUL; a content provider can replace them with custom ones, should they desire - and so can the average hacker. :)
I wrote to the Mozilla Wishlist once
And if yer not a C++ guru, go to mozilla.org anyway and help out however you can. It's a great project, and I want it to be the best it can be.
Attached is the letter I sent to the wishlist.
-Fresh
+++++++
Dear Mozilla Team,
Over the past few months, I have kept a text file of ideas that I thought up for Mozilla 5. It would be my pleasure to share these ideas with you, and it excites me how for the first time, with mozilla.org, I can have a part in influencing the design of one of my favorite programs, Netscape Communicator.
I have 3 big ideas that are major feature requests, some other ideas that would be easy to impliment and would be very useful, and a small list of crazy ideas that may or may not interest you.
I'd like to have someone reply to me with their opinion on each idea if that is possible.
Again, I really hope that you guys consider these ideas for Mozilla 5.
And now, the rugged list of ideas for Netscape 5.0
you know how you have telnet://, gopher://, ftp:// ?
It would be very easy to have these:
finger://
whois://
dns:// (resolve hostname to ip and vice versa)
ping://
trace:// (traceroute)
etc. I'm telling you, it would be easy to do and I would LOVE it, it would make Netscape an all around net-utility belt and not add much bloat at all!
---------------------
Have a good download manager built in. Go!Zilla is a great tool.
Heck, why don't you buy out GoZilla and add it to netscape?
It searches "Ftp search sites" for other download locations and tests the speed of each server, and lets you download from the fastest one. It supports canceling of a download (with ability to resume later)
this would be a must have feature. I really, really would like to see this, but please do not add "ads" like in SmartDownload. check out http://www.gozilla.com to see what i mean.
trust me on this one guys..
-----------------
maximum syntax guessing / Smart browsing.
if a user types in www.something.co and forgets to type the "m", then try contacting something.com IF something.co doesn't resolve / connect.
I'm sure you guys can think of an innovative way to handle these kinds of URL errors:
wwww.something.com
www.somethingcom
wwwsomething.com
wwws.omething.com
www.something.comm
remember, you would only try syntax guessing if:
1) the address that they typed in didn't resolve or connect
2) the option for syntax guessing is enabled
3) the address typed is suitable for syntax guessing. for example, if a genius domain (www.something.com) didn't exist, then dont try fixing it.
=====--more ideas summed up in a line or 2--====
* multiple email accounts
* very advanced / expert email filters
* remembering site passwords
* full intellimouse support
* full screen viewing
* when you paste text from the clipboard that's multiline but contains a url, still read that url.
IE, notepad is a multiline Edit control, and its possible to actually get a Carriage return / line feed before or after the actual URL. and when you paste it into the Netscape URL dropdown box, which is one line, the url doesn't show. If you dont know what im talking about, then forget it..
* support those blocks that can make a link underline or whatever when you move the mouse over it (like ie)
* consider including an ActiveX wrapper.
-*-begin crazy ideas-*-
* I miss Infoseek's "QuickSeek", which provided a very easy way to search InfoSeek.
make it so you can type the following into the url box
?av tigers
and it would search altavista for "tigers"
?is beer
and it would search infoseek for beer.
--
* Align netscape.exe using WinAlign or something to make it load faster
* perhaps make it "work well" or even integrate with ICQ? (both of you are owned by aol now..)
* i dont think anybody needs the "set as wallpaper" popupmenu feature.
* consider VBscript support, if you're bored.
make a way for users of netscape to easily submit "wishlists" and programs ideas. let them know netscape cares.
---end ideas---
In closing, I hope you at the very least CONSIDER these ideas and their benefits to your users. Personally, I think that it would be a very good investment.
--
Andrew Niese / "Freshman"
Fresh Software
*Opinions expressed by this email do not necessarily reflect of those of Fresh Software. *
"when great minds are put together, they think in exponentially greater ways"
Samuel Sparling, 1998
Notice to SPAMMERS:
Pursuent to U.S. Code, title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter II, DF227, "Any
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----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
I am a coder, but I don't know C++.
I program in object pascal.
I know how the fundamentals of programming goes, but I don't know how C++ works. ok?
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
The GTK look is very stylish, it's going to be a bit of a shock to the typical M$ user (in a good way).
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
You can. Select advanced in the download applet and select "compatibility". Worked for me.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Probably not a whole lot. Before Netscape starting giving away their browser completely free, (free for non-commercial use, but otherwise cough up $50 or so) it accounted for something like 5% of their gross revenues, with 95% of their revenues coming from server software sales and other commercial enterprises.
Your first post got moderated to -1, second post is +4.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Mozilla is a great project, but *right now*, IE is kicking their butt on Win32.
And before I get my head flamed off, this is not an inconsequential problem -- If you want CSS & DHTML *today*, and page load time is critical, the best choice is IE4/5. (We're facing this at work - we chose the best CSS & DHTML feature set, fastest browser, and fastest, most stable java machine over the minor benefit of being cross-platform. Sure, we're drinking the Extend&Embrace Kool-Aid, but we need a real solution now, not in a year. And NO, we don't want to be bothered with maintaining Netscape's code base, even though we could.)
