As Firefox started gaining momentum, some people (I seem to remember Scott Finney of www.scotsnewsletter.com fame claiming a difference in near-1.0 days) claimed differences
Not that it's the main point of your post, but the Mozilla Suite and Firefox and even Camino (barring any Mac-specific styling on widgets) should render all pages exactly the same. At least, versions from the same era (like Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 1.0, or the forthcoming SeaMonkey 1.0 and Firefox 1.5). Both programs are built on top of the Gecko rendering engine, it's mainly the user-facing code like the GUI and extension mechanisms that would be different. I'd be interested to see any site that renders differently in two programs based on the same revision of Gecko.
I can't believe people are taking that article seriously. It has to be some sort of bizarre joke on the part of The Register. Ignoring the ridiculous premise, take a look at the content of the article. It's written by someone calling himself "Bonhomie Snoutintroff", which should give you an idea of what to expect. He calls the EFF "pale vegetarians", and the media "pigopolists". What does that even mean? At the end of the article, there is a registered trademark symbol for no reason.
Here is the Register's summary of Mr. Snoutinroff's career: "Bonhomie Snoutintroff is a plain-spoken strong leader in cyberspace. He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous, well-known Internet ventures that for various reasons unrelated to his forward-looking guidance no longer exist. He developed a cocaine and alcohol problem, although he refuses to dwell on the past: his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession. His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility."
Google has exactly one other article written by Mr. Snoutinroff (from 2000) which is equally ridiculous.
At least to me, it seems like someone at the Register got bored and somehow Slashdot turned it into a crusade. Which I guess really shouldn't come as a surprise : ).
Have you had these problems in one of the recent Firefox 1.5 release candidates? I know they've fixed a lot of leaks since 1.0, although some remain.
I think the reason these bugs don't get fixed isn't laziness so much as it is that they're just plain hard to track down. Most of the memory leak bugs in Bugzilla are along the lines of "I used Mozilla and now my system is slow". Some of the worse leaks also seem to be very machine-dependant (certain video drivers, versions of plugins, etc) making it even harder for developers to pinpoint a fix. Maybe that's more of a rationalization than an excuse, but it's not like the Mozilla developers want their code to be leaky, and it's a harder problem to fix than many people realize.
IANAMD (I am not a Mozilla developer), but I assume there is no RC2 in the version string because for once they are actually adhering to the meaning of "release candidate". If they find no show-stopping bugs in this build, the exact same file you just downloaded will be rechristened "Firefox 1.5". If they had to change anything (even the version string), it wasn't technically a "candidate for release".
I'm currently in the second month (of six) of a software quality engineering internship at Bose, and definitely enjoying the experience more than any of my previous internships. At this point they have a large and mature internship program, so you don't get crap jobs or get swept under the rug by management. I can't say for sure whether it's the tight scheduling constraints of the project I was assigned to, or the way they usually conduct their internships, but right off the bat I had a lot of autonomy and responsibility for a first-time intern.
Like any job, it has its ups and downs, but I'd recommend interning at Bose to anyone interested in getting into software testing as a career, or interested in breaking into development of embedded systems. Sure beats my previous CS internship where I basically spent 6 months making Powerpoint slides...
Re:Why is this important?
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it might be that the ice on the poles is frozen CO2 (like "dry ice"), whereas this is frozen H20. At least that's what I inferred fromt he article.
A lot of memory / resource leaks have been fixed since 1.0 came out; when the 1.1 beta comes out in the next few weeks, you might give it a whirl and see if it's any better for you.
I've been annoyed that Greasemonkey doesn't work with it either, but apparently it was actually a bug in Greasemonkey and will be fixed in their next release. Read that here while I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on:) http://bugzilla.mozdev.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10173
I imagine that while landfill runs the most absolutely up-to-date version, the massive traffic on b.m.o probably reveals at least as many issues as the "real" test site.
Agreed! Having Firefox open external links in a new tab rather than hijacking the current one is extremely convenient. That and sorting bookmarks were two features that seemed like no-brainers but took almost Firefox's entire lifespan to get implemented. Glad they made it:).
I always wondered about that optical mouse thing. A few years ago, when MS' version was relatively new, I bought one that stopped working pretty quickly. Went through their tech support process, and after trying a few simple steps (like "is it plugged in?") they just told me they'd send a new one, no questions asked. Best support I ever got from MS:). Interesting to hear that others had the same experience.
For what it's worth, this is how recent Mozilla releases have worked pretty much; put out a build, and if there's no showstoppers, it gets renamed to Final. And yes, I agree that it is completely nonsensical to schedule more than one "release candidate":).
This is probably OT, but I followed your link and I'm curious as to how to interpret Sec. 109(b). Does this really say you are not allowed to re-sell a CD or computer program you've legally purchased? Maybe I just don't know the legal meaning of "notwithstanding", but that section confuses me. It seems to say in section 109(a) that you can sell your copy, but then directly afterward say "subsection a does not apply". I guess people treat "legalese" as a seperate language for a reason:).
