Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 0.7 Released 209

Posted by michael from the 10,000-guinea-pigs dept.
mpt writes: "Mozilla 0.7 has been released. This is the first release with PSM (the Personal Security Manager) included on Win32, Mac OS, and Linux, so secure sites should work without extra fiddling. Other noticable changes since 0.6 include better mousewheel behavior, Microsoft Proxy Server support, treating maximized windows properly on Win32, and numerous performance improvements (especially for NNTP). So try it out, and report dem bugs." Since Mozilla.org and Mozillazine are now reporting this, we figure the mirrors have had time to update. :)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Mozilla 0.7 released More

Mozilla 0.7 released

Comments Filter:
  • please make sure the bugs also occur in a recent nightly build [mozilla.org]. Mozilla 0.7 branched about two weeks ago so your bug might have been fixed since then.

    By the way, today's nightlies are pretty good [mozillazine.org] - several recent regressions were fixed. Two new bugs in today's builds that weren't in 0.7: links on some pages are ignored [mozilla.org] and home page isn't displayed on startup under Win32 when using -console option [mozilla.org].

  • Anything like this for Win32? It would be nice!

    Sure: http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/ [mozillazine.org]

    I run Debian/Linux, and use that "build bar" to decide when to upgrade. It should be fine for Win32 users as well.

    At the pace the Mozilla project is going, 0.7 is going to be obselete in a week, so keep the link handy.

    - Dr. Foo Barson

  • I d/l'ed Mozilla 0.7 for Linux, and it is much nicer than the previous versions. All the sites I visited, with the exception of one (www.jesusdressup.com [jesusdressup.com])loaded smoothly.

    My only real issue right now is stability. It seems to crash about every 15-20 minutes. But, then again it is still in development, so I expect that when they do hit 1.0 (hell, 0.8) this will be a thing of the past.

    Good job, keep up the good work.

  • On X you are able to set the window to "no background color" (actually this is the default) and it does nothing except send the Expose event to the application.

    This is actually much faster, and certainly simpler. It is faster because the area is only drawn once (it is extremely hard to make the program's redraw be able to assumme the area is already erased, since the same code must be used for incremental update when there is no damage, and I doubt Mozilla does this).

    More importantly this reduces blinking. For Mozilla which must change the background color for each page, except for a single background color (gray, probably) it will blink to gray and then to the correct color for every page. Even if the color is fixed, or even if background pixmaps are used, it will still blink when a large image or table in a different color is drawn in that area.

    Blinking is very annoying and is the primary reason X displays often look like crap when you move windows.

    I very much believe this is the correct behavior. I would like to see X fixed so that resizing and mapping windows, and in fact everything except drawing commands from the programs does not alter pixels on the screen. This would vastly reduce the annoying flashing behavior.

    The fact that Mozilla is so slow that you would prefer to see the solid gray (actually a very slow version of this "blink") is of course Mozilla's fault, but erasing windows is not the solution.

  • -plugins...

    You mean like what I can setup by editing my user specific $HOME/.mozilla/$moz_profile_name/plugin.list file? You know, the one that's user configurable and everything.

    --
    "Don't trolls get tired?"

  • still slower... (Score:3)

    by mosch ( 204 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @03:30AM (#518162) Homepage
    still slower than ns 4.x

    it's slower to start a window, but page rendering tends to actually be faster than 4.7, with the notable exception of soros.ath.cx [soros.ath.cx] which is still faster on 4.7. Slashdot, on the other hand, renders faster in mozilla than ns47, when I hit one of those 500 comment articles, that I read in nested mode.

    --
    "Don't trolls get tired?"

  • HP/UX is not a fringe operating system, Mozilla supporter.


    It is from a Desktop user perspective.

    I'd venture to say that Linux has a bigger space in the desktop/workstation market then HP-UX (although I'd bet most of those are develpment machines in people's homes vs. in the workplace).

    Oh.. and I started using the nightly build from 7/5 as my main browser recently. A little wonkieness certainly, (sometimes downloading files bombs out with an odd message followed by the browser crashing soon after), but it seems to do much better than NS4.08 (which is now my secondary browser), and almost on par with IE5.0 (my tertiary browser... or was that part of my OS? ::grin::)

    YMMV but I think they should be ready for a release candidate real soon. The installer even let me pick to just install the browser which made me a very happy camper indeed :)

  • OK, so this is the Stupid Question of the week, but maybe I am not the only one wondering.

    Are these 0.x releases:
    a) a continutation of the Mxx releases (Milestones) with a new name (to show that they are approaching 1.0); or
    b) a forked development started by Netscape 6 with the Milestones development abandoned (say, a branched development like GCC->EGCS->GCC but then more planned); or
    c) a forked development started by Netscape 6 that stands independent of the Milestone builds (something like GCC->EGCS before these two developments met again)?

    Thanks in advance.

    It's... It's...
  • Even better....they fixed that date, but now 0.6 says it was released in December of 2001. Wow!
  • seems a wee bit faster and more stable than 0.6. If they can improve it a little more it will be fine.
  • On win32 it installed java and for the little I used it it seemed preaty stable, but I turned it off as soon as I remembered I had to dither with the settings :)

    (don't like java unless I ask for it)

    (posting from the 5/1/01 nightly build)

  • Re:Don't bother bashing Mozilla. (Score:4)

    by Elladan ( 17598 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @03:59AM (#518168)

    This isn't really valid -- look at some of the other good browsers available (Konqueror and Opera for Linux, and IE for 'doze) and you'll notice that all of them smoke the living daylights out of Mozilla, while providing quite capable DOM and reflow (better than Mozilla's, in most cases!).

    Sure, they can be a bit pokey at times doing one thing or another, but in general, they just haul compared to the 'zilla.

