I'll miss the favicon's in the title bar and bookmarks, and the ability to enable cookies and JavaScript on a per-site basis.
You can enable cookies and JavaScript on a per site basis. You can go one step further too. You can disable specific bits of JS on a per domain basis. You can, for example block a group of sites from opening new windows or resizing your window. You could block a site from moving your windows or altering the status bar text. See Configurable Security Policies for more information.
Well, when confronted with a fact like 'bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled,' one shouldn't immediately go on apologetic flights of fancy which result in such ineptitudes as 'there's more users so there's twice as many bug submissions! DUH!.' when there's no evidence backing it up.
"bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled" is not a fact. It doesn't even make sense. Doubled what? Doubled since yesterday? Doubled since the beginning of the project? Doubled in volume?
Bug submissions certainly have not doubled in volume in recent history. We get between 100 and 300 bug reports a day and this has been steady for quite a while. About half of those are immediately marked as Invalid, Duplicate or Worksforme by the growing numbers of active testers and Bugzilla account holders. We have over 15,000 active Bugzilla accounts and that number is growing (accellerating, even). And that is a fact.
Point here is that 1.0 has meaning to me, should it be fairly robust I will encourage my friends to use it and install it on a bunch of machines that I don't update with every release.
What if Mozilla 0.9.8 is "fairly robust"? Will you not encourage others to use it because it is not called 1.0? What if the plans for 0.9.9 and 1.0 do not include any improvements in the "robust"ness of the app? Is is useful to hold off recommending it until the magic number 1.0 happens? What if we had never moved from the Mx Milestone naming scheme? We'd be at about Milestone M26 now. Would you wait until it hit M30 or M50 or maybe M100 before encouraging others to use it?
Of course, they are not going to fix 1500 bugs by v1.0
Actually, we average about 1500 bugs fixed every Milestone (about every 5 to 6 weeks). So I sure hope we can fix at least that many in the Milestones we have between now and 1.0.
BTW, I appreciate the sentiment of your comments. Don't take my nits as anything but nits and my questions as genuine curiosity.
The incoming bug rate is NOT DOUBLING. I don't know if that is some figure you got from MozillaQuest (reason enough to discount it) or if you actually went to the source (bugzilla.mozilla.org) but someone got their queries/reports confused. The bug charts show that the rate has been pretty much steady for a long time. The only interesting thing about this graph (that the person reporting the doubling nonsense obviously was confused about) is the rise in New and the drop in Assigned. Bugs start out as New and get marked Assigned when a developer decides the bug is his. In late 2000 we stopped sending out a 'nag' email that urged developers to accept their New bugs. When we stopped sending that mail the Accepting dropped off. The incoming bug rate has not changed significantly and neither has the fix rate.
The rate of incoming bugs has been pretty steady for some time. With 15,000+ active Bugzilla accounts it is not at all strange to see 300 bugs reported in a single day. Anyone who takes a minute to look closer will see a couple of important trends in these numbers. First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code. Second, the overall average severity of incoming bug reports has been going down for some time so that while the volume of incoming bugs hasn't changed a lot, the kinds of issues being reported are more polish issues that development or testing blocker issues.
I have been involved in organizing the Mozilla community quality assurance and testing effort for more than two years and I can say with confidence that the project is at a much higher quality level than it was 2 years ago, 1 year ago, 6 months ago (grab M9, M16 or 0.8 and compare for yourself). Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.
I just want to make sure it is very clear to slashdot readers that MozillaQuest is in no way connected with or affiliated with mozilla.org. Do not be confused by the name or the 'borrowed' mozilla graphics (mostly gone now I believe). MozillaQuest is a series of articles written by Mike Angelo who has no connection to mozilla.org or any 'inside information' about the goings on of the Mozilla project. mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site but the requests went pretty much unanswered and so we've turned to simply ignoring the site. It is a shame that slashdot, a place that many in the open source community turn for information, continues to point its readers at this kind of sensationalism.