I downloaded it in Firefox, which last time I checked doesn't run ActiveX. So I think it's pretty safe to say there's no serial check going on, or at least they aren't trying very hard.
I'm more excited about the games that will be created based on the Doom 3 engine than Doom 3 itself (as has often been the case with id). D3 looks alright, but I'm much more interested to see what future designers will turn it into.
That said, HL2 looks about on par technologically and stands a very good chance of being a Game of the Year candidate.
There's also a "printable version" if you don't care to click through multiple pages, or want to help save GameDev survive Slashdotting slightly longer.
Thunderbird already has integrated significant improvements based on SpamBayes, I believe. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230093 , which was closed about a month ago. The test data from that patch is encouraging, although obviously results will be different for everyone since not everyone gets the same type of spam. If you want to keep tabs on upcoming refinements to junk mail filtering, take a look at the dependencies of this meta bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228674 . Please don't "spam" up that bug with comments though, if you have something to say put it in a specific bug or file a new one if something relelvant doesn't exist.
I don't believe that vulnerability exists anymore in Firefox 0.9 / Mozilla 1.7. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238684 if you're interested in the details, but basically that patch made unrequested attempts to install an XPI illegal, sort of like how the pop-up blocker works. You have to click a link or something along those lines for the request to be valid.
I actually took a look at this after seeing your post, since that glitch pisses me off too. It looks like it's not as simple as it seems to fix...I found the proper place in the code to change, but it had dire warnings that the search should be case-sensitive due to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121478 . They acknowledge that making the search case sensitive introduced this new bug we're seeing, but I guess the old one was deemed more important/annoying. There's probably a way for both fixes to co-exist, but nothing jumps out at me.
Every time there's a Mozilla story on Slashdot, several people make this comment and they all get modded up to +5. SeaMonkey (the suite) receives a very small amount of the official "Mozilla Foundation" support. It's essentially in maintenance mode, with only relatively minor work being done to it. Now *Gecko*, and the Mozilla-as-platform work, are still actively maintained, but that's not the same as working on SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey happens to benefit from work on Gecko, since both it, Firefox and Thunderbird run on the same engine, but a very small percentage of work going on now is beneficial only to SeaMonkey.
Compare the new features in Mozilla 1.7 to the new features in Firefox 0.9/Thunderbird 0.7. I think you'll find very few that are limited exclusively to SeaMonkey, and vastly more that are found in the new apps but not the suite. The suite is minimally supported because some major coporations and organizations have rolled it out and contribute back code, money, etc. to keep it going, but it's definitely not even close to the main development focus as the new apps are.
For what it's worth, this is in Bugzilla as bug 101611 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10161 1), but there hasn't been any sort of work done on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe people are taking that article seriously. It has to be some sort of bizarre joke on the part of The Register. Ignoring the ridiculous premise, take a look at the content of the article. It's written by someone calling himself "Bonhomie Snoutintroff", which should give you an idea of what to expect. He calls the EFF "pale vegetarians", and the media "pigopolists". What does that even mean? At the end of the article, there is a registered trademark symbol for no reason.
Here is the Register's summary of Mr. Snoutinroff's career: "Bonhomie Snoutintroff is a plain-spoken strong leader in cyberspace. He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous, well-known Internet ventures that for various reasons unrelated to his forward-looking guidance no longer exist. He developed a cocaine and alcohol problem, although he refuses to dwell on the past: his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession. His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility."
Google has exactly one other article written by Mr. Snoutinroff (from 2000) which is equally ridiculous.
At least to me, it seems like someone at the Register got bored and somehow Slashdot turned it into a crusade. Which I guess really shouldn't come as a surprise : ).
Have you had these problems in one of the recent Firefox 1.5 release candidates? I know they've fixed a lot of leaks since 1.0, although some remain.
I think the reason these bugs don't get fixed isn't laziness so much as it is that they're just plain hard to track down. Most of the memory leak bugs in Bugzilla are along the lines of "I used Mozilla and now my system is slow". Some of the worse leaks also seem to be very machine-dependant (certain video drivers, versions of plugins, etc) making it even harder for developers to pinpoint a fix. Maybe that's more of a rationalization than an excuse, but it's not like the Mozilla developers want their code to be leaky, and it's a harder problem to fix than many people realize.
I was hoping a fellow metalhead would make the Iron Maiden reference in this article :). Mod points to you if I had 'em.
IANAMD (I am not a Mozilla developer), but I assume there is no RC2 in the version string because for once they are actually adhering to the meaning of "release candidate". If they find no show-stopping bugs in this build, the exact same file you just downloaded will be rechristened "Firefox 1.5". If they had to change anything (even the version string), it wasn't technically a "candidate for release".
None of them fazes 1.5 beta builds either as far as I can tell, at least on Windows 2000 here at work. No trouble at all loading any of those pages.
I'm currently in the second month (of six) of a software quality engineering internship at Bose, and definitely enjoying the experience more than any of my previous internships. At this point they have a large and mature internship program, so you don't get crap jobs or get swept under the rug by management. I can't say for sure whether it's the tight scheduling constraints of the project I was assigned to, or the way they usually conduct their internships, but right off the bat I had a lot of autonomy and responsibility for a first-time intern.
