Re:Ignoring the real problems at Mozilla...
on
Mozilla's Joy Of Naming
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· Score: 2, Informative
"The Mozilla team has decided to produce a mail client and a stripped-down browser missing most of the really cool features of Mozilla."
What Mozilla SeaMonkey browser (Navigator) features are missing in Mozilla Firebird? There are certainy a lot of preference settings no longer exposed in UI and there are a few differently exposed features but I'm confused by your characterization of Mozilla Firebird as "stripped-down" and missing *most* of the really cool features of Mozilla (Navigator/SeaMoney browser).
Some cool features from the application suite's browser: 1. tabbed browser 2. pop-up blocking 3. bookmark custom keywords 4. great privacy controls 5. fine-grained js controls for saying no to sites that want to take over the status bar or raise and lower/resize windows, etc. 6. support for themes 7. image blocking 8. view selection source 9. search on selection 10. type ahead find aka find as you type 11. great layout engine 12. XUL extensions for all kinds of great additional features. 13. sherlock-like search plugin support (see mycroft.mozdev.org for 300 or so search plugins).
Those are a most of the "cool" features I use in Mozilla Navigator *browser* and every single one of them is available in Mozilla Firebird (and some are even better/more usable in Mozilla Firebird).
In addition, Mozilla Firebird has quite a few really cool features that the Mozilla Navigator browser doesn't. Customizable toolbars, a XUL extension manager, inline form auto-completion, "clear all" privacy mechanism, more themes, etc.
If you're talking about things like an email client, the dom inspector, the js debugger, chatzilla, an html composer, etc. those aren't going anywhere. They aren't browser features though. They are applications. And they won't be "missing". We'll continue to support them as Mozilla applications or extensions to Mozilla applications.
The only "cool" features, that are actually browser features (and not other applications or preference settings), that I can think of are html sidebars, the site navigation (formerly "link") toolbar and an author style sheet switching mechanism. All three of those are planned to be included in Mozilla Firebird.
What are all of these other "really cool features of Mozilla" that were stripped out of Mozilla Firebird?
Honestly, as much as I admire the work these folks do, I have to wonder how one medium-to-high-profile open-source project can decide to use the name of another.
Mozilla's Firebird browser is not going to be confused with a relational database. Without customer confusion, there isn't a trademark problem.
It's strange that there are ports to OSes so obscure that I've never heard of them, but not the OS that the majority of people in my building use.
Maybe it's strange, but that's the reality. There are people that care enough about AIX or BeOS and have the skill to keep them building on those platforms. There aren't people that care enoughand have the skill to keep Mozilla building on Mac classic.
Is there any way which someone not tech-savvy enough to help with a port to OS9 could help to persuade the Mozilla people to give us the extra features and stability that we are missing out on?
Sure. Convince someone that is tech-savvy enough to do the hard work necessary to maintain an OS 9 build (estimated by some as a couple of full days a week). We made several attempts to find such a person before retiring the build and none stepped up. It's sad, but if no one wants to work on it then it doesn't get worked on.
"I love how Netscape, since they own the rights to the Mozilla code, uses it directly for their browser"
Netscape doesn't "own the rights to the Mozilla code". They are the copyright holder to some of it. But so are scores of people not employed by Netscape. Mozilla is available under the terms of the MPL, the GPL or the LGPL and that means that anyone can use and modify the code and the kind of ownership you're suggesting just doesn't exist or doesn't matter.
Mozilla has had various bits of ActiveX supporting code available to those that want it for some time. There have been plugin wrappers that make ActiveX controls sort of work in Mozilla and Netscape. There has been a Gecko wraper that alows Mozilla's rendering engine to be embedded as an ActiveX control like MSHTML. Various Mozilla contributors have been interested in and working on this stuff for a long time. Some of this support was even available in the Communicator days. None of this is built in the default Mozilla releases and so Mozilla releases do not support ActiveX.
1.4 nightly builds have support for profile chrome. That means that extension developers can make extensions that install to your profile and won't get erased when you upgrade your Mozilla binary.
I'm sure the Mozilla gods have blessed us with a config option to disable this "feature."
Actually, you have a preference to _enable_ the feature. It's off by default. Also, once enabled (by going to Edit->Preferences...->Appearance and checking the box titled "Enable automatic image resizing") a simple click on the image will restore it to its original size.
This really is a friendly implementation. I much prefer it to the feature implemented by the other guys.
