Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla M3 Release Available Now
Makali writes
"Just took a quick peek at the Sunsite FTP mirror of
ftp.mozilla.org and
Sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk
is up and contains tarballs for several platforms. Fetch! "
Downloading my copy now, now considering how badly screwed
up my machine is right now, the odds of it actually running
is about 1 in 12 *grin*.
Well something must be seriously wrong on my NT box then:
http://slashdot.org
Viewer.exe takes 6928k mem + 4980 vmem
Apprunner.exe takes 8828k mem + 7092 vmem
netscape.exe takes about 12M + 15M
Better, but is it good enough??? I guess no matter what you do, building tree structures and displaying pages of gfx is always going to use up gobs of memory....
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Sorry, this seems to be a step back. Sure, the browsing window has some (ugly, nonfunctioning) UI elements wrapped around it, but the core of the browser -- the renderer -- seems to have taken a significant step back. The nightly build from mid-february I was running layed out most pages I looked at fairly well, 90% of the time they were correct as far as I can see. Now half the sites that worked before no longer lay out properly.
:) Unfortunately it blows core when I try to open the console window, so I can't see exactly whats not working...
Some things I've noticed that are broken now:
Tables inside of tables where the width of the inside table is the same as the width of the cell its in -- no longer fit. The inside table for whatever reason starts to wrap cells. Very strange...
Frames. (I can't honestly remember if the other one had frame support at all, but I get a lot of frame content showing up in the wrong frame...)
Although it *says* its got editor support built into it, the editor doesn't work at all. That's a step back. Opening editor pages just opens up new browser windows (which cause it to blow core when you close them...)
Javascript -- working just enough not to work.
The widgets... I thought this was GTK? What version of GTK is it using? Themes don't work -- and the widgets themselves don't look like any of the GTK ones I've got installed. Where's it getting them from? Either way, I get toolbars showing up in the scrollbars, although once a page is loaded they usually go away.
Resizing the window doesn't work...
Forms don't seem to work, whereas they did before.
I couldn't get any background images to display. Some JPG's were not displaying either, and the ones that don't display seem to badly mess up table rendering. (IE, a 200 pixel wide image aligned left in a table cell with text around it will push the table 200 pixels wider...)
Of course, most of the people getting all worked up about the release think "M3" is some official release or something, its just a development milestone. No promise or guarantee it'd be better than what was there before, its just a point to freeze the code and take stock on whats done and what needs to be done.
I'm just suprised that the core of it seems to have backtracked so far...
Umm... hello? Of course it has a long way to go yet. This isn't anything more than a pre-pre-pre-alpha release with all the debug flags turned on, nothing in the way of optimization turned on.
Have you read what this is? It's a release for the developers, so they have something usable from day to day with a max failure rate of once per hour. You do the math.
Gecko is the first good web browser the world has ever known.
HTML was designed from the ground up with several goals in mind, that seem to have been completely forgoten by most people over the years. The whole basis was to separate structure from style enabling a document to be viewed on any system. XML finall takes this concept to it's conclusion in a manageable fashion. HTML was about using structural tags such as H1 rather than hard coded font tags, because a heading will look much different on an 1600x1200 monitor than it will a cell phone.
So with the growth of the web you get a billion traditional media people designing web pages, that have no concept what the word _dynamic_ means, all writing pages that _must_ be viewed at 800x600, because they only know how to create pages for fixed paper mediums, and because they never bothered to actually learn what HTML was about. How many web designers even know what SGML is let along understand that HTML is an application of it? Admitedly, this only includes about 99.99% of the web designers out there. Traditionally the browser makers have been just as bad. It seems Netscape has finally got a clue. Netscape was the pioneer in adding proprietary style based tags to HTML, if they get Gecko right, which they are, I may actually forgive them, even though thanks in part to them, the whole web is a mess.
So now, x years later, everyone finally learns HTML and runs across all these problems in browser compatibility and site management, and they start looking for a solution, can you say "What's a style sheet?". They discover that style sheets were supposed to be part of the web since day one, and that in fact they are much cooler than all the proprietary hacks they have been clamoring for from the browser makers. The sad thing being, even those web designers that knew about the One True Way from the beginning have not been able to do anything about it due to lack of browser support.
Enter Gecko, the first web browser to actually give a web designers the ability to design a page the way it was meant to be. Gecko is not about small. Gecko is not about fast. Gecko is about HTML, CSS, XML, and DOM. Gecko is actually including a real parser (Expat) for the first time. We should have been able to use SGML features for years now, if browser makers had actually done it right and included SGML parsers. Gecko is including real DOM support, so now we can write JavaScript that may actually work in more than one place, and not only that, but that does a hell of a lot more for creating dynamic content. Gecko includes XML support, the most important document format since ASCII, finally giving the world a standard for creating documents with actual structure, and a way for bringing those to the masses. Gecko includes full CSS1 and a good chunk of CSS2, so my documents can actually look clean for a change, and be 1/5 the size at the same time.
People who make comments how all the web pages don't load any faster, and how IE has better bookmarks or something like that, these people have obviously never tried any serious HTML work, browser programming, or managing a _large_ site. Gecko is not for the users, they will look at it and ask what it gives them over version 4. Gecko is for the designers, who will bow down at it's feet screaming FINALLY, and will now be able to die (mostly) happy. And for that, Gecko is the best piece of software to hit the web, _ever_.