--Asa
(my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or mozilla.org)
* Some limited support. Netscape will more than likely release another minor update in a few months to catch any top crashers. It will also release updates for any security issues that arise. With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone.
correction, with Mozilla you must wait for the next _nightly_ release. You don't have to wait for a milestone. About avery 12 hours a new build for mac, win32 and linux is made off of the tip of the development trunk. To suggest that updates from Netscape come any faster than updates to Mozilla is plain silly. Even if you were just talking about Milestones, we had about 7 of those between Netscape 6 and 6.1
Sometime less than a year ago mozilla.org announced intentions to (begin) work toward a dual licensing scheme with the _MPL_ (not NPL) and the GPL or LGPL. This is not as easy as flipping a switch and saying "done." It will require contacting the hundreds of developers that have checked in millions of lines of code in thousands of files and getting agreement. More than "absolutely nothing" has been done about it. The list of contributors is being constructed. The research and discussions about the options available (dual with GPL or LGPL or modifications to MPL) is happening. Big projects don't happen overnight.
Where do you hear these "people talking about Mozilla and it's GPL nature"? I hear people talking about it and it's MPL nature. You're right when you say "Mozilla is not GPL at all". It isn't. It's MPL and NPL.
If you don't consider Mozilla free then you have a fundamental disagreement with stallman and the fsf who say the MPL is a free software license (GPL incompatable but free).
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#So ft wareLicenses
0.9.1 is old. 0.9.2 is better (don't know if we have a fizzilla build yet). right now fizzilla doesn't come with PSM (security module). This should change very soon and fizzilla builds will also start to become available daily.
you can turn this off Edit|Preferences|Navigator|Smart Browsing|Enable Internet Keywords. you will still have to tab to the search item on the popup to initiate a search. I believe you can edit the location to change the keyword lookup to take you to Google's 'feeling lucky' results instead of Netscape's database results. To do this try editing all.js (found in C:\Program Files\Mozilla\bin\defaults\pref for me) to replace the netscape URL with a Google URL
--Asa
Re:Give it to the Konqueror wishlist.
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
·
· Score: 2
in Mozilla:
Tasks|Privacy and Security|Cookie Manager
there's also |Image Manager for controlling killing those pseky banner ads.
--Asa
Re:Whats New & Why you should get it
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
·
· Score: 2
"2. new autocomplete widget - now works like a combo of IE and NS 4.x complete, but better than both (uses any site in your history file). Has an option to search for keywords thru Netscape at the bottom of the list, tho i wish this were google instead. "
Edit|Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet Search -> Default Search Engine.
You can select any of the search engines for the autocomplete popup. Mozilla search engined are based on sherlock technology so there are literally hundreds of them available (including Google, which I am using right now).
--Asa
Re:Whats New & Why you should get it
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
·
· Score: 3
The bookmarks problem is actually pretty easy.
Bug 71685 Bookmarks in Sidebar are blank.
This affects you if you have used the sidebar blank bookmarks workaround or your
profile was created between early March and late May. If you have a pre ~11
March profile for which you never used the sidebar blank bookmarks workaround or
a post ~23 May profile this probably doesn't affect you.
If you have a profile which was created before about March 11 and you used the
workaround between about March 11 and May 23 then you will have to use the
workaround again. If you have a profile which was created between about March
11 and May 23 then you will have to use the workaround now.
Workaround:
1. open browser
2. view sidebar
3. click "Tabs" button at top right of sidebar
4. select "Customize Sidebar" menuitem
5. select "Bookmarks" from "Tabs in My Sidebar" list
6. click the "Remove" button below the list of "Tabs in My sidebar"
7. click OK
8. click "Tabs" button at top right of sidebar
9. select "Customize Sidebar" menuitem
10 select "Bookmarks" from "Available Tabs" list
11 click the "Add" button below the list of "Available Tabs" list
12 click OK
note: just unchecking the tab from the "Tabs>" menu and rechecking it will not
fix the problem.
--Asa
Re:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
·
· Score: 2
not sure if it's still working (I think I saw a bug recently) but you should be able to put this in your prefs.js file to controll image animations.
The UI hasn't been implemented yet (there's a bug on file) but the backend for this has been around for a while. See Configurable Security Policies and from the release notes page:
// Use configurable security policies to override popups, see
// http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/component s/configPolicy.html
// Turn window.open off for particular sites:
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowin te rnal.open","noAccess");
// Or turn it off everywhere:
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinter na l.open","noAccess");
// Override popping up new windows on target=anything
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true);
"arch thats not supported by the moz team? Like *BSD or anything else"
Not supported?!? Did you look at the builds that were posted for 0.9? Mozilla is a Cross Platform (XP) application. If you've got a platform Mozilla can probably be compiled for it. (feel free to snicker with vic20 and c64 comments)
Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001 (one month ago)
Slashdot editors posted a comment which was clearly stolen from http://www.mozillazine.org It would be nice to see a little more integrity from the slashdot editorial staff. Checkin sources, reading referenced links, etc. would go a long way to improving the value this site brings to it's users and the Web in general.