(And don't forget, at one time things like tables and frames were proprietary to Netscape. Eventally the feature sets of all browsers converge on a standard, but for the latest-and-greatest stuff, both NS and IE are functionally proprietary.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Trying apparently wasn't good enough. Netscape really screwed themselves in the server market.
First they announced that they were building a "Lotus Notes Killer", thus burning a big bridge with IBM. (They never finished the product.)
Then Apache pretty much kicked the pants of their commercial web server.
Then Microsoft vapor and Novell pretty much took the air out of their Directory Server
Then, they produced a substandard mail/calendaring client, losing any enterprise mail deals they might have gotten.
Then, IBM, Microsoft, and everyone else came out with an eCommerce server - Netscape's got lost in the crowd.
There's still plenty of good server technology over there
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
We've had "Freedom of Operating System Choice" for a long, long time. Most people don't chose to make use of the freedom (for various reasons, some of which don't have to do with mind control beams shooting out of Redmond, WA).
The cross-platform nature of Netscape is a "minor" benifit for intranet developers, because their users are 98% standardized on Windows. The other 2% are Macintoshes, a platform on which IE also outperforms Netscape 4.x, although the margin is narrower.
It's somewhat disturbing, to me, to build a web-based solution that locks you in to one browser, but in many cases the equivalent Netscape solution is just as proprietary (won't run on IE) and doesn't run as well as the IE solution. A Duel IE/Netscape code base costs more money.
In a year or two, Linux may be on more corporate desktops, and by then Mozilla will be out, and the situation can be reevaluated. (Of course IE5 for Linux might be out, for those "legacy" IE-based sites.) But right now, Linux and Mozilla are non-issues in an intranet situation.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
IE 5 seems to have been a flop, but I'm still not going to use netscape on Windows until they make a navigator-only 4.5+ version!! When are they going to realize that no one wants to use their damn crappy email and news clients.
There is a debian package of Mozilla if you have trouble getting it to run yourself. I think the package is a little out of date though... It runs, but seems to be much slower than the 4.5 series...
I'm running the 3/21 as well, and as you said - slashdot renders fine - and quick. But, you should try http://www.cnn.com.. Not so fine.
And, are the sub-components supposed to work in this build? For some reason, nothing outside of the actual browser works.. (e.g., mail client)
I've gotten the same problem from ftp.mozilla.org and every mirror I tried.
The Win32 version renders everything except the banner on top.
And its very very very very very very very very very very very much faster than Netscape
But when I saw the size of the file I downloaded the latest build of Mozilla
The full browser executable is called apprunner, just run that.
Q.
Yipee, a MSIE troll.
I'm sorry here pal, but in todays world of freedom of operating system choice, a platform locked browser (however good) isnt what we need.
Smarten up or shut up.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
I hear that, who cares about MSIE5.
I can wait for Mozila.
And i'll bet most people who love there freedom can to.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
The announcement said that AOL was starved for engineers, so the Netscape people that got laid off were probably in management/sales/other non-tech jobs.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
so either you are a very determined troll with too much free time, or there are some things you need to be clued in on: -Contributing to the wishlist is, of course, helpful in its own way, but this post reeks of a "Cmon, guys, write this program for me. Here's how I want it done. I would help, but I don't know how, and don't have the time. Well? What's taking you so long?" kind of attitude. -Mozilla is a little late in the development cycle to be talking about piling on new features. In fact, it is in a code freeze right now. The priority is performance and stability. A suggestion: Wait until 5.0 is out the door. Meanwhile, brush up on coding. When it comes out, download and enjoy it. Then, see what suggestions of yours have been implemented. Use it for a while until you have a better idea of what would be good additions for the next version. Send them to the wishlist. Then, get familiar with the codebase, find something you want to see implemented that you can do yourself, and start coding. Good luck!
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I got the 16/3 nightly build.
It's really buggy,
and cannot render slashdot (segfaults)
I wouldnt say it's ready for consumtion.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
but,
as I've seen from the mozilla.org news,
M3 was in 12/3 (isnt it???) and my build is the latest source (i pulled it yesterday from ftp).
maybe I'm wrong but M3 should work properly and function on all OSes to allow html writers to design NS5 pages,
and surf most sites, and it doesnt, yet.
When i tried slashdot, i got:
Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkbox.c: line 332 (gtk_box_pack_start): assertion `child->parent == NULL' failed.
URL to load in nsBrowserAppCore is slashdot.org
WARNING: cell content 836ADC0 has large width 45886
WARNING: cell content 839DB40 has large height 48775
WARNING: cell content 839DB40 has large height 48775
Aborted
I got a similar message for trying to use the preferences box too.
(gtk is not defective, i have 1.2.0, gimp works fine, and so does gnome,
but yeah, i assume win32 wont have this problem).
on the other hand it does render linuxtoday without a hitch.
btw,
yes the UI sucks, but i dont care about that,
I know that first lets get it working.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
How come I can checkout MozillaSourceUnix,
but I cant update MozillaSourceUnix?
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
update, not commit.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
Netscape Communicator 4.5 with Java support disabled is rock stable. However NS 4.5 often takes over 25MB of memory and does not release it without restart.