    Really, Mozilla being incredibly slow is probably not really because of the rendering engine being sluggish (though it could probably use some usability tuning). It's more due to the horribly designed theming engine and widget set, as you surmised. A quick look at Galeon should convince anyone of this, and also hint at the even greater speedup that could appear if it was dumped completely.

    I recall doing some cheezy benchmarks a couple months ago, and found that on the same machine, rendering a page with a bunch of text boxes (thus hitting the XUL junk hard), IE and Netscape 4.75 were both between 20 and 40 times faster than Mozilla (and had better layout usability as well -- Mozilla just had a blank screen, while IE laid out the table incrementally. NS4 didn't, but didn't freeze up either, or at least, was so fast it didn't appear to freeze up).

    Eg., NS and IE laid out the page in under 2 seconds, while Mozilla took more than 20. Taking into account the ~1s server generation lag to create the page, that's rather bad. And, of course, since Mozilla is a massive threaded app, instead of forking off children as it should, it froze up completely during rendering in all windows.

    Actually, usability speed, as opposed to "real" speed, is one of the big problems with Mozilla right now. It's often fairly comparable with other browsers at producing a finished product of a page, but is very, very slow in terms of the UI feel. Status bars don't update often, gizmos don't pulse and flash, the page doesn't flash on quickly and then get reflowed, etc. The end result is that it's slow to begin with, and once the nasty UI is through with it, it seems like the days of the 386 have escaped to haunt us.

  • For some reason, my M16 install decided one day to stop running any plug-ins. Ergo, no Flash (no Thugs on Film! Henious!), no Real Audio (no Car Talk!), and Plugger never worked. Do plug-ins work on M17? Has anyone else seen this on M16?

    I've removed the both the Mozilla install and the .mozilla directory several times to try to clean this up, to no avail...
  • I used to have problems with it losing mail in the old milestone releases. Since I got .6, though, it's now my primary mail client. I used to use Netscape mail, since I am a Windows convert and text-based email just doesn't do it for me.

    As for the news reader, that's supposed to be greatly improved with this new version. I guess I'll find out when I get it.

    +++

  • Hohoho... You are a funny man. Mozilla is going to be very important in the next couple years. If IE becomes the only viable browser (and to me it was for the last year or two) then Microsoft will have more control than is good for them over the implementation of outside specs.

    Even if people don't use it Mozilla is important simply for that reason. And people will use it...

  • Re:What's the x86 Linux Java support like? (Score:3)

    by Zimm ( 94553 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @08:39PM (#518172)
    Java support being about the only thing keeping me using NS4.x. . .

    Works better then NS4.x and yes i'm talking about the x86 Linux version. It uses the jkd1.3 jvm from sun. Just get the browser and go to a java site like java.sun.com, a popup will ask you if you wish to install the jdk plugin say yes, and your done. I use the nighly builds, and i'll never go back to Netscape 4x

  • In my experience, any URL will do, given enough chances.
  • From the Compatibility Information [mozilla.org]:

    For Red Hat Linux 7, you must install the Standard C++ libraries for Red Hat 6.x compatibility. Get the package from the Red Hat 7 installation CD or download it from Red Hat [redhat.com]. (Bug 59012 [mozilla.org])

    --
  • I have yet to find an IE-only website that is worth going to. Even among the plug-ins, the only ones that seem useful (and only rarely at that) are Java and Flash4.
  • Apart from Konquorer - who the gnome zealots won't use

    I really like Konqueror [konqueror.org]. I think it is much faster than Mozilla, and when it works it works really well. Unfortunately Konqueror is not yet as stable as Mozilla---Konqueror seems to blow up about 3 times more frequently than Mozilla, and it doesn't work with Datek.

    BTW, I use Gnome as my desktop and Konqueror as my browser.

  • From the Installation Notes [mozilla.org]:

    Before installing on Linux, you must have write permission for the target installation directory. (Bug 46588 [mozilla.org])

    So it's saying that I need +w in the install directory when I install Mozilla? No way!

    --
  • Seriously, I don't understand the criticisms of Mozilla. I hate Netscape 6, but Mozilla .6 was fine, fine software. Sure there were bugs, but it's a huge product and it's still in the pre-1.0 releases, so you expect it to be somewhat unfinished. I'll tell you what - M.6 was much faster and must less annoyingly hypercommercial than was N6.

    I'm also a web developer interested in the cusps of DOM and CSS and the consistent cross-platform highly-compliant nature of Mozilla means I can develop with these new technologies and refer visitors to Mozilla if the pages don't render.

    So I really look forward to using M.7. I've been using nightly builds a lot in the past couple weeks anticipating the .7 release and every build is a bit better than the previous. I applaud the Mozilla effort.

    MyopicProwls

  • Waah, roaming access yet (yeah I know, d/l the source and hack it in..)?

  • Actually, it's worse. According to the installation notes:
    If you are installing Mozilla on a multi-user operating system such as Linux, Unix, or Windows 2000, you should install it separately in the user directory of each user who plans to use Mozilla. (Bug 42184) If you install Mozilla in a shared write-protected directory, it may not run properly. (Bugs 42184, 41057 )
    This could quickly fill up a real multi-user system. Though I'm not sure how to compromise between allowing users to upgrade/add plugins/language packs/themes/etc and not allowing users to write to the directory with the binaries.
  • Wow, I know people complain about the releases being behind schedule, but now their going backwards.

  • A light Mozilla session vastly overshadows the memory utilization of NS4.x. Infact, it beats Lotus Notes, and other major bloatware. If you leave the process inactive for a while, and the memory utilizaiton hits 50MB or so... it is a real drag to click on an icon as everything very slowly returns from swap. I hope these are memory leaks... and if so, that they're correctable.

