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Mozilla M10 Released
pangloss writes "On the heels of the "Whither Netscape 5.0?" story comes M10. Proxies are working. Check out the release notes or the brief blurb at MozillaZine, which cites the new beta release date (12/15/99). Cheers to the Mozilla Team!"
Cool, thanks that fixed my prob.
I guess it was in the release notes somewhere.
Thanks
You twit. Why don't you go find out the origin of the quote before making yourself out to be what you signed your comment as.
Since the Mozilla team is publishing a schedule the situation is entirely different. Furthermore, there are no vaporware announcements.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I get the same when I build the CVS (or M9, haven't tried 10 yet) on a RH6.0 system.
But when I run the mozilla-viewer.sh script, viewer loads without any Gtk warnings, and displays the themes correctly. Only mozilla-apprunner.sh gives me the warning (and fails to use my Gtk theme correctly).
Mozilla's great, I'm using M10 to post this. But there's a problem with using a browser that works right. Zillions of pages on the web are just plain broken when it comes to standards. Case in point: (opens new window). Completely trashed.
The input box got FUBARed somehow (because Mozilla's not done yet?). Anyway, that link was supposed to be to ZDNet.
Next release will be alpha. It'll be
feature complete. Once they hit that point
it may make sense to use it. Once in alpha
condition, it'll probably have fewer bugs than
current navigator.
Oops, I meant architecturally complete.
It'd be nice to have a /. user-preference option which says "Insert text between reply and signature:" and accepts an arbitrary HTML snippet. Then individual users could set this according to their own tastes.
Meanwhile, in your own .sig, you can put a
tag in there too and it looks just like Usenet. For example:
<BR>--<BR>"People tell me one thing one day and out the other."
See my .sig below for how it turns out.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Ack. Preview mode bit me. It turned my instances of <BR> into <BR> in my edit buffer and I didn't catch them all. Ack, ack, ack!
I meant to say "you can put a <BR> tag in there too".
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I've got a 300MHz Ultra 2 on my desk at work, and a Pentium II 300MHz at home. The Ultra is alot faster at batch floating point jobs, but the Pentium II running Linux feels alot snappier than the Ultra 2 running Solaris 2.5.1. In general, the Ultra 2 is faster on big batch jobs though. X Windows performance sucks though, since my workstation seems to have a minimally accelerated frame-buffer.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Hrm, I didn't t hink JavaScript had gotten that far along...like JScript...I guess I'm wrong :).
Oh well.
I guess I should have thought about it more...you can write COM components in Perl now too.
Forgive me.
If you do web design that much, it's a good investment to actually learn HTML.
HTML was origionally designed to be written in a text editor, and it's really easy to learn.
One major problem with using an editor (other than producing dirty code) is that it tends to make you want to get the layout "exactly right", which frequently means that it comes out exactly that way in one browser, and completely screwed up in other browsers. This hit me really bad once when I was trying to get text to line up (to the pixel) with the background image... it worked great in IE but was 5-6 pixels off in Netscape...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Didn't find an old one, just one dated 10/9/99. Deleted that, and am getting further along. Sorry if I missed it in the Release Notes.
Adam
TSS Productions
This is he original press release of Mosiac 0.9 in 1994, just 5 short years ago. Mosiac featured , among other things, "Native support for the JPEG image format"(which was a big deal at the time!)
One of the more interesting quotes in a Wired article is one of the First Review of Mosiac 0.9 (a fantastic,sometimes funny, look back in time) features some quotes from then VP of technology Marc Anreesen. "If the company does well, I do pretty well," says Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."
In just 5 years, Netscape has helped redefine the IT landscape, and has forced a lot of people to look again at the multi-platform delevopment model. As they rewrite the code base for the 21st centrury, Lets not be so hard on the team that has given so much.
I'd just like to point out that if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product (like, say....Windows 2000?) the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them rather than celebrate them.
Mozilla and Win2k both are considered like new products (Mozilla have been rebuild quite from the ground up and MS say that people should consider win2k like a new OS rather than an extension of NT) and that when you makes new products this take time.
But you forgot to point out that Mozilla didn't drop a lot of feature they planned to do like win2k (or feature that will be buggy). Mozilla is a step in the right direction, Win2k may be a step in the right direction but given MS track on new products (say win 1.0/3.0/95) we can think they won't manage to do thing well from the first time (i.e. wait for SP 5/6 or for win2002).
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product, the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them
Right - but in their betas, there's no real progress - W2000 beta 3 is not more reliable than beta 2 (it does fix some bugs - and introduces others to take their place). With the Mozilla builds, we at least see some progress.
The war is over
Not quite - it may be over in the Windoze world (for now - that doesn't mean it won't change!), but not in the rest of the world...
And with Linux getting more important, products that are cross-platform are getting more important, and nobody sane would call Internet Exploiter cross-platform.
People WILL consider alternatives like Netscape or Opera if it means they can use it on every machine they're using, and not just the one running Windoze.
release browser components
Take a look at (for example) the KDE libraries: There's a HTML display widget, there are http handling classes, there's the beginning of Java support (in 2.0 CVS), and there's more.
