Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla M6 released
ZuperDee writes "The Mozilla Organization has just
put out their 6th
Milestone Release of SeaMonkey. I highly recommend downloading it
from their ftp
site. Some of the new things in this release include more mail/news
functionality, the beginnings of the profile creation wizard and install
wizard, and of course, lots of bug fixes. " Seems sluggish right
now, but hopefully they'll be mirrors.
If you are having a problem with updating from a previous build to M6, and are getting error messages concerning it not finding files when you run apprunner, and it appears that its looking in the wrong directory. Delete windows\mozregistry.dat this stores info about file locations.. it will be recreated on the next load
I hve gone through the same problem. Rerunning
apprunner seems to work, though, as the Profile
Manager is not started again. It is this that seems to crash apprunner the first time it's started.
Hope this helps.
Woohoo....
posted this from within M6....
working quite well...
Just remember, kids, that there are
several reasons why this is slower than the final
product will be - most obviously,
it's presently spewing loads of debugging + status
information out.
Hey....the preferences nearly work now !
No more manually cutting+pasting the configuration
from ~/.netscape/preferences.js
to ~/.mozila/profile/prefs50.js
Actually, MSIE 4.5 Mac is rock-solid on the machines I've used. If one has random crashes, one usually has to trash the "Internet Preferences" file from the Preferences folder.
MSIE PPC is fast, stable, and has a very slick UI. Not too surprising, since some members of the development team are from Claris.
Other than being made by Microsoft, the only real problem it has is all that crap it spews all over the system folder. Wait, is that redundant?
Of course, there are some other browsers -- iCab is very good. But I'm really hoping (like everyone) that Mozilla comes in and saves the day for all platforms everywhere.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If you ever download it from "last-built" or if it has a name like "05-18-99-M6" It is not M6, it just means that the code checkins are from the M6 pool (correct me if wrong)
That's why there are 05-28-99-M7 builds, even though M7 is far from done.
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
Well, the website still doesn't say anything about it, but the ftp link just has a case-sensitive typo in it. Here's the real link.
i've run a manual update and m6 is now available
r eleases/m6/
e ases/m6/
at mirror.aarnet in australia. you can get
it from
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/mozilla/mozilla/
or
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/mozilla/mozilla/rel
Have to stick with using the menu to open new windows...
I guess I could hack a button for the toolbar, but it's not functionally different than using the menu bar.
On another not, anyone notice M6 expanding to suck up all the free CPU cycles? Anyone know why?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Is mozilla worth it for anyone out there?
I've never had good luck with it. It crashes a little less than netscape and is even more of a memory hog on my machine. It does seem a hell of a lot faster though.
Also, has netscape made any real progress in the last few quarters? beyond cosmetic changes in version 4.6 and the extra AOL crap that comes forcibly bundled with it I cannot see any. On my rh6.0 and debian 2.1 boxes netscape 4.08 works remarkably better then versions 4.51/4.6. I realize that some of the code is made up of netscape's, why didn't the mozilla team choose a better browser to model? ( KDE's browser rushes to mind, in my experience with it last year it was already faster/stable/more usable than netscape.
Does anyone know of a browser for the gnome desktop? Am i correct that mozilla makes use of gtk? Do any other browsers out there?
I'm sure i'm the only linux user who really hopes the rumor to be true, but I for one cannot wait for IE for linux (assuming that it is not the poor hack i've heard the other unix versions are) IE on the MACs at work is much better than netscape and uses considerably less resources.
[disclaimer: yes MS is not the most 'kind' organization, but IMHO Internet Explorer is a damn fine piece of software (on win32 and mac that is)]. i hope the linux version is usable.
-matt
This is really starting to look good. The Mozilla team have made a lot of progress since the last release. I bet that by this get to beta it will be ready to replace 4.XX (and IE for those of you who use that). It renders pages faster than the 4.XX releases on my box (the text loads a lot faster and that is usually the important part 8).
I was not able to crash it at all.
I think the gui design is starting to look very interesting, I always preferred the netscape gui to IE anyway, but I think maybe Mozilla is going to make this even more so. I run linux as a workstation at home and at work, so IE is
not an option for me anyway. Even if M$ was to port IE to linux and it performed any thing like it does under windows, It would probably be
slower than Mozilla anyway. I did some testing with IE 4.and win98 vs Netscape 4.XX and linux, the last combination was clearly faster on my
system, linux may be a big factor here but I bet the IE port to linux would be at least as bloated as the sun port. Anyway I really need IE for linux like I need cancer.