    Does anybody who has the source code know what it taking up all that RAM?

    OTOH, NS4.x and IE5 run on minimal hardware such as Windows 3.1 machines with 8M of ram (don't run Java unless you have 16 or so)

  • You shouldn't run it as root. If it had an exploit someone could do nasty things to your machine.

    (Yeah, I go it :)
  • I'm running Mozilla 0.7 on a K63-450 with 80M of RAM. The motherboard is an older VX97 chipset model that only supports a 66MHz bus. 0.7 works much better than previous releases did. I actually enjoyed using it last night, which was a first for Mozilla. The slugging performance always kept me using Netscape 4 until now.

    I'm running Debian/GNU Linux with Windowmaker as my window manager.

    Jeff
  • I went to Dl 0.7 and checked the date: "Mozilla 0.7 - Completed January 9, 2001" then i scroled down and saw: "Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2001" Anyone know how to tell them that there date is wrong.. or i realy sleeped in this morning. :)
  • Quick question for the mozilla insiders: Does this release support S/MIME? If not, will that be available anytime soon? (Missing S/MIME support is what forces me to use 4.76...)
  • Too bad Netscape wouldn't wait a a couple months to have incorparted this.
  • > If you quit Mozilla the start it again (assuming
    > it starts) it's quite fast and.. dare I say it...
    > faster than IE5.5 on machine.

    This is mostly due to mozilla still being cached by the OS in memory, not because of some option to stay in memory.
  • nah. IE3 sucked hard too. Even 4.0 wasn't that good. But with 5.0 the gap got a little out of hand.

    ~
    ~
  • Why's everyone saying they still use Netscape 4 for Java? You can get the Sun 1.3 JRE as a plugin for Mozilla and it works great. Just go here [netscape.com] to get it.

    OK, so it's not free software, but neither is Netscape.

    +++

  • That version would be 1.0, dammit!

    Dancin Santa
  • I believe that is a bug that has been fixed in the latest nightly builds. It probably just didn't make it into 0.7 which branched about 2 weeks ago.
  • You know, you suffer from the common misunderstanding about freeness. I actually do have friends producing Free software that is FAR from free. Enterprise applications, built on top of reusable GPLed components. Extending and selling their services. This actually can work, and it can empower small shops to compete on a level ground with the big boys.

    In any case, I make more than enough money. I enrich myself every day at work, producing rather non-Free and non-free software which we sell to companies, big and small, for a few hundred thousand dollars a pop, or run as an ASP for several 10s of grands a month.

    In short, I spend a lot of time enriching myself. If my business work involves mostly enriching myself, the other people at my company and our VCs, then so be it. When I come home I like to work on projects that enrich all of us in a different community (we humans are very tribalistic by nature, you know). This other community is the community of *nix hackers and users, people who appreciate software as an art and a craft, people who appreciate technical accomplishments on their own merit.

    So I don't really see the huge difference here. It's all just a matter of what enriches you and your life, and how you perceive yourself in the tribalistic/social framework.

  • See bug # 17048 [mozilla.org]. Contribute if you can.

    --

  • Every program has bugs and crashes. I run the daily builds of Mozilla and the CVS version of Konqueror. You know what? Konqueror crashes just as much as Mozilla, and don't even try to pretend it doesn't. Not to mention Konqueror has nowhere near the capabilities of Mozilla.

    Just a few things Mozilla has that Konqueror doesn't:

    1. Embedded Java *in* the page( apparently this is a limitation of KDE itself or so I'm told by Konqueror developers ). Not to mention that Konqueror crawls when you use it.

    2. VERY limited DOM support( face it, Konqueror DOM support really sucks.. for now )

    3. Slows to a crawl when lots of animated gifs are on the page and/or when a plugin is heavily in use.

    4. Limited to 5 threads( there needs to be an option to change that )

    5. Must have that *Stupid* DCOP server! While not a complete memory hog, it's annoying for those who *don't* use KDE. As a result Mozilla actually starts up *faster* than Konqueror on a fresh start.

    .. and if you want me to keep going I can prolly find more.

    But you know what? Mozilla is *still* a second to Konqueror when I'm browsing the web. This is because of memory usage, and speed once the app is started( and the pages I go to, Konqueror usually does okay ).

    But I have Mozilla waiting in the wings when Konqueror dies( and it does.. *alot* ). And Mozilla works when I use it on URLs that Konqueror dies misably on( and I've had Konqueror take X with it ).

    So before you start saying stuff is horse shit you should probably look at the product your defending. While Konqueror is great, in my book there is a lot of trouble when trying to compare it to Mozilla.

    Posted from Konqueror 1.9.8( CVS 20010106 )

  • Don't bother bashing Mozilla. (Score:5)

    by evil_one ( 142582 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:18PM (#518205) Homepage
    Apart from Konquorer - who the gnome zealots won't use - Mozilla is the only mainstream browser out there for Gnu/Linux users. How many times have you gone to a page only to be turned away because your browser "isn't supported by this website"? Mozilla - being a semi-offical netscape project, will actually have people and companies making scripted sites that will work properly with mozilla. One way that redmond has been trying to keep people away from linux is by not releasing IE for linux - it ensures that some web sites simply won't display on linux.
    The point is this: Mozilla stands to be a real mainstream browser. Don't knock it before it gets a decent chance.
    ---

  • Re:Alternate Architectures (Score:4)

    by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:53PM (#518208) Homepage
    mozilla is looking for contributions of bulds on platforms other than linux, mac and win32. See http://mozilla.org/build/distribution.html
    for info on how to contribute builds to mozilla.org.