I suspect that your problem was attempting to load sites with TLS (SSL 3.1) enabled where the site didn't support TLS. Mozilla nightly builds now gracefully downgrade to SSL3 when they encounter these misconfigured or out of date servers. The fix didn't make it into the Milestone but we did set the pref for TLS to off (you can reenable it Edit|Preferences Privacy and Security -> SSL -> Enable TLS) as the Milestone default so you should have better luck visiting SSL sites.
Patience. Source tarball should be there in the next 24 hours. It's a lot of work to get it all together and we'd rather give out what we have when we have it then make everyone wait until we have hte last of the 30 or 40 builds we put up each Milestone.
--Asa
Re:There is _no_ reason to stick with Netscape
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 2
Javascript is supported more than just "pretty good". If you're talking about DOM support this statement makes a little more sense. Mozilla does not support all of the Communicator 4.x and IE proprietary DOM stuff. Layers implemented using the Comm. 4.x or IE methods will not work in Mozilla but Layers implemented using W3C standards should work, for example.
Yes, please include URLs when relevant and if you know what actions caused the crash please include steps to reproduce in the comment box. When we get many talkback reports with the same stacktrace but none of the reports have steps to repro it can make fixing the crash more difficult. Thanks for your help in testing Mozilla and reporting problems.
--Asa
You keep an eye on frequent crasher bugs by querying Bugzilla keyword 'topcrash'.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll miss the favicon's in the title bar and bookmarks, and the ability to enable cookies and JavaScript on a per-site basis.
You can enable cookies and JavaScript on a per site basis. You can go one step further too. You can disable specific bits of JS on a per domain basis. You can, for example block a group of sites from opening new windows or resizing your window. You could block a site from moving your windows or altering the status bar text. See Configurable Security Policies for more information.
--Asa
Well, when confronted with a fact like 'bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled,' one shouldn't immediately go on apologetic flights of fancy which result in such ineptitudes as 'there's more users so there's twice as many bug submissions! DUH!.' when there's no evidence backing it up.
"bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled" is not a fact. It doesn't even make sense. Doubled what? Doubled since yesterday? Doubled since the beginning of the project? Doubled in volume?
Bug submissions certainly have not doubled in volume in recent history. We get between 100 and 300 bug reports a day and this has been steady for quite a while. About half of those are immediately marked as Invalid, Duplicate or Worksforme by the growing numbers of active testers and Bugzilla account holders. We have over 15,000 active Bugzilla accounts and that number is growing (accellerating, even). And that is a fact.
--Asa
Point here is that 1.0 has meaning to me, should it be fairly robust I will encourage my friends to use it and install it on a bunch of machines that I don't update with every release.
What if Mozilla 0.9.8 is "fairly robust"? Will you not encourage others to use it because it is not called 1.0? What if the plans for 0.9.9 and 1.0 do not include any improvements in the "robust"ness of the app? Is is useful to hold off recommending it until the magic number 1.0 happens? What if we had never moved from the Mx Milestone naming scheme? We'd be at about Milestone M26 now. Would you wait until it hit M30 or M50 or maybe M100 before encouraging others to use it?
Of course, they are not going to fix 1500 bugs by v1.0
Actually, we average about 1500 bugs fixed every Milestone (about every 5 to 6 weeks). So I sure hope we can fix at least that many in the Milestones we have between now and 1.0.
BTW, I appreciate the sentiment of your comments. Don't take my nits as anything but nits and my questions as genuine curiosity.
--Asa
The incoming bug rate is NOT DOUBLING. I don't know if that is some figure you got from MozillaQuest (reason enough to discount it) or if you actually went to the source (bugzilla.mozilla.org) but someone got their queries/reports confused. The bug charts show that the rate has been pretty much steady for a long time. The only interesting thing about this graph (that the person reporting the doubling nonsense obviously was confused about) is the rise in New and the drop in Assigned. Bugs start out as New and get marked Assigned when a developer decides the bug is his. In late 2000 we stopped sending out a 'nag' email that urged developers to accept their New bugs. When we stopped sending that mail the Accepting dropped off. The incoming bug rate has not changed significantly and neither has the fix rate.
