Mozilla M4 is Out

Greg Johnson writes "Mozilla Milestone 4 is out. I highly recomend you go snag it at the Mozilla Ftp site. " mozilla.org does not yet have a description of what exactly is new-and-improved from M3, but what the heck.

Comments

You'd think it was a pre-beta or something

[jabbo]

Rather than polished software like Windows 98...

Most important change to me:

[Matts]

They've finally enabled expat as their XML parser, so it now dislays well formedness errors. Yippee. Finally a good XML development platform for Linux and Win32.

I'm now just hoping someone will develop an XSL system for Mozilla. Seems doubtful though...

Release notes here

[baby fishface]

Release notes

Read the release notes, please

[robinjo]

I'd like to point out that M4 is still very much a developer-only release. It has loads of bugs and everybody knows it, except you guys who are complaining that it's slow and buggy and lacks features. Oh, and one also said how Mozilla isn't improving.

I just wonder if you have bothered to RTFRN or to run Mozilla from the daily builds to see the progress? I have been trying them for a while already and there is progress.

A month ago almost no web pages were rendered correclty. Banners were here and there, text running in wrong places etc. But after each and every new version it started rendering better. That's progress.

Also I'd like to point out that apprunner is really pre-code. People really haven't been working on it for long. Most work has been done to create the rendering engine and not for the bells and whistles in the user interface. Also remember that they are creating cross-platform code so it required a lot of planning and programming to even get this far.

I usually use the viewer-program. It's the one that has been used to develop the rendering engine. No bookmarks or anything but it has been pretty stable and fast for me. To get an idea of Mozilla's speed, go visit sites with a lot of tables and resize the window. On my PII it's about ten times faster than Communicatore 4.51.

So if you don't mind it crashing 10 times a day, rendering pages wrong and not giving you everything a finished product does, go and try it. But if you don't understand what M4 is, do find out before whining.

Pros and cons

[MindStalker]

The pop-up ads are done through basic html and javascript. If you removed the javascript command to create a new window with the no file menu/scroll bar/explorer stuff that would effectivly be deviating from the DOM pertaining to the creation on windows. While I abhor pop-ups like everyone does, when we start picking and choicing which standards to incorperate and which ones to leave out, we become no better than the guys creating proprietary standards in IE and Netscape. Now one thing that can be left out safly I'm sure if that onexit command or whatever its called that allows a site to dictate a final command when you leave a site. This command was created at the request of advertisers, and is generally only used to keep people from leaving a site unless you purposfully crash your browser. Though luckly very few sites, but the PrOn 31337 sites sink to this level.

Javascript makes me sick.

[BeanThere]

I hate Javascript. I've had more of it than I can take.

I agree with the concept - something like it should exist. But in practice it is HORRIBLY overused. All too often I see javascript used again and again to perform functions that are exactly the same as what plain html can do - except it makes it harder to actually get the information from the site that you want. Javascript is obfuscation of information, and that's why I hate it. Gamasutra, for example, often makes you click on stupid Javascript popup windows just to get a picture in an article. What for? So that you HAVE TO view the site interactively, presumably so that they can shover adverts down your throat. I can't spider the sites with wget. In my country phone billing is done according to how long your phone call is - so for every second I'm online I'm getting charged - and it pisses me off that some lame site is forcing me to sit for hours online, clicking link after link after link just to get one silly little article. Just give me the damn *information* that I want, without all the damn frills and crap getting in the way. Ideally I want articles etc to be made available as zip or tarball; this is what I try do on my webpage.

Javascript should be used extremely sparingly, and only when necessary. The way companies use Javascript to artificially keep you clicking away at their sites while they shove ads down your throat goes against all my principles. The way amateur web designers obfuscate their web pages by throwing in as much "keWl stuff" like Javascript also annoys me.

Java by itself is alright, as long it is used sparingly and in a useful way, for example to demonstrate algorithms. Java doesn't screw over 'wget' either.

For an arbitrary example of a site made totally useless to me by all the ^$%#^$ frills, have a look at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/9589/ , an electronics website. (Quote: "ActiveX - please use Internet Explorer".) And those damn geocities popup ads. Bah humbug.

Three or four years ago the web was pretty damn cool, and useful too. Now you can't go two hops without having ads pushed at you, and it's become increasingly difficult to wade through all the useless commercial blurbs when searching for real nuggets of info. The current move towards search engines that return links of companies that pay the search engine is going to kill the Web. It will become almost impossible to find information without being steered towards someone selling a related product.