    --Asa
  • HP/UX is not a fringe operating system, Mozilla supporter.

  • You don't need year 2000 compliance any more. It's 2001 now.

  • NO, you're putting your question into the place of his, since I answered his.

    I'm curious as to how you think systems should find out that a file exists, if you're not allowed to edit a file or run an 'installation' program. I presume that you're suggesting that ld be modified such that every file on the entire system gets checked to see if it's a library, rather than keeping hints?

    Hint to Spitzak: you ALWAYS need code to run on your computer, if you want something to change. Mozilla currently doesn't follow the first or second rules of UI design though. Those being 'only use one button' and 'if at all possible, make that button press itself'.

    Also, make a mozilla plugin sometime... when you do, you'll discover that all this editing happens auto-magically. The self-clicking button exists, but isn't deployed since nobody in their right minds would bother releasing such things until mozilla is fully matured.

    Go back under your bridge.

    --
    "Don't trolls get tired?"
  • This is a continuation of the milestones. Version numbers make it obvious what version 1 is, and also allows you to release 1.0.6 after 1.2 or whatever as a "stability" release. You can't do that with just one number. 0.6/N6 was branched based on code that was pre-M18, so 0.6 was missing stuff that was in M18. 0.7 is the first numbered release based on the main line from M18 onwards, and we'll see numbered releases from hereon in. I expect we'll see 0.8/N6.5b1, 0.9/N6.5b2, etc from hereon in.

  • I agree, it *is* stupid. But I expect they'll have something this major cleaned up before 1.0.

    About the installation of plugins and such... I think it should be perfectly possible to just have users be able to download their own plugins and things (to be stored in their .mozilla directories) if the sysadmin's Mozilla install doesn't already include it.
  • No, it's neither faster, nor does it avoid blinking, nor is it the default:
    • The "clear area" happens automatically on the server, and it need not happen if the rectangle gets repaired quickly enough by the client.
    • Disabling the clear area doesn't avoid blinking: the area is damaged and a redraw needs to happen anyway. But you will cause unnecessary visual artifacts if you don't set the background color correctly (i.e., to something close to the actual background of the window content for text documents).
    • Netscape 4 did have some blinking issues, but they were minor and avoidable with a better use of the X11 protocol (among other things, the window background should be set to the actual page background.)
    • Clear-to-background isn't new or unusual. It has been like that since X10. It's the default when you create a new window through Xlib. And this functionality is why windows have backgrounds in the first place; otherwise, they wouldn't have to. It's only some recent toolkits that mess with this default and cause havoc in the process.

    In a network transparent window system, you simply cannot guarantee timely redraws. And even local applications cannot do so. Not allowing the server to clear damaged areas often results in visually very confusing displays. Even if clearing did cause some unnecessary flashing (which it doesn't), disabling it would still be a bad tradeoff from a usability point of view. Mozilla is just broken in that regard, as is Qt. Microsoft Windows also gets this wrong, although it is less critical on Windows. Gtk and Tcl/Tk seem to do it right.

    If you really want to avoid flashing, turn on backing store. That's what it is there for. But you have to decide whether the cost is worth it for your application. For Mozilla, it's unnecessary.

  • I see people posting negative comments. However, I was very impressed myself with the last release. It is January 10th 2001, and I have had it running as my only browser process since 2000 (ps aux doesn't give the exact dates for last years processes). I don't understand some of the comments. If a page doesn't follow standards and is designed for IE5 only, its not worth my while if it doesn't render correctly on my platform. It's their loss. With that said, I have never noticed any problems yet. I also use the mail and news for reading news.groupstudy.com. It works fine, never has crashed, however periodically it gets damn slow and I hear my hard drive thrashing like crazy. But then it stops. Anyway, I'd like to reiterate my thanks and appreciation for this project.

    (Im running on a P166, 64megs Ram, Redhat 6.2)

    I got this strange problem with XFree 4.0.2 though, my mouse pointer doesn't redraw correctly when the image below it changes.


  • 0.6 was on it's way to becoming my primary browser until some bugs in the history code reared their ugly head. First, clicking on a link sometimes did *weird* things. (It would try to load the right page on the wrong server. :P) Second, Mozilla would nuke the history and stop adding pages to it, making it look like I had the history completely turned off.

    It's things like this that I'm sure are a major pain in the ass for the Mozilla developers, but once their ironed out, it should turn out to be a really nice browser.
  • Sounds usable? I've been using Mozilla nightlies since September (I think that they were pre-M18 builds). Not just using Mozilla off and on, but as my full-time browser. I have absolutely no reason to use another browser. PSM works, Java works (I got Netscape 6's xpi's and install the jre.xpi file into every nightly that I download, and, viola, I have Java 2 support.) Some plugins even work (I use the Flash plugin regularly, don't know about others.) Some days you shouldn't download the nightly, but the mozillazine build comments warn you about all of the major bugs, and even recommends when things are worth getting if you haven't updated for a while.

    In short...get the nightlies and use the heck out of them...that's the only way that we're going to get all the bugs found and fixed.

    I also have to say congrats to mozilla on picking up the release schedule. I remember people whining about how long it took for new milestones to come out, but now things really are progressing nicely. Good job!

  • Its kinda obvious you need write permission to, umm, write stuff also install documentation (/notes) often try to cover all the bases, just in case you forgot something.. Lets not post a slashdot comment everytime a manual reads that the plug needs to be plugged in for an appliance. Specialy since microwave manuals in the US still state its not a good thing to try to dry pets in the appliance

    -- Chris Chabot
    "I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
  • oh, and one other thing. our build machines never sit idle. we produce builds every day. check them out at ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly
  • The clearing causes blinking.

    Imagine even the simplest display, some black text on a white background. In your case the server automatically clears exposed areas to white.