Version numbering seems to be doing the trick quite well. There seems to be widespread, though not explicitly stated agreement in the open source community that a project release will not be numbered "1.0" until it meets all the original goals, and is largely bug-free. "Alpha" and "Beta" are just short-hand terms for software that is steadily improving, but still a work in progress.
I think this is a good thing. It's much more honest, at least, than typical proprietary standard, which is to just call the first thing thrown out the door version 1.0, and try to debug from there.
Hm, everyone keeps saying how slow it is. But I have use an older build for a few days on nt 4.0 (at work only! I swear I wouldn't let that near my home computer!), and it was much faster than ie 4.0, and seemed to render everything pretty good. :)
Ok... So maybe since all of you are using linux, mozilla seems slow, but that is fast for nt
I thought they were using the same source for unix and win32?
Yes, I was curious! :-) Microsoft's US download site said FTP time would be 14.5 hours! I ended up downloading it from Japan (after ie5setup.exe crashed three times).
Final verdict? IE5 = IE4 + minor UI annoyances + silly net radio toolbar + "under the covers" support for developers, like XML, CSS stuff, etc. For users, there seems to be no real value. How long did IE5 take to develop? 12-18 months? From what I see, this feels more like an IE 4.5 upgrade with a 4-6 month product cycle.
cpeterso
Did you ever notice how everyone who doesn't code always comes up with suggestions, saying "it wouldn't be hard to add this" and "this certainly wouldn't add much bloat" ?
How does he know? I admit that I haven't touched NS's code but I know that most things which seem easy on the surface often end up being the most difficult to do..
What gets me is that installing IE5 means you can't have IE4 or IE3 on your system (Win32 that is). Being a web developer, this is REALLY annoying.
Is mozilla going to be feauture compatible with ie5? No because ie5 does not support THE standard and mozilla apperently will. So when when mozilla will be released it will be incompatible with ie(hurray MS you did it again).
In other words if you want all those cool xml/html 4.0 thingies to work in all browsers you will probably still have to develop two pages instead of one.
I just installed IE 5. It works for me. It's an improvement over netscape 4.5. Faster, just as stable, nicer GUI. In fact it hasn't crashed on me since I installed it yesterday morning.
Sure I'll give mozilla a fair chance when it arrives (this century?) but until that time I'll run IE. Why? Simply because at this moment it's superior over netscape.
Jilles
The Win32 build increased in size because they just added a boatload of stuff, namely mail/news and the editor.
You really can't compare the current mozilla with the latest "Gecko" release, as it is several months old. If you want to talk about problems with it I would suggest downloading the current build of mozilla and compiling it yourself. Then report any bugs you have, and give your comments
I read that it will not be ready for beta until late July and offical release at years end.
--
My ISP posted it on their website. So I tried to D/L it, but it just sent me a 500K executable called ie5setup.exe or something like that. Considering (a) I was in Linux and didn't see why I should be forced to be in Windows just to get IE5, and (b) considering MS's track record with privacy, I didn't want to be using some Microsoft executable just to download IE5; so I decided to just try get the plain installation files so that I could install offline.
... I had to press "Reload" about five times for each page I tried to view before I could view it, because I kept getting "network error"'s. It was incredibly slow and kept disconnecting. (All other websites I viewed were fine, so the problem wasn't on my side.)
So I headed for www.microsoft.com, in hopes of locating instructions for doing this, and a nearby mirror.
But I had so many problems
Then there was the font issue. I could scarcely read what was written on their pages (and in many parts I couldn't read it at all.) (I use Navigator 4 on Linux.) Considering that almost every other website on the planet IS capable of creating web pages readable with all web client software, I thought it seemed incredibly strange that a company like Microsoft, which is supposed to be really clued-up and professional, can't even design web pages based on the most simple of web-design principles.
So then, amidst dozens of "network error"'s, I tried in vain to click on their "feedback" page, so that I could inform them that were many issues with their website preventing me from obtaining IE5 (and I'm sure they wouldn't want that now.) I was going to suggest that (a) they migrate their website from NT to one of the Unix'es, to make it faster and more stable, and (b) that they go on some basic html design courses, so that they can design readable web pages and not look so unprofessional.
But the feedback thing kept taking me to something that seemed to be labelled a "registration wizard" or something. Presumably I was going to have to give them personal information before being allowed to send feedback.
But this turned out to not be a problem when I had so much trouble just trying to get the dang feedback page to download without giving errors, that I gave up, deciding to try out IE5 "another day", when they put it on the network at work or something.
... but they know about it.
For whatever reason, they have a corrupted tarball. I have heard no news as to when they will/can/may resolve the issue.
I tried to compile the thing myself, but unfortunately I cannot seem to get past some runtime environment they want.. even after downloading it from their site. Frustrating.
The next step, for me, will be to do a CVS co, which is exceptionally time-consuming (and I lack the time <sigh>).
Oh well... hopefully the linux version will be resolved soon. I would like to use something slimmer than standard Netscape.
Hmm, there is some M3 release on the ftp site, but the linux binary tgz file seems to be corrupted :(