And you even get a "sample" browser - konqueror.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Less than 50 posts and I can already read how Mozilla is buggy, how it's late and how IE is better. Maybe some of you haven't been following the Mozilla development? I'd like to clarify a few things for you.
Mozilla is still very much alpha. It means that there's a lot of bugs. M10 is definitely not for daily use. These milestones are released so that we can try them, report bugs and take part in the development process. If you don't want to do it, then you're better off with an old Netscape or MSIE.
Those of us who do know programming understand really well why Mozilla is special. That's because programmers usually know to pay attention to basics. In Mozilla I see a really small browser which supports standards really well and has a really fast renderer. It's way more important at this point than having a beautiful screen or flawless scrolling.
I'd like to talk more about programming big projects. I've been working on a big project for a year now and customers are amazed as I can't show anything yet. That's because I've been concentrating on building tools - a compact database, fast and versatile search engine and lot's of controls. When these are working well, it's really fast to build the application and it will be fast, reliable and small. This is exactly what these guys at Netscape have been doing too.
Many say that the browser war is over. It's not as the internet is a moving target. We'll get new complicated technologies and browsers have to support them well. As the renderer in Mozilla is done well, it's easy to make Mozilla support these technologies. It wouldn't have been possible with Netscape4 or the code that the Mozilla team dumped when they decided to start from scratch. And as MSIE is a huge program, it probably also hides a lot of bad code which makes developing it worse.
As I see it: Mozilla will probably be ready in the first quarter. It will still be small and fast and I'll definitely love to use it.
I'm using 1.2.5-1
I've now tried M7,8,9 and now 10, and each version just gets better and better. Its not release quality yet, but, the differences between each milestone is a leap forward.
I hope AOL doesn't stop mozilla, because it would be an absolute shame. This has got the potential to be the best browser around, certinely better than the 90megs+ of the full internet explorer download.
I'll look forward to using it regularly - I couldn't use it yet, too many bugs in it - remember, its not even a beta release yet. But, they will be fixed.
Finally, I was reading a previous post, where it said it was 6meg. I'd forgotten about that: the point is 6megs for everything that netscape currently does.. and more. It will be the most compatible browser around for html, javascript and xml standards...
Compare Mozilla size to IE5... ah! makes you laugh - microsoft, big and bloated.
Mozzilla is shaping up very nicely.
If your one of the ones moaning about how long its taken, its only 6meg, doesn't take long to download, bare in mind its not even beta release, and think about its potential.
Several of the testpages crashed it, and some had rendering errors.
I can understand a crash here and there, but it crashes very often, also I had not expected rendering errors, due to the much hyped new rendering engine.
As a last note, it's also realy slow. Much slower then Netscape 4.61 is on the same machine. Especially scrolling a large page. I know that most of this might be blamed on all the debugging code, but still.
why doesn't slashdot put a "---" between the post and the signature, like in the newsgroups?
I added that to my sig for clarity
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
That should all be fixed by 1.0
Not. I use HTML for writing technical documents, it being quite a few cuts above MS .doc format in terms of transportability, compactness, other considerations. I haven't got time to type "
" at the end of every paragraph. Etc.
Netscape composer is a solution made in heaven, as far as I'm concerned... sure, it has it flaws but it works well enough to get the job done and the HTML it produces works pretty well, and looks pretty reasonable in source form too.
To whoever clued me in about Amaya - thanks, it looks interesting.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I don't want to sound cynical, but the way I see it, NS crashes a lot (not saying it's their fault), and also NS3 didn't have CSS support. These are very important reasons to upgrade to NS4. NS4 is pretty buggy, so everyone keeps updating to the latest bit of NS4, hoping it's a bit better (that's what I used to do).
Now, IE4 works fine, and has lots of patches from MS whenever a new bug is found. It is in my experience quite stable. IE5 adds a bit to that, but since IE4 is already fine, many people may not have a reason to upgrade to IE5. Anyway, it is relatively painless to patch/update (except for the large SP every now and then).
I still use NS, despite crashes, because I like the interface better. However, when I use IE for sites that crash NS (sometimes on purpose), I don't mind whether I am using 4 or 5, they both work fine.
NS updates are huge. The NS4.0x series went up to 4.08, the 4.5 series is at 4.7. That's 13MB for each update for the smallest version. Personally, I can hardly tell any difference in each NS update, and I don't find it any less crashy. I'm not even going to get 4.7 at 15MB+, since comments posted here earlier seem to indicate it's just about the same as before, except heavier.
I'm not going to update NS until mozilla is finished and well tested for a while. I really am sick of 13MB updates with no "what's fixed" info.
The recent article "Whither Netscape 5.0?" was obviously an attention getter, designed by AOL to generate buzz prior to this milestone release, as well as elicit reaction from the slashdot go-with the-underdog crowd.
:)
Or maybe the JIQ (journalist in question) just got dick-slapped in the face after all...that's gotta sting. Go Mozilla!!!
-- Liquor up front, poker in the rear.
>In other words, give me the toolbox to build my
>own browser, instead of a complete browser.