That's not at all accurate. Phoenix developers have checked in changes to thousands of lines of code in hundreds of Phoenix files just this month and Phoenix also picks up almost all of the backend Mozilla changes that happen every day. Just because it's not moving at the pace it did when it was all brand new doesn't mean it's not moving.
The ac post reply to this that got moderated down was from the lead developer for Camino. --Asa
Just because we turn down patches we don't agree with doesn't mean we are shills to Netscape/AOL. We're allowed to control the direction any way we want.
While it's not completely free of the "cat-and-mouse game", Mozilla's Junk Mail Controls are cutting my spam down by about 90% and it only requires a single mouse click for each of the few spam messages that gets through to keep the filter trained at that level.
--Asa
Re:It Harasses People with Visually Disabilities
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Perhaps google could offer a new service that only indexes sites that are bobby & w3 safe? that would help us all enforce good behavior on the WWW.
Actually, I was thinking of something like this recently. There are a few really common bits of recycled code on the web. If google would look at the JS on the sites they index and determine if it is one of the common scripts which intends to spawn a popup onload (and even worse if that popup has onmouseover JS) they could put a little frowny face or exclamation mark icon next to the listing in their search results. If you saw that flag then you could just open the Google cached page and not have to worry about the evil popups.
I user Mozilla and Phoenix so I'm unbothered by all of this but I think it would be a great service for google to offer. If it was controversial then maybe Google could launch it among several similarl new "flags" for search results. They already have page size. They could add to that "image intensive", "not screen-reader accessible", "plugins used", and any number of other useful bits of information that I'm sure they could develop the technology to harvest when they index sites.
--Asa
Re:Pheonix vs Mozilla on Win32 (I prefer mozilla)
on
Phoenix 0.5 Has Arrived
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· Score: 3, Informative
The user doesn't maintain a 'refcount' inside their head to make sure they aren't closing the last window. And with the miniscule startup delay with IE, they don't have to, but with Mozilla, forgetting the refcount costs you a 30 second delay. 30 seconds? What kind of hardware are you running? I see anywhere from 1 to 8 seconds on my fastest to slowest machines.
Just what is it that makes the Linux apps so much bigger (openoffice.org also springs to mind)?
A number of reasons. One reason is that the msvc++ compiler can make a smaller (disk and memory footprint) and faster Phoenix binary than it's linux counterpart.Another reason is that there are code and compatability issues that prevent us from statically compiling more of the linux binary like we do for windows.
With most projects, the tgz'd (or bz2'd) source file is in plain site, but I can never seem to find the one for Mozilla.
Mozilla source tarballs are _always_ a day or two later than the release binaries. We only have so many people working on this and so many machines to make this all happen. We release when we've got the four primary platforms built and a release tag created. That's usually late at night and when it's done we go home and the next day get to work on creating the source tarball. If you can't wait a day or two then pull MOZILLA_1_2_1_RELEASE from cvs.
--Asa
Re:So if there's just been one bug fix...
on
Mozilla 1.2.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
(Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)
No one ever took it from you. If you deleted it after the install just go back to ftp and download it again. I'd recommend that you do an uninstall and remove any traces of the Mozilla install directory then try a reinstall of 1.2.1. There should be no problems with a clean install. If that doesn't work then try creating a new profile and see if that works (you can copy your old profile data over to the new profile if necessary). I'm surprised you're having this difficulty and hope that one of the steps I suggested would fix it. The chances of 1.2.1 introducing a problem that didn't exist for you in 1.2 are about zero so I suspect that some other problem is at work here, possibly cruft left over from a beta install. Like I suggested above, removing the entire beta install directory should clear up any problems if it was a beta build problem that's manifesting in the final release. Good luck.
How come the solaris releases are always days or even weeks behind?
mozilla.org makes binaries for Mac9, OSX, Linux, and Windows. All other builds (sometimes as many as a dozen or so platforms) are contributed builds.We release when we've got the four major platforms done and then the Solaris and FreeBSD and OS/2 and BeOS and all the other builds arrive later.
--Asa
1.2.1 does have better security than 1.1 or 1.0.1
on
Mozilla 1.2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, the headline isn't completely wrong, Mozilla 1.2.1 only contains the "can't write to dynamically created elements" fix that was breaking some DHTML and page layout. Mozilla 1.2.1 also contains everything that the 1.2 release contained when it was released and then unreleased last week. That included new features, improved performance, better stability and security fixes. So if you're using _any_ oler Mozilla releases you really should upgrade to get all the new 1.2.1 goodness, including improved security.