This is excellent work by the Mozilla team and I am really looking forward to the beta and the final release.
Linux, coming to a desktop near you!
1) Daniel Roberts is working on a Motif port 2) Christopher Blizzard is working on implementing the platform specific parts of gecko (gfx (rendering) and widget (widgetry)) using xlib only. That is without using an x toolkit. 3) Check out the MathML project at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/
---
M6
bob
the problem with win98/IE integration is that when IE crashes, my system is hosed (reboot and get another beer). When Netscape crashes, I restart it and get on with life. Using History makes this usually pretty easy. I personally cannot abide using a program that screws up my entire computer when it misbehaves.
Chris
PS. the last time I used IE 4.5 on a mac it had significant problems. It actually slowed down all other programs! There was stuff on this at www.macintouch.com such as this dated 2/1/99:
John Kordyback supplied another example of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5's penchant for reducing performance of other
applications (see also Peek-a-boo, a utility for displaying resource usage):
"I've noticed that Interapplication Communication is much slower when Internet Expolorer 4.5 is running on my Mac
(3400c/8.5.1/80 megs RAM). For example, if you run the following do-nothing AppleScript for Excel:
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
Activate
ClearContents Range "R1C1:R100C1"
ClearContents Range "R1C2"
set startTime to current date
repeat with i from 1 to 100
set rowString to i as string
set rngString to "R" & rowString & "C1"
set FormulaR1C1 of Range rngString to rowString
end repeat
set totalTime to ((current date) - startTime) as string
set FormulaR1C1 of Range "R1C2" to totalTime
end tell
It averages 4.8 seconds without IE 4.5 running and 13.9 seconds with. I've also noticed that OLE communication (which
really uses AppleEvents for communication) is similarly slower."
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Netscape also has (and has had) a problem with lots of dialog boxes popping up about bad widget sizes. You can't get rid of the messages, but you can send them to stderr instead where they do no harm. Check DejaNews for how to configure that.
With those two fixes applied, 4.5/4.6 seems as good or better than 4.08.
M6 Out!
Yeah,for a Beta, iCab is pretty good!
Fully Navigation Services and Net Services
compliant, totally Drag&Drop everywhere, renders pages
fast as IE, and the best part: image filters!
I wish these guys the best of luck.
It does crash on occasion, like most betas should,
but with MacsBug, it crashes very cleanly, and you
can relaunch right away with no problems.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
As much as I love to root for the underdog, in my experience, Netscape is too big, too slow, and too horrible to use. Explorer (I'm using 4.5 and Communicator 4.5. All of 4.x all gave me the same problems) runs much more quickly, has a MUCH better user interface (eg it lets me use my own email program when clicking on mailto: links, as opposed to Netscape's super-annoying habit of forcing me to use communicator's email regardless of my IC prefs) and has hosts of other nice features from which Netscape could take some serious hints. Another example that comes to mind is the "Go" button next to the URL box. Yes, I know it's a symptom of my supreme laziness, but if I cut&paste a URL, it's a pain to have to go and hit the enter key. As I said, I am that lazy. And like I said, it runs several orders of magnitude faster and more stably than any Netscape 4.x.
Maybe Netscape has given up on the older Macs and is designing programs that work fantastically on the g3s or something, I have no idea honestly. All I know is that on this little ol' 7300/180/32MB, IE kicks Navigator/Communicator's ass wayyy around the block. A few times.
I'd be interested to know what kind of Mac you're using as well as which versions of the progams.
-----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
Evan
rooooar
It is slower than N4.6 right now, definitely.
The jerkiness, I have found, seems to be tied to a bug(?) in which M6 'expands' to suck up all the free CPU cycles. Anyone know why it does that?
Likewise, any way in Windows to click on a link and get a new window? The menubar->file->close option doesn't seem to work, meaning I don't think one can close a window without killing all of them.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Okay, for starters... Mozilla is *not* Netscape 4. Not any more. Anything you thought you knew about Netscape, it does not apply to Mozilla.
If you think that Netscape's CSS support is atrociously bad, you are entirely correct. If you think that that means Mozilla's is too, you are completely wrong.