    Take a sample pixel that lies inside a black letter. It will initially have the old window's contents. When exposed the server changes it to white. When drawn the server changes it to black. That is 2 transitions.

    Now imagine the program is super-efficient at drawing (or that it copies the data from a backing store, as you suggest), so that it only draws each pixel once. Then initially that pixel will have the old window's contents. When drawn it will turn black. This is 1 transition, the minimum possible.

    Now you can argue that nobody draws their data like that, and any reasonable program will result in 2 blinks anyway, but the fact remains that if the server clears it, it is impossible to avoid the 2 blinks.

    I also argue that simple application will erase the background even if the server did. This will result in 3 writes to the pixel, even if two of them are the same white color. This is not cheap, 1000 pixels does take some machine time and it is worth it to save one pass.

    Also, even if the program blinks I think it is less objectionable since it will draw the two images right next to each other in time. If the server erases it there could be a quite long time where the display is showing the cleared area, making the blink much more visible.

    Backing store like the NeXT had is nice (and it can be faked on X by mapping a single large pixmap as the background for the window). In fact I believe it is the only solution that allows the server to decide what to do with exposed area. But unfortunately most modern hardware does not allow hardware accelerated graphics to be used there, defeating most of the advantages.

  • > How come it has so few users,

    It has a lot of users - you would be surprised.

    > and nearly no presence in the marketplace?

    Because you define the term "marketplace"
    (nice in combination with "free") for
    yourself?

    > Because the lisp community (with exceptions) has never understood free (libre) software.

    How does it come then that there are so many
    free Lisp systems (alone for Common Lisp
    there are GCL, CMUCL, CLisp, SBCL, ECL, ...)
    and Lisp software? Tons of Scheme systems
    (the complex MIT Scheme, the Scheme Shell scsh,
    the cross platform DrScheme, the tiny
    SIOD, ...).

    > Where is GNU ? Everywhere!

    Actually not on my computers - GNU software
    is not really "free" - one is bound by
    the GPL.

    Anyway, what do we see?
    Guile (a Scheme implementation,
    which is, hmm, a Lisp dialect) is the "official"
    scripting language (remember GIMP?) for GNU.
    Emacs and XEmacs are **widely** used. Weren't
    they mostly Lisp programs?

    > Most people who work on free software do so because they benefit from it directly. It gives them features they need.

    Dream on.

    > So what is better (1) enrich yourself at other people's expense or (2) enrich yourself and others? Wake up lispers!

    I guess you should just forget your romantic
    ideas.

    There is Lisp software out there.
    I applaud more the guys who are maintaining
    the CMUCL and CLisp (drives for example Yahoo Store) implementations - both excellent and free,
    instead a random guy who has no idea what he
    is talking about.

  • Re:Don't bother bashing Mozilla. (Score:4)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @11:33PM (#518257) Journal
    plugins... I still have yet to find a plugin system that works as well as it does on IE. In ie, when you get one of those "plugin needed" messages, you can click install, wait for a few seconds, and the page now works, no reloading, no nothing.

    Thank you for saying the number one reason I never used IE 4 back when I had dialup years ago. Most of the time, IE will download that plugin BEFORE asking if you want it. How big is Shockwave 7? Do you really want that downloading over a modem every time you hit a page with a director file that you don't care about, but never wait long enough for an install prompt?

  • Daily RPM builds (Score:5)

    by daemonc ( 145175 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @06:03PM (#518258)

    right here [redhat.com].

    Chris Blizzard rocks. He builds (almost) daily Mozilla rpms for Redhat 6 and 7. At the above link you will find:

    • bare-bones mozilla rpms: no commercial netscape crap, no debugging crap, no mail/news, only 6.3 MB
    • mozilla-mail rpms, if you want it
    • mozilla-psm rpms, so you can go to secure sites.
    • mozilla-devel rpms, if you need it

  • This isn't quite what it sounds like. What they mean is that whoever runs Mozilla for the very first time on a given machine needs to have write access to wherever you installed it. For most of us, this will be the user 'root'. This is due to the fact that Mozilla automatically generates a few files in it's own directory the first time it's loaded. After that, anyone can run it harmlessly.

    This is probably derived from Win32 way of developing things, but I'm confident that most of the developers are just as concerned with the Linux platform as well and it will be fixed or worked around somehow before 1.0.

  • just some of what's new (Score:3)

    by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @06:05PM (#518262) Homepage
    Actually, that's just some of what's new. That list highlights some of the features that users are likely to notice right off. For a more comprehensive list you might try a bugzilla query something like the 1500 or so bugs fixed since around Mozilla 0.6 [mozilla.org] It's not a perfect query since a few of those were in M18 and not in 0.6 and vise versa but you get the picture. --Asa
  • ARGH! This WASN'T modded up! I posted it at +2!

    I was making a tongue-in-cheek comment about the fact that having +w on the target install dir was a requirement to install it, AND it was listed as a bug. That's what I was referring to...

    *sigh*...

    --

  • Actually, I am wrong... That isn't the bug in question. In fact, I think I agree... that's a pretty stupid bug. :P

    Interestingly enough, bug 46588 seems to have something to do with pasting rather than installing... weird.

  • First Impressions... (Score:4)

    by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @06:44PM (#518268) Homepage
    Well, I'm using 0.7 right now to post this, and after tooling around with it for a bit, I can finally say that it's finally an acceptable browser. Speed seems greatly improved since the last milestone, it "feels" a lot more stable, and a lot of the annoying bugs that hampered previous use of it are finally ironed out. Congratulations to the Mozilla team.