Like any job, it has its ups and downs, but I'd recommend interning at Bose to anyone interested in getting into software testing as a career, or interested in breaking into development of embedded systems. Sure beats my previous CS internship where I basically spent 6 months making Powerpoint slides...
I think it might be that the ice on the poles is frozen CO2 (like "dry ice"), whereas this is frozen H20. At least that's what I inferred fromt he article.
A lot of memory / resource leaks have been fixed since 1.0 came out; when the 1.1 beta comes out in the next few weeks, you might give it a whirl and see if it's any better for you.
I've been annoyed that Greasemonkey doesn't work with it either, but apparently it was actually a bug in Greasemonkey and will be fixed in their next release. Read that here while I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on :) http://bugzilla.mozdev.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10173
I imagine that while landfill runs the most absolutely up-to-date version, the massive traffic on b.m.o probably reveals at least as many issues as the "real" test site.
Agreed! Having Firefox open external links in a new tab rather than hijacking the current one is extremely convenient. That and sorting bookmarks were two features that seemed like no-brainers but took almost Firefox's entire lifespan to get implemented. Glad they made it :).
I always wondered about that optical mouse thing. A few years ago, when MS' version was relatively new, I bought one that stopped working pretty quickly. Went through their tech support process, and after trying a few simple steps (like "is it plugged in?") they just told me they'd send a new one, no questions asked. Best support I ever got from MS :). Interesting to hear that others had the same experience.
Agreed...if you want to see a true example of a movie that is simply awful , without even Ed Wood's reeeming quality, check out Robot Ninja.
...actually, on second thought, DON'T!!
For what it's worth, this is how recent Mozilla releases have worked pretty much; put out a build, and if there's no showstoppers, it gets renamed to Final. And yes, I agree that it is completely nonsensical to schedule more than one "release candidate" :).
This is probably OT, but I followed your link and I'm curious as to how to interpret Sec. 109(b). Does this really say you are not allowed to re-sell a CD or computer program you've legally purchased? Maybe I just don't know the legal meaning of "notwithstanding", but that section confuses me. It seems to say in section 109(a) that you can sell your copy, but then directly afterward say "subsection a does not apply". I guess people treat "legalese" as a seperate language for a reason :).
I downloaded it in Firefox, which last time I checked doesn't run ActiveX. So I think it's pretty safe to say there's no serial check going on, or at least they aren't trying very hard.
I'm more excited about the games that will be created based on the Doom 3 engine than Doom 3 itself (as has often been the case with id). D3 looks alright, but I'm much more interested to see what future designers will turn it into. That said, HL2 looks about on par technologically and stands a very good chance of being a Game of the Year candidate.
There's also a "printable version" if you don't care to click through multiple pages, or want to help save GameDev survive Slashdotting slightly longer.
Thunderbird already has integrated significant improvements based on SpamBayes, I believe. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230093 , which was closed about a month ago. The test data from that patch is encouraging, although obviously results will be different for everyone since not everyone gets the same type of spam. If you want to keep tabs on upcoming refinements to junk mail filtering, take a look at the dependencies of this meta bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228674 . Please don't "spam" up that bug with comments though, if you have something to say put it in a specific bug or file a new one if something relelvant doesn't exist.
I don't believe that vulnerability exists anymore in Firefox 0.9 / Mozilla 1.7. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238684 if you're interested in the details, but basically that patch made unrequested attempts to install an XPI illegal, sort of like how the pop-up blocker works. You have to click a link or something along those lines for the request to be valid.
I actually took a look at this after seeing your post, since that glitch pisses me off too. It looks like it's not as simple as it seems to fix...I found the proper place in the code to change, but it had dire warnings that the search should be case-sensitive due to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121478 . They acknowledge that making the search case sensitive introduced this new bug we're seeing, but I guess the old one was deemed more important/annoying. There's probably a way for both fixes to co-exist, but nothing jumps out at me.
d rbook/src/nsAbAddressCollecter.cpp#89
BTW, if you're curious, this is the function in question: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/mailnews/ad
Every time there's a Mozilla story on Slashdot, several people make this comment and they all get modded up to +5. SeaMonkey (the suite) receives a very small amount of the official "Mozilla Foundation" support. It's essentially in maintenance mode, with only relatively minor work being done to it. Now *Gecko*, and the Mozilla-as-platform work, are still actively maintained, but that's not the same as working on SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey happens to benefit from work on Gecko, since both it, Firefox and Thunderbird run on the same engine, but a very small percentage of work going on now is beneficial only to SeaMonkey.
Compare the new features in Mozilla 1.7 to the new features in Firefox 0.9/Thunderbird 0.7. I think you'll find very few that are limited exclusively to SeaMonkey, and vastly more that are found in the new apps but not the suite. The suite is minimally supported because some major coporations and organizations have rolled it out and contribute back code, money, etc. to keep it going, but it's definitely not even close to the main development focus as the new apps are.
For what it's worth, this is in Bugzilla as bug 101611 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10161 1), but there hasn't been any sort of work done on it.