But that is what you have got! There are already several projects out there using only parts of the Mozilla toolbox, in particular the layout engine is popular.
However, we still need Mozilla as a flagship and showcase for the wonderful components of the toolbox.
anyway, I couldnt use it since M9 - I dont have the libstdc++ it requires (the one provided with egcs-1.2), I have gcc-2.95.1 instead. So Im compiling it myself. But it hangs on startup (yes, I have glibc-2.1) if I run mozilla-apprunner or doesnt find its resource if I run mozilla-viewer, therefore lacking its stylesheet, making pages unreadable. So I starterd cvsing the code every night, but it doesnt work yet.
MPL is mostly similar to the LGPL, i.e. you can link it with closed source projects, but changes to the MPL files themselves must be open.
NPL gives some extra rights to Netscape. They had to use this because of contracts with third parties, who were allowed to use future versions of Netscape Navigator source in total closed source products. But even if this hadn't been the case, I'd find it a fair reward for the work and money they have put into Mozilla.
Netscape is quite cooperative, for example they have released their Javascript implementation under a dual MPL/GPL license, presumably because some GPL'ed project needed it.
There are plenty of GPL'ed browser projects, but I think they are mostly a waste of time. Mozilla is both open source and free software by the RMS/BP/ESR definitions of the terms.
I can agree that the mozilla project is making progress but you have to ask yourself, how much longer? The milestone map only goes to february 2000 for milestone 13, but for some reason I want to say a previous milestone map was more optomistic than that, anyone know?
toufic
This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer.
It's accually pretty good. Mozilla Composer is to Netscape Composer right now what Mozilla Navigator is to Netscape Navigator (as in, good, but not prime time yet.
Look, I like the Mozilla guys as much as anyone, but as far as the release of an integrated browser goes, "everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost."[1]. There are already free (as in free beer) browsers available for every platform. In terms of importance to the open source community, a project to release small, documented, interchangable browser components freely (as in free speech) would be of much greater value.
In other words, give me the toolbox to build my own browser, instead of a complete browser.
[1] Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"
Couldn't really tell you. All I know for sure is that this thing is damn fast! :-)
A friend of mine--who keeps up on this kind of thing more than I do--replied when I asked :-).
him that that it would be about as fast as a Pentium 600. (Do they even make such a
thing [yet]?) Then again: he's an incurable "Sun-head", so I took it with a grain of
salt
We're running all Sun Sparcs with Solaris at work (except for the Web server--which is a
Sparc box running RH Linux), and I wanted compatibility there. And I wanted the
reliability of Sun hardware. I certainly didn't want EIDE disk I/O. I wanted a
real disk I/O sub-system. So the Ultra5 and Ultra10 were out of the question. (I
would almost sooner a PC with SCSI than a Sparc box with EIDE!)
Were I to guess at the comparative performance: I'd guess that this machine would excel
over a Pentium at floating point and anything that's I/O intensive. The CPUs in PCs are
still "glued-in" to the rest of the system pretty-much the same way they've been since
the IBM-PC XT. Whereas the RISC boxen have made strides in hardware performance. For
example: the first generation of UltraSparcs were 3-15 times as fast as the preceding
SuperSparc boxes. In spite of the fact that the processor speeds were only doubled. (We
saw a general performance boost of a bit over 5x, on average, in our applications.
YMMV.) But the UltraSparc architecture improvements amounted to a lot more than just
boosting the CPU speed and adding more localized cache.
This is why serious users still buy RISC boxes :-). (Ducking)
Nothing against PCs running Linux and the like. I run Linux myself on my P166 laptop.
Works like a charm. There are things I like about Linux better than Solaris. And that
Web server I put up on RH 6 on a Sparc box runs like a charm. Never gives me any
trouble. Nice and quick.
I just happen to be fond of Sun, Sun hardware, and Solaris. I feel that while Linux and the
BSDs make PC hardware quite usable: I'm still not fond of it. To each his or her own, I
suppose.
Is anyone else getting this error? Just did a fresh download of the Win 32 binary, double-clicked on apprunner and:
APPRUNNER caused an invalid page fault in
module XPCOM.DLL at 015f:60ad1510.
Damn!
real UltraSparc will be faster. (How much faster, I don't know.)
As for the graphics performance. Heh. Compare apples and apples. I've run both Open
Look under Solaris and Gnome under RH 6 Sparc Linux on the exact same hardware. Believe
me: you'd far, far rather Open Look under Solaris. (And that was on 2.4. 2.5.1 and
later are much improved--performance wise.)
You probably have something like a GX graphics adaptor on the Sun box and an accelerated
graphics adaptor on the Pentium box. Put a high-performance graphics adaptor on the Sun
box and see what happens.
I've got a PGX32 graphics accelerator on this AXi box and it's real snappy :-). With
either Open Look or CDE. Can't wait to try the Gimp on this box!
For a supposedly Alpha release it is working really well. I am typing this on it. There are a couple of bugs,but I am using it instead of Navigator as my default browser. Once the bugs are worked out it is going to be great.
Renders really quickly.