For the folks that just downloaded Mozilla 1.2 last week, if you're not having any problems (and it seems like the DHTML issue is a lot less visible on linux) then there's no pressing "security" reason to upgrade to 1.2.1 but you might as well get it for this DHTML fix which is likely to eventually cause you some pain at some site somewhere.
Don't even think about commercializing Mozilla when it can't open certain DHTML sites. I've tried 1.2.1 (just now) on both Windows and my Debian.
Actually, if you're thinking about commercializing Mozilla then our milestone model is probably just the thing you're looking for.
We push nightly builds to thousands of testers every day, hundreds of thousands of users test and thousands of users report problems against Alpha and Beta Milesotne releases and then we ship a final milestone to even more users/testers.
In some cases a new problem is discovered in that Final Milestone a fix is landed on the milestone branch. Someone interested in commercializing Mozilla has a well tested and well patched code branch from which to build a commercial product.
That this bug was discovered in Mozilla is precisely the reason that organizations would want to use Mozilla technologies in commercial products. We keep making it better and when we move on to the next release cycle any commercial (or non-commercial) organization is free to pull the code, listen to Mozilla Milestone feedback and bug reports and continue making it better themselves.
The alternative is doing all this development and testing work yourself or relying on closed source code where you can't continue making it better yourselves if you do find something wrong. If I was building a commercial app that required HTML rendering then I'd definitely investigate using one of the Mozilla code branches for my products.
There is a particular issue with the flash plugin over X. I don't like flash, but since it is on so many sites now, often on the first page, the result of this bug is to make quite a lot of the Internet inaccessible. Get the Flash 6 plugin. Macromedia has fixed the hang and crash over x-remote and not only that but the problem with it blocking or being blocked by an audio device has been fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Mozilla team has decided to produce a mail client and a stripped-down browser missing most of the really cool features of Mozilla."
What Mozilla SeaMonkey browser (Navigator) features are missing in Mozilla Firebird? There are certainy a lot of preference settings no longer exposed in UI and there are a few differently exposed features but I'm confused by your characterization of Mozilla Firebird as "stripped-down" and missing *most* of the really cool features of Mozilla (Navigator/SeaMoney browser).
Some cool features from the application suite's browser:
1. tabbed browser
2. pop-up blocking
3. bookmark custom keywords
4. great privacy controls
5. fine-grained js controls for saying no to sites that want to take over the status bar or raise and lower/resize windows, etc.
6. support for themes
7. image blocking
8. view selection source
9. search on selection
10. type ahead find aka find as you type
11. great layout engine
12. XUL extensions for all kinds of great additional features.
13. sherlock-like search plugin support (see mycroft.mozdev.org for 300 or so search plugins).
Those are a most of the "cool" features I use in Mozilla Navigator *browser* and every single one of them is available in Mozilla Firebird (and some are even better/more usable in Mozilla Firebird).
In addition, Mozilla Firebird has quite a few really cool features that the Mozilla Navigator browser doesn't. Customizable toolbars, a XUL extension manager, inline form auto-completion, "clear all" privacy mechanism, more themes, etc.
If you're talking about things like an email client, the dom inspector, the js debugger, chatzilla, an html composer, etc. those aren't going anywhere. They aren't browser features though. They are applications. And they won't be "missing". We'll continue to support them as Mozilla applications or extensions to Mozilla applications.
The only "cool" features, that are actually browser features (and not other applications or preference settings), that I can think of are html sidebars, the site navigation (formerly "link") toolbar and an author style sheet switching mechanism. All three of those are planned to be included in Mozilla Firebird.
What are all of these other "really cool features of Mozilla" that were stripped out of Mozilla Firebird?
--Asa
These folks must not have looked very hard if they thought "Firebird" was a name with no conflicts
Mozilla's Firebird browser isn't going to be confused with a relational database. Trademark onflicts only arise when there is customer confusion.
--Asa
Honestly, as much as I admire the work these folks do, I have to wonder how one medium-to-high-profile open-source project can decide to use the name of another.
Mozilla's Firebird browser is not going to be confused with a relational database. Without customer confusion, there isn't a trademark problem.
--Asa
It's strange that there are ports to OSes so obscure that I've never heard of them, but not the OS that the majority of people in my building use.