--Asa
The rate of incoming bugs has been pretty steady for some time. With 15,000+ active Bugzilla accounts it is not at all strange to see 300 bugs reported in a single day. Anyone who takes a minute to look closer will see a couple of important trends in these numbers. First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code. Second, the overall average severity of incoming bug reports has been going down for some time so that while the volume of incoming bugs hasn't changed a lot, the kinds of issues being reported are more polish issues that development or testing blocker issues.
I have been involved in organizing the Mozilla community quality assurance and testing effort for more than two years and I can say with confidence that the project is at a much higher quality level than it was 2 years ago, 1 year ago, 6 months ago (grab M9, M16 or 0.8 and compare for yourself). Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.
--Asa
I just want to make sure it is very clear to slashdot readers that MozillaQuest is in no way connected with or affiliated with mozilla.org. Do not be confused by the name or the 'borrowed' mozilla graphics (mostly gone now I believe). MozillaQuest is a series of articles written by Mike Angelo who has no connection to mozilla.org or any 'inside information' about the goings on of the Mozilla project. mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site but the requests went pretty much unanswered and so we've turned to simply ignoring the site. It is a shame that slashdot, a place that many in the open source community turn for information, continues to point its readers at this kind of sensationalism.
--Asa
(my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or mozilla.org)
* Some limited support. Netscape will more than likely release another minor update in a few months to catch any top crashers. It will also release updates for any security issues that arise. With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone.
correction, with Mozilla you must wait for the next _nightly_ release. You don't have to wait for a milestone. About avery 12 hours a new build for mac, win32 and linux is made off of the tip of the development trunk. To suggest that updates from Netscape come any faster than updates to Mozilla is plain silly. Even if you were just talking about Milestones, we had about 7 of those between Netscape 6 and 6.1
-Asa
a few corrections.
o ft wareLicenses
Sometime less than a year ago mozilla.org announced intentions to (begin) work toward a dual licensing scheme with the _MPL_ (not NPL) and the GPL or LGPL. This is not as easy as flipping a switch and saying "done." It will require contacting the hundreds of developers that have checked in millions of lines of code in thousands of files and getting agreement. More than "absolutely nothing" has been done about it. The list of contributors is being constructed. The research and discussions about the options available (dual with GPL or LGPL or modifications to MPL) is happening. Big projects don't happen overnight.
Where do you hear these "people talking about Mozilla and it's GPL nature"? I hear people talking about it and it's MPL nature. You're right when you say "Mozilla is not GPL at all". It isn't. It's MPL and NPL.
If you don't consider Mozilla free then you have a fundamental disagreement with stallman and the fsf who say the MPL is a free software license (GPL incompatable but free).
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#S
--Asa
Mozilla doesn't play well with a couple of proxy servers. Do you have junkbuster or something like that? have you tried disabling that?
--Asa
Now, if people started to make real XUL applications... (A web browser is definitely not the best way to browse slashdot messages, for instance).
FORUMZILLA ROCKS!
--Asa
0.9.1 is old. 0.9.2 is better (don't know if we have a fizzilla build yet). right now fizzilla doesn't come with PSM (security module). This should change very soon and fizzilla builds will also start to become available daily.
--Asa
you can turn this off Edit|Preferences|Navigator|Smart Browsing|Enable Internet Keywords. you will still have to tab to the search item on the popup to initiate a search. I believe you can edit the location to change the keyword lookup to take you to Google's 'feeling lucky' results instead of Netscape's database results. To do this try editing all.js (found in C:\Program Files\Mozilla\bin\defaults\pref for me) to replace the netscape URL with a Google URL
--Asa
in Mozilla:
Tasks|Privacy and Security|Cookie Manager
there's also |Image Manager for controlling killing those pseky banner ads.
--Asa
"2. new autocomplete widget - now works like a combo of IE and NS 4.x complete, but better than both (uses any site in your history file). Has an option to search for keywords thru Netscape at the bottom of the list, tho i wish this were google instead. "
Edit|Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet Search -> Default Search Engine.