The capabilities of new generation browsers are going to have to be radically different from the old 4.x series. New browsers will have to accurately implement XML, XSLT, CSS, DOM; and they're only the foundations for technology like MML, SVG etc -- we're not talking a few JPEGs and some virgin HTML anymore, Toto.
Currently Netscape still has a 30% share with what is basically a two year old browser, which is impressive brand loyalty. But the new generation products are going to be a whole new ball game... you ain't seen nothing yet!
Could anyone more proficient in legalese comment on MPL, and the differences between it and L/GPL?
And whatever the answer, could someone just please start a GPL browser project? Or is that being worked on already?
It was much better than Netscape 4.x I'm pleasantly surprised. For Windows it still cannot compare to IE, but in Linux if it is this smooth I'll surely replace Netscape (that piece of crap). I've used the Windows version for about an hour now and no crash! Netscape (under Linux grant you) crashes a few times an hour on my potato debian machine with Navigator 4.7 from Netscape's site. I can't wait to get home and try it.
I especially liked the language translation, but I'm a little disappointed that it includes all the usual netscape bloat. When will netscape/mozilla realize that the browser is just that, a browser and stop integrating things with it... but rather have addons or user defined choices, like Microsoft has done with IE.
Does anyone know what (if any) javascript works with M10? The pages I visited whihc I know include javascript did not work correctly.
You're "not critizing the Mozilla team"? In not so many words you said that they'd lost the war -- that it was all over. If someone told me that the project I poured my heart out into was fighting a lost war I'd take it as something a lot worse that critisism!! Judging Mozilla on it's PR and good intentions? Damn kid -- "What matters is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog." - Coach Bear Bryant IT'S ALL ABOUT THEIR INTENTIONS!! It's all about the effort and dedication they put in! Maybe the moment of excitement has passed for you, but not for me -- and many others I know. Go ahead and call me a zealot, because we're the ones that fight and don't quit to get projects like these to #1 -- I'd gladly be called a zealot!
>Netscape (under Linux grant you) crashes a few :)
>times an hour on my potato debian machine with
>Navigator 4.7 from Netscape's site.
No netscape problems here under potato.. this machine is always a few days back on updates (after something got screwed up between lilo and glibc) until the test machine runs the updates first...
Only thing I do is disable java, it never seemed to work right under Linux in 4.07+, so I never keep it enabled anymore, and I don't seem to miss anything.
>When will netscape/mozilla realize that the
>browser is just that, a browser and stop
>integrating things with it... but rather have
>addons or user defined choices
Agreed. I really must try mutt, to lazy to move from pine atm...
David, who leaves netscape running 5+ hours a day (longer if I forget to logout and such before I go to sleep) and hasn't seen a netscape crash in a long time..
This sig left intentionally blank.
Now, if you look at your server logs, you'll notice something pretty interesting - users of MIE form a "normal" bell curve - they're distributed from 2.0 to 5.0, with the biggest bump at 4.x. But all the netscape users cluster around the latest distrubition, and virtually all of them are using 4.x. OK, to be fair, "you're" server logs means across the board (I imagine slashdot's server logs break every curve).
So what? So, when Netscape 5.0 is done, and it works great, people will upgrade. 30 million people. This is a major milestone (to my mind) for the open source community - linux is in the purview of a very (dare I say select) few, but Netscape is centered squarely in midstream.
Now, you can argue that Mozilla isn't true open source, but you'd be needling semantics, and missing the big picture: A major company which makes a mainstream product is using public and volunteer help to develop a product that a major percentage of the internet, and indeed the US population are currently using, to say nothing of the rest of the planet....
Linus may have been the prime mover, but Netscape is taking the concept (and the result) to the streets.
I think that's worth crowing about.
neil
Thanks -- but now COOKIE.DLL breaks it -- any ideas for that?
But this may be a rather dangerous thing, as the libc is one of the most central parts of the system. It would be easier to upgrade to Suse 6.2 which already uses the glibc 6.1
don't load the components you don't want (this is the first browser in which you will *ever* have the opportunity to do that)
From what I remeber, both IE and NS (for Windows at least) give you some ability to control what you install...NS seems a bit less willing to do so, though (whatever happened to Standalone Navigator?).
--------------------------
Where did I say you were at fault for the glibc bug? What I said was that NECKO broke NSPR threads, and that rewriting netlib was a poor idea since it worked and wasn't a source of bugs. If rewriting netlib is such a great move and will save so much developer time, then why did you wait so long to do it?
Perhaps you could figure out how to fix glibc2.0.
Its written in C so you wont have to learn C
to do this
Oh thanks. I'll download it tonight and try it. It's just so annoying to have to resize mozilla everytime you use it. :)
--
Scott Miga
Um, the MPL has been around for over a year. Where have you been?
I vote for the latter.
See this bug report. No solution yet.
hahaha.... Tummxy X looks like a flaming idiot now. I love it when stupid people get smacked down!