    WARNING: This opinion is subject to quick and radical change the first time it crashes. ;)
  • The linux kernel "jumping" from 1.x to 2.0 is the same as Windows 2.x jumping to 3.0. You don't need all the x:es between 1 and 9 in 2.x to go to 3.0. Going to 3.0 means (should mean) you made a major leap. Skipping version (MS Word 2 -> 5, NS 4 -> 6) is a completely different thing. It's is marketshare hunting.
  • But that's the point--it's a perpetual beta! With every cycle, it gets bigger, more feature-laden, and slower; without ever getting closer to release. If feature development was stopped right now, and they did nothing but fix all of the bugs in it, then it would be a big and slow release product.

    In other words, it's not getting any faster, any smaller, or any closer to completion. It's just getting bigger and slower.

  • Re:SVG and MathML support??? (Score:3)

    by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @06:16PM (#518288) Homepage
    both are still in the source. Previous mathml and svg enabled builds were contributed to mozilla.org by interested folks in the community. If they don't show up sometime in the next couple of weeks ping me and I'll ask around. The win32 mathml & svg enabled build was contributed by a regular build contributor so I imagine that will show up soon.

    --Asa

  • Re:Mirror links (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @06:19PM (#518289) Journal
    You know you are linking to the same site (mozilla.org) so chances are that if I can't get to the actual page, I can't access the mirror list either.

    If you check it out, you will find that the www site and the ftp site are different boxes. So linking to the www mirror page will not effect the ftp server

    Official name: komodo.mozilla.org
    (Aliases: ftp.mozilla.org)
    Addresses: 207.200.81.212

    Official name: gila.mozilla.org
    (Aliases: www.mozilla.org)
    Addresses: 207.200.81.215

  • You said WHAT Proxy Server?? (Score:3)

    by juliao ( 219156 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @06:21PM (#518290) Homepage
    Quoting from the article: Microsoft Proxy Server support.

    Now what on earth is a Microsoft Proxy Server? I've heard of HTTP proxies, SOCKS proxies, but Microsoft? What is this new protocol I never heard about??
    -----

  • This release has simply blown me away. It's fast - almost as fast as Netscape 4, and completely tolerable on this pII/233 (I can't wait to try it out on my new dual 733...)

    And I noticed one sort of odd thing: it hasn't crashed yet on me. When I started trying Mozilla the thing blew up all the time; now I feel completely comfortable with the idea of Mozilla as my primary browser, particularly with the integrated (and free!) crypto.

    The only edge Konqueror has over Mozilla now, in my opinion, is being based on QT - which is the only toolkit so far that's been patched to use the excellent Xft [xfree86.org] library for antialiased fonts under XFree86 4.0.2 and later. I can't wait for Mozilla to pick up support for this thing.

  • I guess I visit a different segment of the web than you, too. Can you give me a URL that crashes Mozilla 0.7? Or M18? I like to report bugs.
    ----
  • Whats wrong with that?
  • Excellent! Modded down before I was modded up! I'm so proud!

    Anyways...

    IE won. Won, as in, controls well over 90% of the desktop market. If ALL of the non-Windows operating systems out there ever amount to more than 10% of the _desktop_ environment, then MS will release IE for (whatever). Mark my words--IE6 or IE7 will be released for Linux if it keeps growing on the desktop like it has for the past few months.

    As far as embedded devices running Mozilla, I still disagree. No company will embed it, if it's big, slow, buggy, and unreliable.

    Mozilla has lost its momentum, and its focus. It can't be compared to Linux, because Linux is a centralised, focused effort, and is not allowed to drift off course.

    I still say that Mozilla never was and never will be a contender as a browser for anyone other than the hardcore diletantes, and a very few very specialised applications. Hell, look at OS/2--at least it was a good product, and it still didn't get any farther than that.

  • Man, it's hard to believe that they have had this locked up for a year.. They must have done a lot of testing!
  • I know what you mean, I simply must have money to live. I don't think anyone realises how important it is. How can I buy food without it after all. Perhaps if I sit on my arse and whinge about it for long enough, some will fall into my lap. Perhaps if I go up to people in the street and tell them that they simply MUST give me money, they will.

    Rich

  • The release is getting pretty good, but there are still a few problems. It crashed when converting the Netscape profile, when trying to install Java, it just hangs if it can't write the directory, and rendering is a bit sluggish. Text wrapping in text areas is a bit off (spaces at the beginning of lines).

    Most importantly, though, why does Mozilla still insist on changing X11 screen redraw semantics? By default, damaged areas of X11 windows get cleared. Mozilla insists on leaving the damage, leading to very confusing screen displays with parts of one window ghosted in another. Can't this be fixed? Why deviate from the X11 convention in the first place? Windows gets this wrong, and X11 just gets it right.

  • I'm not sure I agree with you.

    The mozilla renderring engine is quite a bit faster in my experience. Also it takes less ram.

    It's XUL stuff that takes the ram, slows down start up time, and takes so long to render.

    Most web pages do not have very complex html. A couple nested tables but that's about it most of the time. With mozilla renderring the UI is far more complicated than renderring the web page.

    Try a XUL free browser that uses the mozilla renderrer. The debian gtkembed package is really old so I wasn't too impressed with galeon and skipstone. But kmeleon ( http://kmeleon.org ) for windows is really fast.

    XUL is really cool. I understand why they made the choices that they did to use it. Someday we will all want themeable browsers. But it's really slow.

  • Personally, I'd wait until .71/.8 came out, or at least some bugfixes - I can almost guarantee some will be needed. However, it's got enough functionality now to make it a secondary browser. You'll likely still want to keep another one around until all the "neccesary" things are in (java, etc.) properly, but for the sake of a decent browser that does what you need, and will evolve to do all of it, this fits the role.

