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Mozilla M8 Released
bergie writes "The Mozilla milestone release 8 is now available! Go check the coverage on MozillaZine. Go fetch it! " For
those interested, MozillaZine has a pseudo-changelog available. It seems blizzard's Xlib port
is coming along quite nicely. Anyone at OLS next week will
be able to attend Mike Shaver's "Inside the Lizzard" talk. Congrats to the Mozilla folk!
10. Renders pages very quickly.
9. Free!
8. New features such
*segmentation fault*
This message is being posted from Mozilla M8.
It's long been my contention that the biggest problem with Linux these days is that there are no decent graphical web browsers for it. I'm looking to Mozilla to make that change.
The current standings:
This version seems to be okay for stability on Win98. It hasn't crashed yet, although the "back" feature is still a bit quirky so I had to quit once and restart Mozilla to make it work again. Please note that this is not a huge issue for me yet, as I know this is still alpha software, but it's good to know where it stands so far.
Speaking of the "back" button, it is still broken: like Netscape, it takes one to the TOP of the previous page, rather than to the link on the previous page that was used to proceed to another page. This, IMO, makes it unusable for browsing: if I click on a link at http://www.freshmeat.net/ and then return later to resume reading Freshmeat, I expect it to take me where I left off, not dump me at the top of the page to spend a minute finding my place again.
IE seems to have figured out this little feature. What's wrong with the Netscape guys? Is this in the blueprints for Mozilla, and simply unimplemented at this point?
(Note: I didn't throw that remark about IE in as flamebait; it has its own passle of problems that make it next to unusable too... although I suspect many of the multitasking problems are results of the underlying OS, but then, since IE doesn't run on Linux, and is made by the same people who make the OS, the blame still goes to the same people.)
As for style sheets, I must say I am impressed by Mozilla's renderer, much improved over Netscape. This has been a sticky point with me, considering that serious web designers (many of whom I work with) only laugh at Netscape and barely (and grudgingly) bother to throw in a little extra code on their CSS-enhanced pages to make it readable in Netscape. And they're right: the CSS design is a good one, and Netscape's non-conformance to the W3C's standard is a serious detriment to the growth of the 'web and structured document development and acceptance. That is, people are afraid to develop content using W3C standards since 50% of the popular browser market (Netscape) doesn't support them. The fact that Mozilla renders HTML "correctly" according to the W3C is a saving grace.
Other than these issues, little else in M8 is particularly notable or worth its bloat. When it becomes a little more stable and fixes the "back" button, I'll try my hand at compiling it without the myriad of consumer eye-candy schlock that is handled better by external programs (like mail, news, and bookmark management). If I discover anything else worth noting, I'll try to remember to drop a note here for anyone interested.
Does this mean Mozilla will not require GTK+?
From the Mozilla Xlib Project page:
"The fact of the matter is that there will always be more than one toolkit for Unix. Right now the big players include Motif, GTK+ and QT. Each of these toolkits unfortunately has its own look and feel for many things including menus and scrollbars.. None of these toolkits is going away anytime soon and it is inevitable that there will be ports of mozilla to each of these toolkits.
One of the goals of the Xlib toolkit project is to create a common base, written in Xlib, that will include all of the functionality that is common across the Unix toolkits. The majority of the code will include simple drawing and image handling in the gfx module. It will also include some of the widget side of the toolkit. Some candidates include the nsWindow class which is the simple drawing surface used by the html layout and the XP widgets.
One of the project goals should be to make it very easy to plug in your toolkit of choice. This means that you will be able to use Mozilla in your Motif, GTK+ or QT application. Until the world chooses the One True Toolkit or dies in the process, Mozilla should be able to run on all the toolkits without hardship to people writing applications.
It should also be possible to have a stand alone Mozilla browser that is based entirely in Xlib. While this compromises one of the primary goals of the many Desktop Projects for Unix and Unix-like systems, it allows for a lightweight browser implementation that could be used on a Kiosk system, or on very old hardware. The fact is that Mozilla contains most of the functionality of the modern Unix widget toolkits and it is a very small stretch to turn it into a complete toolkit system."
So the answer to your question is yes, altough I'm not sure if the Xlib port is that far along yet.
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