I've got a pretty much stock SuSE 6.2 setup and I can't get M10 to run. At all. I'm following the directions to the letter, and after some chugging I get ".//run-mozilla.sh: line 29: 2269 Segmentation fault $prog ${1+"$@"}"
M9 worked, I tried a couple nightlies but they didn't. Chalked that up to "it's a nightly, anything's possible." I must be missing something obvious, but what is it?
I got this too, and it wouldn't run, but after removing ~/.mozilla like the release notes say to do, it started running. I still get those warnings, but it works.
Just FYI, they were going straight to M11, but they decided somewhere that they needed more testing before beta, so M10 is for regression testing.
Now that all of the features have been implemented I expect to see some rapid progress on bug fixes. Just over the last month there have been some major quality enhancement. Try pulling a build from a month back and compare it to a M10 build.
Because if you have and you actually found a bell curve for IE versions and clumping for Netscape, that's a bad thing. It means that IE has been a better product for longer and that people keep upgrading Netscape.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I hack because I want to. Not because you want me to. I'm willing to bet that they feel the same way.
There is an M8 release for Bezilla, but there is not a single build on the site after that. No M9 build, no M10 build, no nightly builds. Is Bezilla still chugging along? I am really looking forward to it...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Does Mozilla have a working cache? It always seems to re-load a page when I hit back. And now that I am looking at things, I see the bug that a previous poster was talking about -- I can't see what I'm typing after the text hits the edge of the box. The cursor is stuck at the 2nd char in from the left hand side of the text input box.
I installed IE 5 on my Windows partition when it came out ("early adopter", and all that ;) and promptly uninstalled it after about 3 days. Yes, it displays pages a little faster than IE 4 or Netscape, but it takes up gigantic amounts of RAM and has a ridiculous number of bugs. I like IE 4.01 (with the appropriate security patches) a lot better.
;) come with IE 4.5 standard - I don't know if the original poster differentiated Mac IE 4 from Win, but that's another datapoint.
Also, IE 4 comes stock on Win98, which is what most consumer (read new Internet user) PCs have. These people aren't very prone to upgrading a browser, particularly when it involves a 30 meg download over a liable-to-blow-at-any-time WinModem.
And of course all those iMacs (same sorta users, better modem
see picture
Has anyone compiled Mozilla on OpenBSD 2.5 (sparc)? I would like to know how it went before I upgrade a bunch of packages to be able to give it a try.
Yes, the NPL is indeed another one of those sneaky bastard "open source" licenses.. However, it was finalized sometime in 1998, and I don't believe AOL bought Netscape until 1999, IIRC (I don't know, do I? =P). I'm not too excited about the MPL either, however, although it is better than the NPL.. Being somewhat of a die-hard GPL'er, I'm annoyed with the MPL's incompatibility with it..
You may want to read On the Netscape Public License by Richard Stallman. It covers the differences between the NPL, MPL, and GPL. The GNU Project Web site is also an excellent source of information with regards to free software in general, the GNU philosophy, and the history of the movement. ;) Ok, so, enough shameless plugs..
There are a couple well-known ones.. And a few others that I can't think of right now.. The first, and most obvious, would be Lynx, but I rather doubt that is what you are looking for.. On the other hand, there is Emacs/W3, which you may find to be of a little more interest.
~ Kish
Mozilla requires glibc2. It will run on Slackware 4.0, if you selected the glibc2 compatibility library at install time (if you didn't, you should be able to add it easily enough with pkgtool). You'll probably need to compile Mozilla yourself... I haven't been able to get any of the binary tarballs to run on Slack. Something about a missing symbol... After a recompile, viewer works fine. As of M9, I'm still having trouble with apprunner dying silently when it tries to open its first window, though. Maybe M10 fixes that. We'll see...
They always release a new Milestone the day after I download the previous one. Of course, in this case, I'll admit it was kind of dumb of me to download M9 yesterday when the Milestone page clearly stated the target date for M10 was 10/08/99. That whole discussion just got me itching to download something, so I did.
I'm about two hours away from being able to try M10, but I have some comments on the Mac version of M9: the browser functionality is coming along nicely -- for example, it loads Slashdot perfectly, though it still can't log in. The front-end is starting to look relatively polished, but my concern is that it doesn't look like a Mac application. Actually, with previous builds, I assumed that it was simply because the GUI-polishing was being left for last. Now, though, it seems to be starting to look the way it's meant to look, if that makes any sense. I'm seeing the interface that they're designing, and it doesn't seem Mac-like.
As I understand it, they use some sort of cross-platform front-end framework to make all versions use a single codebase. This doesn't seem to use native widgets, so things look funny. This could be okay, if the widgets were similar enough, and if they worked right (even so, the non-native look-and-feel would be a turn-off for many Mac-users), but in fact, many of the text fields, radio buttons, etc., don't draw quite right. Text fields are too tall and narrow for their text, radio buttons are too small, and a few of their pixels get chopped off, the sidebar in the Preferences window sort of jumps when I click something, etc.
This sort of thing is a problem with cross-platform GUIs, I guess, because corresponding things have different relative sizes, and some amount of platform-specific attention is needed to make everything fit. I don't know how this compares to other platforms; maybe the Mac version is just not getting enough attention.
