I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this [mozilla.org] bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.
You're right that this isn't a serious security hole or even a crash or dataloss bug. But it is something that we'd like to fix and make available quickly. The 1.2 release is still available if you want it. Just go to FTP and download. We're very close to putting out something with a fix for this DHTML problem and figured it was better to save folks the extra download by asking them to wait a day or two for the fixed version. The easy way to do that was to pull the high-proifile links to that build until we had a better build to put in its place.
" Interesting that every couple of months when Mozilla has a bug or exploit or something"
This isn't an exploit or even a crash or dataloss bug. This is just a visual glitch that you'll get on some pages with DHTML. The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days when the 1.2.1 release out so the high-visibility links were commented out for the time being.
Is it just me or is prefetching a good way to increase the bandwidth load on the networks? I mean I can see the benefit to the immdiate user, but there IS going to be a fair amount of "unviewed" bandwidth s you might choose to only look at one view of your favorite pron star and not all 50.
Nothing happens without the author specifying it and it's not random like "every link on the page".Read more about it before getting overly concerned. You'll save a few gray hairs.
Yeah right. Almost all of the mozilla developers are PAID to
work on mozilla.
Sure there are some folks here and there doing some small fixes and things. Still they are PAID to work on mozilla, just like any other
developer working for a company.
Almost all? There are quite a few unpaid developers working on Mozilla and plenty that are paid by someone other than AOL. Nearly half of the checkins in the last week were made by people not at Netscape. And these contributors are making significant changes to core modules. Many of our top hackers are employed by other organizations or contributing as volunteers. Of course we have many valuable contributors at Netscape too.
Given that the so-called "classic" theme belongs to Netscape 4, I find it a bit hard to understand why they persist in making it the default. Sure, it (sort of) works on a 16-bit display, but I think this browser is really targeted at users with more modern hardware. I always immediately change the theme to "Modern" on any machine I install Moz on.
Classic is designed to utilize the native system look and feel. On winXP, OS X and GTK (and soon older Windows versions) Classic uses the nsITheme api to call into the system for widget style information. This allows the classic theme to display native looking UI. Modern doesn't use this api at all so you have a browser which doesn't have any native look and feel. Some like that but many do not.
SlashDot uses them -- look at the document nav bar in Moz/Opera, you'll see Next/Previous, which go to the next/previous story. Unless you have a habit of reading every article, Moz will pointlessly prefetch the next story up, and you'll happily ignore it. Users who used to (e.g.) read every other story now actually end up fetching every story anyway.
rel="prefetch" is fine, rel="next" makes me nervous. I don't want content providers to stop using rel="next" because of the deranged behavior of some clients:P
If slashdot uses link rel=next and no one uses it then why are they including it in the source? Authors use this tool to specifically connect pages. It is assumed that people will be navigating to the next document linked or the author wouldn't include that tag. Authors who are using link rel= next that don't want people navigating to that linked document shouldn't be using next so you shouldn't be nervous about content providers stopping use of the tag. What have you lost if slashdot removes the tag if, as you suggested, no users actually uses the link rel=next to get to the next article?
You said that you plan on waiting for tonight's nighly build to pick up any 1.2 fixes but that's a bad idea. There are no fixes that have landed on the 1.2 branch since yesterday (and probably won't be any) so if you get or build a 1.2 branch nightly build today you'll have exactly the same thing and if you get a trunk nightly then you'll be getting development builds containing all kinds of new code being developed for 1.3. If you're looking for stability you don't want a 1.3 nightly build. See http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html#tree-managemen t for what this looks like.
There are plenty of specialized searches that are not google and are quite useful.
--Asa
Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet).
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
View selection source is available in Phoenix (and Mozilla). Just make a selection and context click on it for the menuitem. Google toolbar fir IE is nice. I prefer Phoenix's search field with about 15 search engines (from mycroft.mozdev.org) including google groups, news and images. It has a nifty find in page feature too (but that's as useful as the "highlight" bookmarklet that actually styles every instance of the term on the page like google cache does). Phoenix (the topic of this discussion is Phoenix, not Mozilla) has a UI that's a lot snappier than Mozilla. Edit coming soon (use the system default editor).