Maybe it's strange, but that's the reality. There are people that care enough about AIX or BeOS and have the skill to keep them building on those platforms. There aren't people that care enoughand have the skill to keep Mozilla building on Mac classic.
Is there any way which someone not tech-savvy enough to help with a port to OS9 could help to persuade the Mozilla people to give us the extra features and stability that we are missing out on?
Sure. Convince someone that is tech-savvy enough to do the hard work necessary to maintain an OS 9 build (estimated by some as a couple of full days a week). We made several attempts to find such a person before retiring the build and none stepped up. It's sad, but if no one wants to work on it then it doesn't get worked on.
--Asa
"I love how Netscape, since they own the rights to the Mozilla code, uses it directly for their browser"
Netscape doesn't "own the rights to the Mozilla code". They are the copyright holder to some of it. But so are scores of people not employed by Netscape. Mozilla is available under the terms of the MPL, the GPL or the LGPL and that means that anyone can use and modify the code and the kind of ownership you're suggesting just doesn't exist or doesn't matter.
--Asa
Konqueror is a much better example of open source at work, and it matured much faster than Mozilla.
Really? Konqueror supports more of the standards and the existing web than Mozilla does and they did it in a shorter period of time? Got measures?
How old is Konqueror. I see posts about KHTML from dev newsgroups going back to at least 1998.
--Asa
Mozilla has had various bits of ActiveX supporting code available to those that want it for some time. There have been plugin wrappers that make ActiveX controls sort of work in Mozilla and Netscape. There has been a Gecko wraper that alows Mozilla's rendering engine to be embedded as an ActiveX control like MSHTML. Various Mozilla contributors have been interested in and working on this stuff for a long time. Some of this support was even available in the Communicator days. None of this is built in the default Mozilla releases and so Mozilla releases do not support ActiveX.
--Asa
1.4 nightly builds have support for profile chrome. That means that extension developers can make extensions that install to your profile and won't get erased when you upgrade your Mozilla binary.
--Asa
Hasn't about:config been there for a while?
Yes, it has. But with 1.3, it's now editable. Now you can load it up and make direct changes to the prefs right in the browser window.
--Asa
I'm sure the Mozilla gods have blessed us with a config option to disable this "feature."
Actually, you have a preference to _enable_ the feature. It's off by default. Also, once enabled (by going to Edit->Preferences...->Appearance and checking the box titled "Enable automatic image resizing") a simple click on the image will restore it to its original size.
This really is a friendly implementation. I much prefer it to the feature implemented by the other guys.
--Asa
"Phoenix authors have quit working on it"
That's not at all accurate. Phoenix developers have checked in changes to thousands of lines of code in hundreds of Phoenix files just this month and Phoenix also picks up almost all of the backend Mozilla changes that happen every day. Just because it's not moving at the pace it did when it was all brand new doesn't mean it's not moving.
--Asa
--Asa
"Show me where you can compile Mozilla against Qt."
F -8 &oe=UTF-8&group=netscape.public.mozilla.qt
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UT
--Asa
Where's the release version of AOL using gecko?
Right here: AOL using Gecko
While it's not completely free of the "cat-and-mouse game", Mozilla's Junk Mail Controls are cutting my spam down by about 90% and it only requires a single mouse click for each of the few spam messages that gets through to keep the filter trained at that level.
--Asa
Perhaps google could offer a new service that only indexes sites that are bobby & w3 safe? that would help us all enforce good behavior on the WWW.
Actually, I was thinking of something like this recently. There are a few really common bits of recycled code on the web. If google would look at the JS on the sites they index and determine if it is one of the common scripts which intends to spawn a popup onload (and even worse if that popup has onmouseover JS) they could put a little frowny face or exclamation mark icon next to the listing in their search results. If you saw that flag then you could just open the Google cached page and not have to worry about the evil popups.
I user Mozilla and Phoenix so I'm unbothered by all of this but I think it would be a great service for google to offer. If it was controversial then maybe Google could launch it among several similarl new "flags" for search results. They already have page size. They could add to that "image intensive", "not screen-reader accessible", "plugins used", and any number of other useful bits of information that I'm sure they could develop the technology to harvest when they index sites.
--Asa
The user doesn't maintain a 'refcount' inside their head to make sure they aren't closing the last window. And with the miniscule startup delay with IE, they don't have to, but with Mozilla, forgetting the refcount costs you a 30 second delay.
