Mozilla M12 Released

Cyrrin writes "M12 source is up on the Mozilla ftp site. Binary builds should be appearing RSN." I've been playing with the pre12 builds all week and let me just say wow. It's getting faster and more stable. It's really exciting to see it all come together and climb out of the vapor. The preferences dialog is really slow, but progressive page rendering is fast. Good job to everyone involved, and welcome to the home stretch.

Comments

Slices, dices, chops, cores!

[Jikes]

I guarantee on my small insignificant life that you will be delighted with the new functionality, stability, and efficiency in M12. It still eats RAM like a mother, isn't luxuriant-feeling like IE, and falls over every once in a while, but it's well behaved, significantly more responsive-feeling, and handles far more page/frame/ecmascript/java issues... As an added bonus, the Win32 version can find and use all your old plugins, like Flash!

For the uninitiated, let's run down a few facts.

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Mozilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is certified Open Source.

Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape whatsoever, except for a majority of the authors, the backwards-plugin functionality, and the fact that Mozilla will be incorporated into Netscape 5.

Mozilla is quite modular.

Mozilla is completely cross platform. If the OS exists, Mozilla will probably have no problems running on it.

Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.

Mozilla will do to-the-standard CSS1, HTML4.0, DOM Level 1, XML, a great majority of CSS2 (although this is not promised), and the latest bastard variant of Javascript.

Mozilla will not have crypo. That's for binary-only vendors, or your own project.

The entire UI (ENTIRE) will be themeable. So if you don't care for the UI, don't bitch, because theme support is coming soon, and you will be able to write your own.

Mozilla is going to be large because that is how it is. Don't bitch about bloat, because none of the weekend-project HTML widgets your favorite toolkit sports are able to do everything Mozilla does yet.

Mozilla is not going to force any particular Java Virtual Machine, HTML editor, or mailer on you. Although the comes-with editor and mailer are extremely nice this time around.

Mozilla will be a compile-it-yourself type thing if you so desire.

Report any and all bugs to bugzilla.mozilla.com. Please follow the bug submission guidelines. A shitty bug report is worse than none at all, and wastes developer time.

If you wish, you can do hourly downloads of binaries, weekly downloads of tarballs, or up-to-the-minute CVS of mozilla.

You will be delighted with mozilla. If not, use something else.