You should give it a try. It's a 7MB download. You just unzip it and double-click on the Phoenix app icon. If you don't like it then drag the folder to the trash.
I don't think themes should be included in a lean & mean browser.
"themes" aren't included in Phoenix. Phoenix has one UI (which is defined in part in images and CSS). The nature of the UI makes it possible for other people to easily create new styles or themes (images and CSS). Phoenix contains a trivial amount of code to manage the install and uninstall of themes but the themes themselves are 3rd party components and are not "include in" Phoenix.
What a fast release cycle this has, certainly compared to Mozilla!
Phoenix is young and moving fast. The release cycles have averaged a couple weeks. Development is progressing really fast, though. That's because XUL is an extremely easy and fast environment in which to build applications and the two or three developers building Phoenix are the top XUL hackers on the planet (the guys that invented XUL). The Mozilla application framework has also seriously matured, making it much easier to build these kinds of appa. Scores of great reusable widgets, an awesome rendering engine, a top notch neyworking library, and a great security library give you all the pieces you need to assemble a variety of web-enabled apps. Check out mozdev.org for dozens of great XUL-based projects.
--Asa
Re:Missing the most important feature...
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...Google toolbar! I'm helpless without it.
You get one built in and you can populate it with about 150 additional search engines by going to mozdev.org and installing additional mycroft plugins (they're very tiny, give it a try).
You'd switch because Phoenix has a better feature set. Phoenix makes the web enjoyable again by sparing you from pop-ups and giving you tabbed browsing for a much more organized browsing experience. You'd switch because you're concerned about people using IE to steal your files or execute arbitrary code on your machine. You'd switch because Phoenix is an easy migration. You'd switch because Phoenix works and there's just something "right" about using a free and open solution especially one that works well.
My "clock on the wall" tests seem to confirm what the early automated performance tests suggest: that Phoenix is about 30% faster at startup than Mozilla and about 40% faster at creating new windows. Phoenix developers have also made tweaks to lots of other interface items to improve UI responsiveness and even the rendering engine has been slightly tweaked which improves perceived performance and give Phoenix a some "zip" that's lacking in Mozilla. Not only that but the developers cut the download size by about 40% while adding a bunch of new features like toolbar customization and pop-up blocking whitelists.
--Asa
Theme support isn't exactly new
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The post suggests that theme support is new to 0.4. That's probably my fault for a not-as-clear-as-it-could-have-been release note. Phoenix uses XUL. Part of XUL is that the browser GUI is styled using images and CSS. That makes any XUL-based product "skinable". This is the first release of Phoenix where there were a number of completed themes available but it is not the first release with support for themes. Theme support is a byproduct of the decision to build the UI with images and CSS (XUL). For more information and discussion of Phoenix themes and other Phoenix issues check out the MozillaZine Phoenix forums.
"It's a fucking stupid business decision to buck the trend. It's especially fucking stupid for a bank to do anything that's remotely not mainstream."
So Bank of America, Citizensbank, Citibank, Wachovia, Fidelity, American Express, Canadatrust, and Wells Fargo are all stupid for making changes to their sites to support gecko-based browsers like Netscape 7 or Mozilla? And you're in a better position than they are to make that determination? Wow. We sure are blessed to have someone of your status gracing us with your valuable comments. You should email BofA, WellsFargo and those other banking and financial organizations and tell them that they're "fucking stupid" and that you know what the right business decisions for them are. Please cc: me on that email. Thanks.
they still stubbornly refuse to use CSS stylesheets that aren't served with a mime type of text/css... I still can't see the information on a vast number of web sites out there
You visit sites that include the "information" in stylesheets? That's completely lame. The whole purpose of CSS is to separate the information from the style. If they're including the content in their style sheets then they're doing a lot more wrong than just serving the incorrect mime type.
