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
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
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/
---
I've tried using IE 4.0 and 5.0 under Solaris. I can't remember exactly, but I think IE 4.0 did a font scan each time it booted up. I do remember that it took five minutes to start up. Not very pleasent.
I think it was supposed to do the scan only when something changed. Since I used it so infrequently, I wouldn't be surpised if whatever it looked for changed by the time I used it again.
IE 5.0: I don't think I could get past the first install screen. It probably required patches that the system didn't have. I don't have root access, so I didn't spend much time bothering with it.
I'm not too optimistic about IE for linux. I am much more optimistic about Mozilla.
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
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)...
I would like to point out that while IE 4 may be pretty, when it crashes (yes, it does crash), it takes out other system resources with it (either explorer.exe or win.exe, can't remember at the moment). And MS says that browser integration is in the best interests of the user! :P
-- Tom
--==Hail Eris!!==--
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
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?
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.
if you have "browse in new process" checked in internet options, then the browser won't take out the shell
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
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?
The Mozilla project was initiated by Netscape, and most of its developers work there. Not so much of the code derives from the Navigator codebase anymore; a good deal has been rewritten from scratch (which is why it's been in development so long).
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?
Yes, Mozilla uses gtk. Another gtk browser (still alpha) to check out is Gzilla.
[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.
Ha! It's not too bad on Win32, but MSIE on the Mac is a joke. It's plagued by random crashes and inexplicable slowdowns. Navigator is far from bulletproof, but at least it works passably well on most platforms.
AC
The Mac build has regressed a bit, but is due on Tuesday
hmm.. Good points, but lets examine one of the under emphasized opportunities about M6.
:)
You check the fact that your offered the option to grab M6 w/ the FullCircle bug-logging program? I'm no programmer, so I can't give much to open source projects except my good wishes, until now.
If there's one thing I AM able to do, it's lock up Netscape like a finger trap, almost 2 or more times every day. (I surf a lot
So if I use a pre alpha (not EVEN ready for prime time) browser, I know I can fry it on a regular basis. Generating lots of bug reports.. which lead to a better OS browser, which helps people.
So if altruism is your thing, hey you could do worse than to loan a few extra cpu cycles to a nice little project... even if your not as hard on software as me.
~grell
grell_@hotmail.com
Wasurenaide - doko e itte
mo soko ni iru yo.
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
/.ers in europe should try this link (in Norway - 300 users max).