    If you're into beta testing software at all - get it. If not, wait a month, then get the current release.

    Regardless of what anyone says, I'm going to make a prediction that Mozilla will come to solve many of the picky little things in HTML and will be the first to render HTML 4.0 bug-free. The fact that Netscape has a hand in it will also be good - it will be supported by major sites because the Netscape coding for all those weird website quirks will also be in there.

    CAP THAT KARMA!
    Moderators: -1, nested, oldest first!

  • We do not guarantee that any source code or executable code available from the mozilla.org domain is Year 2000 compliant.

    Drat. I guess I should stop working on my mod_timetravel module for Apache, since it's not going to work with Mozilla.
  • The sad thing is that niether Netscape or the Mozilla folks realize how useful this feature is.

    Whether you use one of the public roaming hosts or your own private server, roaming profiles is the only way I've found to maintain my sanity when dealing with multiple machines and platforms.

    This single feature is the only reason I haven't already given up on Netscape and gone to IE - it's that powerful. This simply MUST be in any final release... I need roaming a whole lot more than I need new features.
  • seen some comments about it and i have to agree: this thing from netscape is not the browser we've dreamt of for Linux.
    Mozilla is an example of "too much code design kills the project".
    Yeah, it's great, it has lotta objects calling lotta others and so on. as a drawback, it's very very slow, and they'll never manage to have a stable product.
    In fact, the only thing that is quite good in Mozilla project is Gecko. It is a quite fast and powerful layout engine.
    The worst idea is having a theme managment and object model OVER GTK+.It's useless (GTK+ IS skinnable), and damn slow.
    And for Mail and NNTP, it's simply crap. crashes often, looses messages in mail and so on. BTW, there's no good X Mailer for Linux (PINE is console, remember ;-)).
    So i'm waiting for Nautilus, Evolution and new versions of Konqueror and KMail (not to talk about IE)... Maybe at the end Linux, the OS the most adapted to the Internet, will have powerful Internet end-user tools.
  • it would be 6.1
  • this will probably be fixed in the next day or two on the trunk either with that patch or by backing out that revision. We took the easy route on 0.7 and just bakced out the revision that was causing the problem.

    -Asa

  • Re:who cares? (Score:3)

    by Aunt Mable ( 301965 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @07:09PM (#518325) Homepage
    The reason IE loads so fast is that it's libraries are loaded at boottime. Mozilla will have an option (does have an option?) to do the same. If you quit Mozilla the start it again (assuming it starts) it's quite fast and.. dare I say it... faster than IE5.5 on machine.

    (Celeron 566, 128MB RAM, everything else vanilla)

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • No, Microsoft bought Spyglass Mosaic and turned it into IE, incorporating version numbers. Sort of similar to how Word jumped from, I think, version 2 to version 5, because that's what WordPerfect was on.
  • I know, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls...

    The only way Internet Explorer can "win", whatever that means, is if they release a Linux version.

    And that isn't going to happen. I agree that IE has won on Windows. So what? What about the embedded market? What about Linux users? You think that Linux users are going to be happy using Netscape 3 forever?

    And you are wrong that Mozilla will not be used. Even if the browser never becomes popular, the Gecko rendering engine will be. A lightweight, fast browser that uses that engine would be much faster and easier to write than a new browser from scratch.

    Many embedded devices like the TiVo run Linux. Many of them will eventually have web browsers on them. Many of those will be based on Mozilla, for some of the same reasons they are based on Linux.

    Failed utterly? Get real.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • Java support being about the only thing keeping me using NS4.x. . .
  • It's still the Mozialla M. Perhaps you installled NBetscape 6...I've noticed the two can interefere with eachother. I don't know if it's in the registry or what. For instance, after I installed Netscape 6 on one computer, Mozilla crashed non-stop. Anywho, I'm typing this message from Mozilla 0.7 and it's working fine, and with the "M" in the upper right.

  • Re:Don't bother bashing Mozilla. (Score:3)

    by dimator ( 71399 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @07:21PM (#518333) Homepage Journal
    - still slower than ns 4.x.

    One thing to realize is that this will doubtfully ever change. That's because 4.x's main goal when rendering a page was to throw the page onto the screen as fast as possible. This means there was hardly any DOM support, as mozilla has, and it also meant that resizing your browser window required a reload, at least from cache, of the web page. If you've noticed, mozilla dynamically moves the elements around now, when you resize your browser window.

    It's give and take, people. Performance was sacrificed, at least somewhat, for DOM support.

    (I don't know how much of the "new window" lag is due to the building of the DOM, and how much is the damn scripted UI. I'm not sure that I agree with the use of XUL/JS for the UI, I have a feeling it causes 80% of the lag times, although that number is completely out of my ass.)


    --

  • Mirror links (Score:4)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:28PM (#518334) Journal
    I hope the site is not /.'ed already...

    but just in case, for those who do not go there often, dozens of mirrors are listed here:

    http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html [mozilla.org]

    I am really looking forward to this, because NS and moz0.6 have been just a little bit problematic for me. Little things, like go to page x then open a new window go to page y, and it thinks it is still on page x. Infuriating, but what can I say.

    I have great hopes for this.

  • People complain about why gtk themes are not being used. And other people complain why native win32 widgets are not being used on windows.

    The reason for the XP toolkit and XUL is to make maintanance much less of a pain in the long run and easy to change the face mozilla.

    It should be noted that the mozilla developers have said, on the record, that if it was not was for XP toolkit they would have only developed on windows. Other platforms would have lagged as developers would need to hack it to their favorite OS.