By the way, what's with the second date for M12 on the Milestone Page? "M12 - 12/7/99 - 15/99/99"? Is somebody having Y2K trouble?
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I just downloaded the M10 linux bin and I'm very impressed with the progress. Startup times compared to M9 are much improved. Context menus now work (ie, you can right click on a link and choose "Open link in new window"). But one of the best things i noticed is that the Gtk widgets are MUCH more responsive in this release. In the past it took like 5 seconds for a button on a toolbar to highlite and allow me to click it. In M10 it works almost right away (on a lowly k5-100 here). :) As I'm typing this message right now in M10 I can't see what I'm writing... it also has backspace problems. One thing that does bother me is the whole profile thing. Why does the linux version even NEED the profile stuff? This is something that should be on Windows/Mac only IMO. On the Linux version, shouldn't mozilla just use your home directory for the preferences file? This way mozilla would just use the existing userbase on your linux box for storing profiles.
Of course, it's still not perfect. I noticed that the text input stuff seems worse than before
Anyways, great job Mozilla people, keep it up.
The Mozilla browser is just one application created from glueing together the various xpcom components. Take a look through the code. Mozilla does provide for browser components through xpcom (cross platform com.) There is also UI building language based on XML called XUL. After the different components used to create mozilla are ready for production, I can image a really slick rapid app development environment for Linux.
Just tried out M10/Linux. IMHO this is the first release where the HTML rendering is usable for most sites (well hey, first time it has done a good job of Slashdot for example). And the rendering IS very slick.
But it's still butt-ugly, and user unfriendly. Would it kill their schedule to say implement a decent button bar, and "Open link in new window" functionality? If it's there I can't see it. That would be a bare minimum for me to think about using it.
And what of bookmarks, preferences, mail/news reader, java etc etc? Don't they have anything to show in these areas? I don't want to criticise, but if this is all they've got it looks a _long_ way from user release.
has anyone gotten mozilla to compile under libc5(perferably slackware 4)?
Bugzilla now has a "vote for the bugs you want fixed" feature. Personally I voted for "option to disallow window.open" and "gtk refreshes everything when resizing".
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
That did it. Dumbass me, I tried both your suggestions at the same time, so I don't really know which did it.
Wow, BIG progress since M9. I'm more impressed with Mozilla every day.
Good (essential news) to hear it's looking up at least in terms of speed then.
Erm... as far as profiles go, I think it depends on how many people you want to impersonate - like here, I have my work 'hat' and the normal PigleT persona to maintain, and one of the things I've never seen either netscrape nor mozilla do properly, is auto-detect which identity to use to reply to mail / news.
I also tend to want to flip between them on the fly - both that and the auto-change-on-response thing are things MS OE5 can do(!).
So some form of profiles, possibly a two-tier form where one is the system user, the other is "within" that, would be a good thing.
~Tim
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Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
I haven't downloaded the M10 release yet but I have one thing to share with you guys. The nightly builds from the same mozilla ftp site are doing pretty good. If you have the time to give one a try I recommend yesterday's Build. It is much more stable than M9 and I bet more than M10 since it includes the work progressed beyond the M10 tree. I have been downloading nightly builds right after the M9 release and I am very impressed by the performance of Mozilla. It is going to be one heck of a browser when it is done. Try out a nightly build and see for your self. PS I am refering to Linux nightly builds !
This is the first milestone release where where the gif's on idsoftware's site don't look broken and out of position. I don't know what the problem was before - maybe the site was off-standard and happened to work in netscape/i.e., or maybe it was just Mozilla bugs... the point it, it works now. Obviously, development is going fine. I found one site that didn't load text correctly, but I'm not panicing. This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer. Hmmm, I'm looking into my crystal ball, and I can see a whole lot of programmers, myself included, jumping into the Mozilla project in the near future. Gotta scratch those itches, you know, and who would pass up the chance to lay a claim to having a part, however small, in building the new lizard?
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I think persistence in window sizing has been hooked up, but maybe it came in after M10 was branched. I'm not entirely sure. If not, its coming soon. There are some attributes on the XUL tag that suggest support of it.
I don't code for the approval of others. Not sure why you suggested that -- but hey it's no big deal.
Installed M10 on my Mac but it kept kicking out 'Cannot Create Profile' errors. Hmmm... and I made sure to move my Communicator Profiles folder.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
There is an argument about possible "bloat" -- you got a problem, don't load the components you don't want (this is the first browser in which you will *ever* have the opportunity to do that) so "can it" (maybe there's a market for making "Mozillas distros" with various configurations... hmm....).
Every once in a while there comes along something so cool in a product that that one feature alone justifies everything else. There are arguably a number of them, but I just came across this one for the first time and almost pissed myself. Under "View". there's a "Translate" menu. Go to your favorite website and select a translation. This is not some "cut-and-paste babelfish" hack -- this thing (using a 3rd party service) re-renders the entire page (properly even), with the text translated. It's like you hit the official German/Spanish/Japanese site of wherever you were located, but you didn't...