Yes, IE is much better CSS-support-wise than Netscape. That's not hard... Netscape's CSS support is literally worse than none at all. IE is far from perfect, though. There's some fairly useful stuff they didn't even try to implement, and they don't seem to have any plans to do so. And, of course, being Microsoft, there's a lot of useless flash added that isn't mentioned in the standard anywhere. Embrace-and-extend, always...
Mozilla does CSS. Period. Oh, there are a few minor things that aren't there yet (there doesn't seem to be any support for text direction, for instance) and a few bugs where things that are implemented don't work right (try setting up a transparent GIF with the background-image for IMGs set to a different GIF that's fixed to the background, and see what happens) but for the most part, it just works. And it blows IE away.
If you want proof, take a look at this page with Netscape (careful... it crashes 4.06, and possibly other versions), IE, and Mozilla, in turn. I wrote the page to the standard without regard for how real-world browsers rendered it, just to see how well they'd do.
Netscape 4.51 makes a mess of it, and manages to get the text color screwed up so that it's black on black in one place. IE (4 and 5 appear to act the same) gets all the basics... it ignores the first-line and first-letter stuff and some of the fixed background-image stuff - and possibly also the line-through on the DEL tag, I don't recall just now. Mozilla gets it all perfectly.
Oh, as a side note... has anyone gotten Mozilla to work on a libc5 Linux system? Or am I going to have to wait for my Slack 4.0 disk with the glibc2 runtime libs to arrive? I've been using the Solaris version with the display redirected (gotta love X) at work, but I don't have that option at home (would be nice if I had a spare Enterprise 5500 kicking around at home, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen)...
M6 this link works bob
It's page structure is similar:
Table divides the page into 'panes', left hand side control/menu, right side sectioned into comment blocks.
Renders fine.
Slashdot renders fine, and it has something akin, left side is comment blocks and right side is control/menu...
I suspect(browsed through the page source, but it was too cluttered to see anything at a glimpse) it's either an obscure HTML compatibility issue that you violate(or they violate), or you're using a tag incorrectly... What does an HTML verifier say about your site?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I've somehow gotten M6 to explode, grabbing all idle CPU cycles.
I've also gotten it to crash whenever I touch the preferences dialogue.
Have you seen anything else?
Your sig:
Wasurenaide - where did you go and what did you do as well(?)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Wanted to say a few good things, test M6 on Slashdot, give it a few rounds...
Some things cause it to crash immediately; opening preferences under edit, and hitting okay(even if you don't do *anything*), for example.
Haven't otherwise caused it to crash.
Was able to replace the throbber and some other minor graphics to suit my taste.
Colors suck, but otherwise okay.
Once in a while I lose focus from the window; don't know what is happening...
The executeable is very small, but has a 17mb footprint under NT task manager... Perhaps optimization will shrink this in the future?
Hasn't crashed yet, through normal use, and loading is very fast, if not quite smooth or polished. Anyone notice this?
Under N4.5 or 4.6, it may take a tad longer to load up a page, but the redraw isn't as jerky, and scrolling was definitely smoother. Perhaps an 'animation' issue, like page flipping or double buffering?
Still, much better than m3 and m4. It *seems* stable enough to be my main browser, except I can't right click and open new windows.
Now I have to navigate Slashdot threads one at a time.
Perhaps the capability will be added again in M7?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Please report this problem to bugzilla.mozilla.org and submit the url to them also.. will help in determining the problem. If you do not have a login for bugzilla simply type in a email address and not a password and hit the e-mail me a password button this is all that is required for registration
in ~/.mozilla/prefs50.js ensure you have lines like the following:
user_pref("network.proxy.http", "junkbuster");
user_pref("network.proxy.http_port", 5865);
I think you can get the same effect under Micros~1 by copying your netscape preferences file to the mozilla directory. Or something like that.
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
running
through a pointless `set up profiles' dialog
Nice to see someone agrees with me about this "profiles"
mechanism under Unix. (Even if it is an AC.)
IMHO there is benefit from taking ideas from Unix to other
platforms. e.g. global configuration files, ability to read
different "mailbox" formats (especially those which are
network exportable), etc. (Thus having interoperability
with other programs.)
Whereas copying Windows workarrounds (especially
those only suitable for stand alone machines) into Unix
is not the best way to do things. What next emulate the
Windows registry, as IE for Solaris does?