  • Re:Don't bother bashing Mozilla. (Score:4)

    by Alan ( 347 ) <arcterex@NOspAm.ufies.org> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:28PM (#518336) Homepage
    Things that still suck in mozilla:

    - plugins... I still have yet to find a plugin system that works as well as it does on IE. In ie, when you get one of those "plugin needed" messages, you can click install, wait for a few seconds, and the page now works, no reloading, no nothing. When mozilla has this then I'll be very happy.. just a $HOME/.mozilla/plugins dir, so it's user configuable and everything.
    - still slower than ns 4.x. Yes, netscape sucks, but it still appears quicker for me (1s) than mozilla (~2s) when clicked from the gnome panel. That's with an already running program btw, not from scratch.
    - x509 certs.... we use encrypted mail at work and I really hate to have to run netscape for mail. When mozilla gets the ability to veryify, encode and decode verisign certs, I will be a very happy camper.

    Aside from those bitches, I'm pretty happy. I don't see a huge increase over the nightly builds I've been using, but I'm sure that over .6 (wasn't it milestone 7 last time?) it's a huge improvement.

  • Microsoft as an adjective? (Score:3)

    by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Wednesday January 10, 2001 @07:27AM (#518338) Homepage
    Can we start to adopt the word "microsoft" as an adjective meaning "something which is ostensibly correct but incompatible in some important way".

    For example, if I have some 3/4 pipe fittings and a pipe that won't fit into them (it is 3/4 and a bit or had a burr or is slightly out of shape), we would say "Oh, that's the microsoft pipe, use the other one"

    Or someone has a sweater that is nice and warm and soft but when they put it on, it brings them out in a rash, that's a microsoft sweater.

    Rich

  • Release notes (Score:3)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alex&spamcop,net> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:29PM (#518339) Homepage
    Release notes are here [mozilla.org]. FWIW, though, I still prefer the daily builds [mozilla.org] :).

    Alex Bischoff
    ---
  • A couple of months ago? Which version of Mozilla was that? 0.5? Mozilla has improved dramatically in the last couple of months. Actually, it's improved to the point that I no longer just test it, now it's my predominant browser. This is true on both Linux (x86) and on Win95. Don't know about the Mac, or other versions of Win32 (since I stopped being willing to agree to the MS license, I no longer dual-boot most of my machines).


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.

  • What's New (Score:5)

    by alexburke ( 119254 ) <alex+slashdot@@@alexburke...ca> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:31PM (#518344)
    The main story only touched on some of the changes such as the Personal Security Manager, which are only part of what's new for 0.7 (albeit a sorely-needed part, especially for Mac users!)

    Here's the rest of what's new:
    • Personal Security Manager is now included in the win32, mac, and linux binaries. This marks the first Mac Mozilla Milestone with SSL support. The PSM 1.4 XPInstall from iPlanet will no longer work with the win32, linux or mac Mozilla 0.7 builds. This should on other platforms as well but isn't working everywhere yet.
    • Mousewheel support has greatly improved and is available for Mac for the first time with this release.
    • Mozilla now has upport for drag and drop attach files in mail.
    • Tooltips have been cleaned up significantly and now do the right thing most of the time.
    • The Mozilla news subscribe dialog has been cleaned up and and most people are now able to use news for some of the really large groups (the alt. hierarchy, for example) which used to cause all sorts of unpleasantness.
    • The problems with Microsoft Proxy Server have been resolved.
    • Context menus for the sidebar have been implemented.
    • Forced reload, not from cache (shift + reload) is new in this release.
    • Mozilla windows now remember their maximized state across sessions and child windows respect parent size.
    • Deleting of History items has been implemented.
    • commandline -version arguement was implemented.
    • Navigation back and forward in framed sites is much improved.
    • Frames can now be promoted in current window with a context menu item (show only this frame).


    --

  • Alternate Architectures (Score:4)

    by neutrino ( 11215 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @05:31PM (#518345)
    I am a huge supporter of Mozilla. It is my regular browser. I do have one wish for the more recent releases, though: Continue releasing binaries for alternate architectures. For the releases before 0.6 (all the Mxx releases), they pu up binaries for PPC, alpha and SPARC. They also released binaries for OS/2, HPUX and other more fringe oses. These weren't released at the same time as the Linux x86 and Windows binaries, but they were released. I know that I can compile it on my own machine (LinuxPPC), but their build host sits idle now instead of building other binaries. Just my thoughts, though.
    --neutrino
  • I understand where you're coming from. They couldn't have used the Gtk object model and had it be XP. Also, if they used Gtk widgets, it would not have been able to conform to W3C standards. Now, if all you want is for the control buttons to be Gtk, use galeon instead - it uses Mozilla for the page, and GTK for the outside.
  • Yeah, I like it too. It's really shaped up to be a "full featured browser". It supports SSL, Flash, javascript, and all the regular goodies. It's not completely spiffed up and polished yet, but that's to be expected. It's not as fast or nice as IE5, but it's actually not too much behind. Overall I'd say it's a good backup browser and I wouldn't hesitate to use it as a primary browser on linux.
  • The new version of Microsoft Proxy Server is named Internet Acceleration and Security Server, which nicely abbrevates to I ASS, also known as the guy who decides take one in use...
  • NO, he means he can "install" the damn plugin without being su by simply copying a file to a certain directory (making that directory have a reasonable name and be under $HOME is also nice).

    It is insane that we have to edit files (or run any kind of "installation" program, no matter how friendly) to tell the systems the simple fact that a file exists.

    Hint to Mozilla: can't find a plugin? Try the handy Unix functions "opendir" and "readdir".

  • From the Compatibility Information [mozilla.org]:

    If you are using an ATI Rage video card, images are correctly displayed initially, but may not be properly re-drawn when you minimize and maximize or resize the window.

    --

Slashdot Top Deals

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Close