HOT
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
IE 3/4 also come pre-installed on OSR2 (and later) versions of Win95 and Win98. People who use this probably take for granted that the browser comes pre-installed and have no experience downloading new versions. Netscape users on te other hand often have to manually install Netscape, thus they know how/where to go for downloads.
Sadly though, most of the people I work with upgrade Netscape Immediately in the hope it will work better, consume less resources, crash less, make a more pleasurable browsing experience. Too bad this has not been the case for a very long time.
I myself rush to download the newest Netscape for Linux only to see it just as unstable, but now with a new SHOP button!
When I downloaded IE5 just yesterday for someone at work it had an 18 megabyte max and 13 meg minimum install. Are you sure it was really 30 megs?
I've found if you install IE5 w/o the desktop addons that IE4 had it is great (part of IE's SP1), but my Win98 machine is a snail thanks to IE's explorer enhancements.
It's painful to admit, but IE is a much better browser than Netscape.
Look at this. I don't know if it still works as advertised, but there is an HTML Xt widget hidden in there, not very big and ready for embedding...
What amount of Mozillas current code originates from Netscape? (Netscape 4.0 or whatever it was..)
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M9 works ok, but with M10 I'm getting
/usr/lib/libgdk_imlib.so.1: undefined symbol: gdk_display
Gtk-WARNING **:
I'm going to try to recompile from source;
as the Imlib I have (1.9.5) is the latest version.
1) For crying out loud, how many times will people whine about the time it's taking Mozilla to get a Gold out!! THE ORIGINAL CODE WAS CRAP -- ok?? Understand? They had to rewrite a lot -- which part of that don't you understand?? 2) The war is over? Ha! As long as people are downloading, testing and improving Mozilla it ain't over!! 3) Browser components? The reason why it's so difficult for developers to help out is that a browser is NOT easily split up into modules. The guys working on Mozilla are doing a fantastic job and I'm not gonna let people whine and put them down like this -- and get away with it -- keep on going guys!! You're doing an excellent job!
Because everyboy had to rush to the ftp
site 1st. All hoping that the lack of a
direct link wold delay some of us.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Read and follow the release notes
Care to be a bit more discriptive?
Just downloaded M10, and boy is it looking good. Besides the usual crashes, espically with the bottom toolbar, is there anyway to save the window size when you close mozilla? It always opens as a small window and I'm a 800x600 man. But besides these small things, I love the new moving logo in the corner, and the pages fly when loading now!
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Scott Miga
Apple OS comes with both (At least, my 8.5 CD did), just with IE set to the default. :P
You can ditch it any time, and UNlike Windez, there's NO system integration, thank Jed!
Just make sure you delete that damn Arial font and the Extensions that come with it.
My beef with MS over IE for the Mac: if it's so damn Mac-centric (like their press likes to tell us) why do the preferences sit in the System Folder, and not in the Preferencse Folder like they're supposed to?
P
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I've been downloading the nightly builds almost nightly,.... I love the way mozilla is going.
Within the last 2 weeks, the startup time was cut in like half. It's getting extremely fast and extremely
fast.. I can almost use this as my dialy browser now.
I still have faith in this project.
ChiefArcher
...Mozilla gains market share as Linux does. This is enough of a presence to restrain incompatible web standards I hope
Don't forget that AOL will also be pushing Mozilla heavily, in its netscape 5 incarnation. Also, many teens will get Mozilla just to get Jabber - never discount that factor, it worked for ICQ. Then there is the fact that Microsoft won't be able to engage in much of it's usual strongarming with OEM's and ISP's, with the Justice department on it's tail...
I'm sure there are other factors also, like Mozilla just plain being a better, more stable product, with development that will never stop. The bottom line is that things are looking pretty good for Mozilla at this time.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
m10.png - 66k PNG (1024x768)
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Even on a p3-450 w/ 128 megs of ram (running slackware 6.1 beta). I'm having a hell of a time just typing this text in here, the text cursor wants to be around 50 chracters behind the current text, even if it movez at all. (It isn't right now, and I've lost where the text is being typed, it's offscreen somewhere, so there's bound to be some typos in this). Is this thing built on GTK ? I still can't believe it, it seriously needs some work. (Oh yea, it segfaulted until I realized that I had the M9 registry in my ~/.nmozilla directory.) Oh well, maybe one day.
At least the lavender look impresses any girls that happen to stop in my dorm room.
That looks better than what it does in X. I tried M5 in Win92, and it was much more stable than any linux version. Weird..
I'm still seriously hoping that Netscape can pull off a great browser. Like other people have said, the rendering engine is VERY slick, but redraws are crummy, at best, and while it hasn't segfaulted yet (since I got it to run), I'm still waiting...
Anyone know where I can find an original Mosaic .9b binary?
If you actually read those pages you linked to, you'd notice that the browser was called "Netscape" in those days; no relation to Mosaic.
No. If you look at the xpCOM documentation it explicitly states that xpCOM unlike COM wasn't designed for cross language support. And that xpCOM objects need to be written in C++. It's not my fault that they decidede to modify javascript under mozilla and add some objects which 'in a way' supports writing xpCOM objects. In order to write real xpCOM objects from scratch you need to use C++.