100% standards compliance means not doing anything forbidden by the standards body specifications and supporting the recommendations of the standards body. If an extension doesn't violate the specification then it is in compliance. The LINK element was specifically designed with room for clients to extend and interpret.
The link tag has been around for some time. It is used to describe releationships between documents. It was desinged by the w3c with extensibility in mind. The w3c leaves it up to the user agent to determine how to handle link data.
Substitute "a" for "the" and you sound a little less uninformed. Try http://www.mozdev.org for a larger list. And guess what, the hundred or so projects there aren't the end of it either. There are all kinds of smaller projects (and even some larger ones) that are hosted on their own sites.
Phoenix will probably never be as small a download as Opera. You can't cram better standards support than opera into an opera-sized package. We can, however, easily trim another MB or two from our download size without much difficulty. I was able to get a local package down 1 full MB smaller just removing a few test files and unused bits and samples. We're working on some build-config changes that will allow us to pull and build less (we're still carrying the weight of Composer even though we're not using it). I expect that Phoenix could get under 7MB without too much difficulty. But it's not going to get down to the neighborhood (2-5MB) of Opera unless we throw away a lot of standards support like our DOM support and other standards that we just do more of than Opera.
That being said, Phoenix download for windows is about 8.4 MB. Mozilla download for Windows is about 11MB, IE6 typical download for win2K is 17MB. Phoenix is by no means the biggest of that group. Opera is to be praised for it's small download size. I just wish they had the same level of support for other W3C standards as they do for CSS.
Slashdot Mirror
They retract a release because of this?
I've been waiting for ages for a fix to e.g. this [mozilla.org] bug which renders Mozilla useless for quite a bunch of purposes. Still I wouldn't see a reason to retract the releases containing bugs like that, unless we're talking about serious security holes.
You're right that this isn't a serious security hole or even a crash or dataloss bug. But it is something that we'd like to fix and make available quickly. The 1.2 release is still available if you want it. Just go to FTP and download. We're very close to putting out something with a fix for this DHTML problem and figured it was better to save folks the extra download by asking them to wait a day or two for the fixed version. The easy way to do that was to pull the high-proifile links to that build until we had a better build to put in its place.
--Asa
" Interesting that every couple of months when Mozilla has a bug or exploit or something"
This isn't an exploit or even a crash or dataloss bug. This is just a visual glitch that you'll get on some pages with DHTML. The release hasn't really been pulled and is still available at ftp but we'd rather spare our users a large download that would probably be repeated in a couple of days when the 1.2.1 release out so the high-visibility links were commented out for the time being.
--Asa
Is it just me or is prefetching a good way to increase the bandwidth load on the networks? I mean I can see the benefit to the immdiate user, but there IS going to be a fair amount of "unviewed" bandwidth s you might choose to only look at one view of your favorite pron star and not all 50.
Nothing happens without the author specifying it and it's not random like "every link on the page".Read more about it before getting overly concerned. You'll save a few gray hairs.
Yeah right. Almost all of the mozilla developers are PAID to work on mozilla. Sure there are some folks here and there doing some small fixes and things. Still they are PAID to work on mozilla, just like any other developer working for a company.
Almost all? There are quite a few unpaid developers working on Mozilla and plenty that are paid by someone other than AOL. Nearly half of the checkins in the last week were made by people not at Netscape. And these contributors are making significant changes to core modules. Many of our top hackers are employed by other organizations or contributing as volunteers. Of course we have many valuable contributors at Netscape too.
--Asa
Given that the so-called "classic" theme belongs to Netscape 4, I find it a bit hard to understand why they persist in making it the default. Sure, it (sort of) works on a 16-bit display, but I think this browser is really targeted at users with more modern hardware. I always immediately change the theme to "Modern" on any machine I install Moz on.
Classic is designed to utilize the native system look and feel. On winXP, OS X and GTK (and soon older Windows versions) Classic uses the nsITheme api to call into the system for widget style information. This allows the classic theme to display native looking UI. Modern doesn't use this api at all so you have a browser which doesn't have any native look and feel. Some like that but many do not.
