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
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)...
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
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).
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
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