Look at the script file - does that look like 100% pure javascript.
Mozilla still doesn't work on systems that don't use glibc2.1 libraries. That means Debian 2.1, Slackware, Redhat 5.2, and many other popular distributions can't try out Mozilla milestones. It has been this way for two months. There is a link to the initial discovery of this bug on M10's release-notes page. Follow that link and READ that thread carefully, all twenty messages, and you'll discover just why the Mozilla project is screwed up.
I think this problem with glibc illustrates perfectly why Mozilla development is so slow. Because despite being behind schedule, they decided to rewrite the netlib library. That was the only C code really left in Mozilla besides NSPR, and it worked, but they decided to rewrite it anyway in C++. When they landed the new networking library, called NECKO, they also broke NSPR threads. NSPR threads are what allow the current generation of netscape browsers to appear to do things simulataneously, like hitting STOP when a page loads. Normally, having a bug in glibc would mean that non-glibc2.1 systems could still try out Mozilla milestones and submit bugs by building a version using NSPR threads. But because of NECKO, they can't.
So a project already hurting for outside developers loses more, the already distant release date is pushed further back, and Mozilla developers create even more work for themselves.
I wan't to help Mozilla succeed, I wan't to even write code (I'd like to see a dumb-tty version of mozilla). Shit, I'm even learning a language I dislike to do so. But they're making it awful tough to remain cheery and optimistic.
Hmm If you're looking for a html composer, try Amaya. I even hear someones trying to combine gecko and Amaya. Should be interesting.
Hmm... Try deleting mozregistry.dat in your c:\windows directory. Also, if you still have problems, try finding an deleting old profiles in the user50 directory that Mozilla had installed, and see if that helps.
You can't write xpCOM components in javascript. javascript can use and call upon xpCOM components tho.
300MHz Sun Sparc Ultra IIi AXi-based system with 128 MB and 9.1 GB
UWSCSI:-).), maybe I'll give building it a go.
I've got GCC 2.95.1. What else will I need? GTK at least, I assume?
(Since I'm going to re-build the Gimp from scratch anyway, I'll have
that.)
Any caveats?
Hi, there are two GPL-browsers I know of (apart from the KDE- and GNOME versions): www.mnemonic.org www.gzilla.com (soon to be renamed to armadillo) -- Felix Natter
I would hesitate to reccomend Mozilla to most folks if they need a daily-use browser, but that's exactly what I'm going to try doing. Now that the lizard supports proxies and keyboard navigation I can live with the bugs - most of the problems I see are cosmetic - like when my cursor just disappeared and I couldn't see what I typed :) I'm REALLY proud that these guys have made it this far and put up with ungrateful criticism. Microsoft has NOT taken over the internet yet (we don't use mshttp: yet right?) so this project needs no rushing. When Moz is ready and everyone's drooling over stability, size, speed, and "kewl skins" or whatever else they want then Moz has served it's purpose. This is a browser where I can trim out fat like bookmark management, and some other bloke can REPLACE the built-in bookmark utility with his own.. The important thing is this is TECHNOLOGY done *right*. While MSIE may scroll more smoothly, I have a feeling once IE hits a certain sized user base you will NOT have the luxury of specifying your own "start page". Maybe you won't be able to type a URL either... just navigate through [paid for] hits in MSN.COM searchpage... ;P
100% better than M9 on my system. It's fast, stable and even the javascript is working. I may switch to it full-time.
Hey, it seems they even found an innovative new way to make money out of it: licensing the name for other businesses. Look at the evidence in 800x600 or 1024x768 pixels.
By rewriting it to be a multi-threaded library, we discovered shortcomings in glibc 2.0. After talking with the glibc developers, they themselves said that making it work would 2.0 would be way too much trouble to try to support 2.0. On the other hand, they have made glibc 2.1.2 more robust thanks to holes that Mozilla exposed.
Mozilla is perhaps the most complex desktop application ever to run on Linux. It exercises almost every aspect of Linux and reveals its strengths AND shortcomings. Don't blame the mozilla team because linux and related projects aren't absolutely perfect...if anything the mozilla project has driven linux-oriented projects like glibc to be better - to meet and exceed existing non-free solutions.
BTW: The bug is #8849
Go read http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable/
The documentation should be fixed if it says what you claim...sure enough, I found the document you're referring to, and it's just outdated. I'll try to fix it this weekend.
Components written in JavaScript are true XPCOM components. It was actually shaver (who you replied to) who wrote the support for JavaScript components... I think he knows what he's talking about
I'm using it right now on my at-work NT system and it's getting on my nerves slightly because the MS intellimouse doesn't scroll and the forms handling is messed up. Right now I can't see what I'm typing because the text box filled in the first two lines or so and stopped displaying anything at all after that. I'm definitely going to preview this post. I know all of these can be attributed to the alpha quality of the code, and I forgive Netscape for taking this long, but I wish AOL would throw some more resources at this browser. It's a very small download and very fast.
Wrong. Have a look at this message:
4 0mozilla.org
snews://secnews.netscape.com/37E80094.A48B1828%