--Asa
SlashDot uses them -- look at the document nav bar in Moz/Opera, you'll see Next/Previous, which go to the next/previous story. Unless you have a habit of reading every article, Moz will pointlessly prefetch the next story up, and you'll happily ignore it. Users who used to (e.g.) read every other story now actually end up fetching every story anyway.
:P
rel="prefetch" is fine, rel="next" makes me nervous. I don't want content providers to stop using rel="next" because of the deranged behavior of some clients
If slashdot uses link rel=next and no one uses it then why are they including it in the source? Authors use this tool to specifically connect pages. It is assumed that people will be navigating to the next document linked or the author wouldn't include that tag. Authors who are using link rel= next that don't want people navigating to that linked document shouldn't be using next so you shouldn't be nervous about content providers stopping use of the tag. What have you lost if slashdot removes the tag if, as you suggested, no users actually uses the link rel=next to get to the next article?
--Asa
You said that you plan on waiting for tonight's nighly build to pick up any 1.2 fixes but that's a bad idea. There are no fixes that have landed on the 1.2 branch since yesterday (and probably won't be any) so if you get or build a 1.2 branch nightly build today you'll have exactly the same thing and if you get a trunk nightly then you'll be getting development builds containing all kinds of new code being developed for 1.3. If you're looking for stability you don't want a 1.3 nightly build. See http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html#tree-managemen t for what this looks like.
--Asa
bugzilla.mozilla.org doesn't "fall over" but thousands of slashdot readers loading bugs slows things down for the people trying to do actual work.
--Asa
http://texturizer.net/phoenix/ has tips and tricks, FAQs and common keyboard shortcuts for Phoenix.
--Asa
build witn --enable-xft on a system with the XFT libs (ex. RH8) and you'll get beautiful AA fonts.
--Asa
mycroft.mozdev.org
There are plenty of specialized searches that are not google and are quite useful.
--Asa
View selection source is available in Phoenix (and Mozilla). Just make a selection and context click on it for the menuitem.
Google toolbar fir IE is nice. I prefer Phoenix's search field with about 15 search engines (from mycroft.mozdev.org) including google groups, news and images. It has a nifty find in page feature too (but that's as useful as the "highlight" bookmarklet that actually styles every instance of the term on the page like google cache does).
Phoenix (the topic of this discussion is Phoenix, not Mozilla) has a UI that's a lot snappier than Mozilla.
Edit coming soon (use the system default editor).
You should give it a try. It's a 7MB download. You just unzip it and double-click on the Phoenix app icon. If you don't like it then drag the folder to the trash.
--Asa
I don't think themes should be included in a lean & mean browser.
"themes" aren't included in Phoenix. Phoenix has one UI (which is defined in part in images and CSS). The nature of the UI makes it possible for other people to easily create new styles or themes (images and CSS). Phoenix contains a trivial amount of code to manage the install and uninstall of themes but the themes themselves are 3rd party components and are not "include in" Phoenix.
--Asa
What a fast release cycle this has, certainly compared to Mozilla!
Phoenix is young and moving fast. The release cycles have averaged a couple weeks. Development is progressing really fast, though. That's because XUL is an extremely easy and fast environment in which to build applications and the two or three developers building Phoenix are the top XUL hackers on the planet (the guys that invented XUL). The Mozilla application framework has also seriously matured, making it much easier to build these kinds of appa. Scores of great reusable widgets, an awesome rendering engine, a top notch neyworking library, and a great security library give you all the pieces you need to assemble a variety of web-enabled apps. Check out mozdev.org for dozens of great XUL-based projects.
--Asa
You get one built in and you can populate it with about 150 additional search engines by going to mozdev.org and installing additional mycroft plugins (they're very tiny, give it a try).
--Asa
Why should I switch from IE?
You'd switch because Phoenix has a better feature set. Phoenix makes the web enjoyable again by sparing you from pop-ups and giving you tabbed browsing for a much more organized browsing experience. You'd switch because you're concerned about people using IE to steal your files or execute arbitrary code on your machine. You'd switch because Phoenix is an easy migration. You'd switch because Phoenix works and there's just something "right" about using a free and open solution especially one that works well.