You can select any of the search engines for the autocomplete popup. Mozilla search engined are based on sherlock technology so there are literally hundreds of them available (including Google, which I am using right now).
--Asa
The bookmarks problem is actually pretty easy. Bug 71685 Bookmarks in Sidebar are blank. This affects you if you have used the sidebar blank bookmarks workaround or your profile was created between early March and late May. If you have a pre ~11 March profile for which you never used the sidebar blank bookmarks workaround or a post ~23 May profile this probably doesn't affect you.
If you have a profile which was created before about March 11 and you used the workaround between about March 11 and May 23 then you will have to use the workaround again. If you have a profile which was created between about March 11 and May 23 then you will have to use the workaround now.
Workaround:
1. open browser
2. view sidebar
3. click "Tabs" button at top right of sidebar
4. select "Customize Sidebar" menuitem
5. select "Bookmarks" from "Tabs in My Sidebar" list
6. click the "Remove" button below the list of "Tabs in My sidebar"
7. click OK
8. click "Tabs" button at top right of sidebar
9. select "Customize Sidebar" menuitem
10 select "Bookmarks" from "Available Tabs" list
11 click the "Add" button below the list of "Available Tabs" list
12 click OK
note: just unchecking the tab from the "Tabs>" menu and rechecking it will not fix the problem. --Asa
not sure if it's still working (I think I saw a bug recently) but you should be able to put this in your prefs.js file to controll image animations.
// Image animation mode: normal, once, none.
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");
--Asa
Yes! BeOS support!. I just left it off the lsit. Sorry. --Asa
The UI hasn't been implemented yet (there's a bug on file) but the backend for this has been around for a while. See Configurable Security Policies and from the release notes page:
t s/configPolicy.html
n te rnal.open","noAccess");
r na l.open","noAccess");
// Use configurable security policies to override popups, see
// http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/componen
// Turn window.open off for particular sites:
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowi
// Or turn it off everywhere:
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinte
// Override popping up new windows on target=anything
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true);
--Asa
"arch thats not supported by the moz team? Like *BSD or anything else"
Not supported?!? Did you look at the builds that were posted for 0.9? Mozilla is a Cross Platform (XP) application. If you've got a platform Mozilla can probably be compiled for it. (feel free to snicker with vic20 and c64 comments)
Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001 (one month ago)
Win32
MacOS 8.5 - 9.0
Linux
AIX
DG/UX
Irix
OpenVMS
OS/2
HPUX
FreeBSD
BSD/OS (bsdi)
Solaris
Tru64 Unix
Slashdot editors posted a comment which was clearly stolen from http://www.mozillazine.org It would be nice to see a little more integrity from the slashdot editorial staff. Checkin sources, reading referenced links, etc. would go a long way to improving the value this site brings to it's users and the Web in general.
--Asa
"Still doesn't recognize external mailers, probably never will"
We're accepting patches. If it matters enough to you to post to slashdot then why not organize an effort to fix it.
--Asa
I suspect that your problem was attempting to load sites with TLS (SSL 3.1) enabled where the site didn't support TLS. Mozilla nightly builds now gracefully downgrade to SSL3 when they encounter these misconfigured or out of date servers. The fix didn't make it into the Milestone but we did set the pref for TLS to off (you can reenable it Edit|Preferences Privacy and Security -> SSL -> Enable TLS) as the Milestone default so you should have better luck visiting SSL sites.
--Asa
--Asa
Patience. Source tarball should be there in the next 24 hours. It's a lot of work to get it all together and we'd rather give out what we have when we have it then make everyone wait until we have hte last of the 30 or 40 builds we put up each Milestone.
--Asa
Javascript is supported more than just "pretty good". If you're talking about DOM support this statement makes a little more sense. Mozilla does not support all of the Communicator 4.x and IE proprietary DOM stuff. Layers implemented using the Comm. 4.x or IE methods will not work in Mozilla but Layers implemented using W3C standards should work, for example.
--Asa
Yes, please include URLs when relevant and if you know what actions caused the crash please include steps to reproduce in the comment box. When we get many talkback reports with the same stacktrace but none of the reports have steps to repro it can make fixing the crash more difficult. Thanks for your help in testing Mozilla and reporting problems.
--Asa
You keep an eye on frequent crasher bugs by querying Bugzilla keyword 'topcrash'.