The ftp directory has a case-error, "/M6" instead of "/m6". I just downloaded the package (240 Kbytes/sec, I *love* my ADSL) and am about to try it out.
t ones/ says a bit about Milestone 6, and some of the upcoming ones.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/miles
I wish the Mozilla folks luck, and I'm looking forward to the day when it becomes usable enough for me to switch. Netscape 4 just has *way* too many bugs and security holes, and I really want to move to an Open Source product (where hopefully the problems will be easier to find and fix).
One the one hand, this creates an extra layer between the browser core and what you see on the screen, if you will -- on the other, it means you can create new skins for Moz with a text editor. :-) XUL and RDF: The Implementation of the Application Object Model is a good starting point if you want to learn more about it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
A Bunch of pplz are wondering about the Mac version of m6 - I got it from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/last-bui lt/ before m6 was even announced. And the creation date seems to be a while ago. I guess they just didn't post it to the m6 directory.
It's not that great actually, it still can't replace 4.6 (and I REALLY would like it replaced). And I had to rename my hard dive before using it b/c of some obscure bug that prevents it from running when your hard drive has a name that uses weird characters - and this bug has been around for a long time. It is making progress though, albeit very slowly.
-Rafi Remove the Spanish to email me.
You can copy your current bookmarks to your mozilla directory, like this:
cp ~/.netscape/bookmarks.html mozilla/package/res/rdf/bookmarks.html
That's discussed on the release notes.
Hm... JPEGs have worked fine for me, at least in the Solaris and Win32 versions (haven't gotten the Linux version working yet... libc5/6 problems, I think). I had the GIMP unable to use JPEGs for quite a while, and finally went and deleted every trace of libjpeg from my system, then installed the very latest version (available on ftp.gimp.org) and recompiled GIMP, and finally it's fixed. Maybe that would work for you?
I found this very annoying also. So I just launch a new browser to read the threads under the main and when I close off the thread window the main is exactly where I left off. Works quite well.
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
The mac M6 build will be available tuesday afternoon. They had a nasty blocker bug in mailnews if I recall.
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
Well, I suppose enabling asserts slows down the code a fair bit
It's not the asserts. There was a recent post about the slow reaction you get when moving the mouse. Follow the next few replies to that post. There are several good explanations of what is causing the slowdown. The short summary is that rollovers are causing the entire document to get redrawn when you move your mouse around. But redrawing the whole browser is complicated, so everything slows to a crawl.
I'm a Slackware user (Slack 3.6 + kernel 2.2.6) and experienced this with RealPlayer G2. The same fix worked for M6. Note you need glibc2.
/dir/where/it/is
/dir/where/it/is # adjust to shell
Grab libstdc++ from RedHat 5.1; package name was libstdc++-2.8.0-14.i386.rpm.
Extract the actual library from it (I've heard rpm2targz does this, I don't have it, I stripped the header off, gunzipped, and used cpio to extract it from the resulting file. Don't know if I could do it again).
Put libstdc++.so.2.8.0 somewhere handy - I just put it in the M6 package dir.
cd
ln -s libstdc++.so.2.8.0 libstdc++.so.2.8
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH
ldconfig -v | grep stdc # check if found right copy
Also make sure your path includes "."
./run_mozilla.sh
GOOD LUCK!
--Indigo
I'm using IE5 now and slashdot is the only reason I do so!
Let me explain.
When you click on a reply to a comment, read it and want to return to the index, netscape would return you to the beginning of the page, while IE would return you to where you left off. Normally this isn't all that bad, but when you have pages with 100+ comments on them and you're somewhere halfway down the page, it is very irritating that netscape returns you to the beginning of the page after reading a reply.
I hope they change this with Mozilla, and I'll w
quit using IE.
For the rest I don't really care. I must agree to a post earlier that I also though MS was the evil empire, and I also turned to the dark side when I started using IE. But, if it suits me better, then I'm going to use it.
Y. Strumpur
The Mac build has regressed a bit, but is due on Tuesday
Well, I suppose enabling asserts slows down the code a fair bit, but on my machine, the highlight can't even keep up with the mouse on the menus. Web pages take 3x as long to load as on Netscape, and it takes forever to load all of the images on an image-heavy page. If this the "Raptor" I was looking forward to,I must say I'm underwhelmed.
/.ers in europe should try this link (in Norway - 300 users max).