--Asa
like galeon, if this thing will introduce more features, it will slow down even a bit more.
Actually, they're adding features and performance together. Phoenix is getting smaller, faster and more featureful all at the same time.
--Asa
My "clock on the wall" tests seem to confirm what the early automated performance tests suggest: that Phoenix is about 30% faster at startup than Mozilla and about 40% faster at creating new windows. Phoenix developers have also made tweaks to lots of other interface items to improve UI responsiveness and even the rendering engine has been slightly tweaked which improves perceived performance and give Phoenix a some "zip" that's lacking in Mozilla. Not only that but the developers cut the download size by about 40% while adding a bunch of new features like toolbar customization and pop-up blocking whitelists.
--Asa
The post suggests that theme support is new to 0.4. That's probably my fault for a not-as-clear-as-it-could-have-been release note. Phoenix uses XUL. Part of XUL is that the browser GUI is styled using images and CSS. That makes any XUL-based product "skinable". This is the first release of Phoenix where there were a number of completed themes available but it is not the first release with support for themes. Theme support is a byproduct of the decision to build the UI with images and CSS (XUL). For more information and discussion of Phoenix themes and other Phoenix issues check out the MozillaZine Phoenix forums.
--Asa
"It's a fucking stupid business decision to buck the trend. It's especially fucking stupid for a bank to do anything that's remotely not mainstream."
So Bank of America, Citizensbank, Citibank, Wachovia, Fidelity, American Express, Canadatrust, and Wells Fargo are all stupid for making changes to their sites to support gecko-based browsers like Netscape 7 or Mozilla? And you're in a better position than they are to make that determination? Wow. We sure are blessed to have someone of your status gracing us with your valuable comments. You should email BofA, WellsFargo and those other banking and financial organizations and tell them that they're "fucking stupid" and that you know what the right business decisions for them are. Please cc: me on that email. Thanks.
--Asa
they still stubbornly refuse to use CSS stylesheets that aren't served with a mime type of text/css ... I still can't see the information on a vast number of web sites out there
You visit sites that include the "information" in stylesheets? That's completely lame. The whole purpose of CSS is to separate the information from the style. If they're including the content in their style sheets then they're doing a lot more wrong than just serving the incorrect mime type.
--Asa
100% standards compliance means not doing anything forbidden by the standards body specifications and supporting the recommendations of the standards body. If an extension doesn't violate the specification then it is in compliance. The LINK element was specifically designed with room for clients to extend and interpret.
--Asa
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html# edef-LINK
The link tag has been around for some time. It is used to describe releationships between documents. It was desinged by the w3c with extensibility in mind. The w3c leaves it up to the user agent to determine how to handle link data.
--Asa
Here's the list of available XUL applications.
Substitute "a" for "the" and you sound a little less uninformed. Try http://www.mozdev.org for a larger list. And guess what, the hundred or so projects there aren't the end of it either. There are all kinds of smaller projects (and even some larger ones) that are hosted on their own sites.
--Asa
Phoenix will probably never be as small a download as Opera. You can't cram better standards support than opera into an opera-sized package. We can, however, easily trim another MB or two from our download size without much difficulty. I was able to get a local package down 1 full MB smaller just removing a few test files and unused bits and samples. We're working on some build-config changes that will allow us to pull and build less (we're still carrying the weight of Composer even though we're not using it). I expect that Phoenix could get under 7MB without too much difficulty. But it's not going to get down to the neighborhood (2-5MB) of Opera unless we throw away a lot of standards support like our DOM support and other standards that we just do more of than Opera.
That being said, Phoenix download for windows is about 8.4 MB. Mozilla download for Windows is about 11MB, IE6 typical download for win2K is 17MB. Phoenix is by no means the biggest of that group. Opera is to be praised for it's small download size. I just wish they had the same level of support for other W3C standards as they do for CSS.
--Asa