30 seconds? What kind of hardware are you running? I see anywhere from 1 to 8 seconds on my fastest to slowest machines.
--Asa
However, Opera has 16 search options for their search window from the pull down menu
and Phoenix has about 150 search options. See mycroft.mozdev.org
--Asa
Just what is it that makes the Linux apps so much bigger (openoffice.org also springs to mind)?
A number of reasons. One reason is that the msvc++ compiler can make a smaller (disk and memory footprint) and faster Phoenix binary than it's linux counterpart.Another reason is that there are code and compatability issues that prevent us from statically compiling more of the linux binary like we do for windows.
--Asa
With most projects, the tgz'd (or bz2'd) source file is in plain site, but I can never seem to find the one for Mozilla.
Mozilla source tarballs are _always_ a day or two later than the release binaries. We only have so many people working on this and so many machines to make this all happen. We release when we've got the four primary platforms built and a release tag created. That's usually late at night and when it's done we go home and the next day get to work on creating the source tarball. If you can't wait a day or two then pull MOZILLA_1_2_1_RELEASE from cvs.
--Asa
(Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)
No one ever took it from you. If you deleted it after the install just go back to ftp and download it again. I'd recommend that you do an uninstall and remove any traces of the Mozilla install directory then try a reinstall of 1.2.1. There should be no problems with a clean install. If that doesn't work then try creating a new profile and see if that works (you can copy your old profile data over to the new profile if necessary). I'm surprised you're having this difficulty and hope that one of the steps I suggested would fix it. The chances of 1.2.1 introducing a problem that didn't exist for you in 1.2 are about zero so I suspect that some other problem is at work here, possibly cruft left over from a beta install. Like I suggested above, removing the entire beta install directory should clear up any problems if it was a beta build problem that's manifesting in the final release. Good luck.
--Asa
How come the solaris releases are always days or even weeks behind?
mozilla.org makes binaries for Mac9, OSX, Linux, and Windows. All other builds (sometimes as many as a dozen or so platforms) are contributed builds.We release when we've got the four major platforms done and then the Solaris and FreeBSD and OS/2 and BeOS and all the other builds arrive later.
--Asa
Actually, the headline isn't completely wrong, Mozilla 1.2.1 only contains the "can't write to dynamically created elements" fix that was breaking some DHTML and page layout. Mozilla 1.2.1 also contains everything that the 1.2 release contained when it was released and then unreleased last week. That included new features, improved performance, better stability and security fixes. So if you're using _any_ oler Mozilla releases you really should upgrade to get all the new 1.2.1 goodness, including improved security.
For the folks that just downloaded Mozilla 1.2 last week, if you're not having any problems (and it seems like the DHTML issue is a lot less visible on linux) then there's no pressing "security" reason to upgrade to 1.2.1 but you might as well get it for this DHTML fix which is likely to eventually cause you some pain at some site somewhere.
--Asa
Don't even think about commercializing Mozilla when it can't open certain DHTML sites. I've tried 1.2.1 (just now) on both Windows and my Debian.
Actually, if you're thinking about commercializing Mozilla then our milestone model is probably just the thing you're looking for.
We push nightly builds to thousands of testers every day, hundreds of thousands of users test and thousands of users report problems against Alpha and Beta Milesotne releases and then we ship a final milestone to even more users/testers.
In some cases a new problem is discovered in that Final Milestone a fix is landed on the milestone branch. Someone interested in commercializing Mozilla has a well tested and well patched code branch from which to build a commercial product.
That this bug was discovered in Mozilla is precisely the reason that organizations would want to use Mozilla technologies in commercial products. We keep making it better and when we move on to the next release cycle any commercial (or non-commercial) organization is free to pull the code, listen to Mozilla Milestone feedback and bug reports and continue making it better themselves.
The alternative is doing all this development and testing work yourself or relying on closed source code where you can't continue making it better yourselves if you do find something wrong. If I was building a commercial app that required HTML rendering then I'd definitely investigate using one of the Mozilla code branches for my products.
--Asa
There is a particular issue with the flash plugin over X. I don't like flash, but since it is on so many sites now, often on the first page, the result of this bug is to make quite a lot of the Internet inaccessible.
Get the Flash 6 plugin. Macromedia has fixed the hang and crash over x-remote and not only that but the problem with it blocking or being blocked by an audio device has been fixed.
--Asa