mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8 615
asa writes: "Today mozilla.org released the Mozilla 0.9.8 Milestone. New to this release are improved Address Book functionality, page setup(for printing), MNG/JNG support, native-style widgets on winXP and OS X, dynamic theme switching, improved BiDi support, speed, stability and footprint improvements, and much, much more. www.mozilla.org and www.mozillazine.org have the full scoop." The build I'm posting with (2002020305) is a little crashy, but most aspects are shaping up very nicely.
For testing or porn, use a nightly build (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs [mozilla.org], you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug [mozilla.org] that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.
Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files [mozilla.org] and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies [mozilla.org]*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems [mozilla.org] that have not yet been ironed out.
I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows [mozilla.org] Mac [mozilla.org] MacOSX [mozilla.org] Linux [mozilla.org].
* Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.
my birthday!!! (Score:2)
Disabling cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't tried Mozilla for some months, so this information could be out of date - but I doubt it, it's been this way from when I first used Netscape up until the last Mozilla build I used, maybe 6 months ago.
Disabling cookies causes the browser to refuse them. This will break many websites, unfortunately. However, there is a little trick that avoids that problem, and still prevents cookie data from ever being saved. Your browser will still accept and return them, satisfying those pushy websites, but will never actually save them, so they all get erased whenever you close the browser, in effect. Well, actually they never even get written.
Netscape/Mozilla stores cookies in a file named cookies.txt, in plain text format. (I wish opera did that, why they have to store them in some wierdo formatted file I don't know, but I digress.) If you simply make that file a link to /dev/null (in *nix) or delete it and make a directory with the name cookies.txt in the same place (on dos systems, this is a minor hack to overcome the deficiency of not having a /dev/null) then everything works fine, except that the cookies never get saved. Since a copy is kept in memory as long as the session lasts, websites get what they want, but as soon as you close the browser, it's all gone, so you get what you want too.
Re:Disabling cookies (Score:5, Informative)
This works with all sites, and forbids them from saving permanent info on your hard disk (i.e tracking you across sessions).
Re:For testing or porn, use a nightly build (Score:3, Funny)
Why should he get a date? He got the pr0n sites working again...
Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer (Score:3, Insightful)
Things You Should Never Do, Part 1 (Score:2, Interesting)
Next in line (Score:2, Informative)
Never fails (Score:2, Redundant)
Sigh.
Keep This Up! Please!! (Score:5, Funny)
My solution? (Score:4, Informative)
$cat newmoz.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd
rm -rf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz mozilla;
wget -c -t 0 -T 40 ftp.mozilla.org//pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozil
tar xzf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz;
rm -rf mozilla/plugins/
ln -s
(I keep all my plugins in a seperate dir to make things easier.)
Mozilla Nighlies forever! (Score:2)
I have been using nightly downloads for a while now as my only browser. Every once in a while I'll get one that's unstable, but for the most part it is way stabler than Navigator ever was. Plus it has support for modern web standards and tabbed browsing.
The point releases are fun, but I really like the excitement of running the nighly builds.
Spellchecker (Score:5, Informative)
To save everyone some time in common questions and answers, there's a FAQ on Mozilla's spellchecker [mozilla.org.uk] (or lack thereof).
However, there's a new development. As you may know, bug 56301 [mozilla.org] tracks the progress on the Mozilla spellchecker. And, for a while, progress had become stagnant. Then, David Einstein stepped up to the plate and started working on a spellchecker for Mozilla. His latest work is available at spellchecker.mozdev.org [mozdev.org].
I feel that a spellchecker would bring much deserved respect to Mozilla, and I encourage you to lend a hand to David. Or, it would even help if you could vote for bug 56301 [mozilla.org] to show your support (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account [mozilla.org] to vote).Re:Spellchecker (Score:3, Insightful)
What would be nice is getting the spellchecker integrated in the text entry controls, like this one with which we post to
Re:Spellchecker (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Here's your spellchecker (Score:4, Insightful)
That technique doesn't work on all platforms which run Mozilla. Also, ispell isn't available on all platforms, and it would seriously slow Mozilla down, since spawning a process is usually pretty slow.
The cross-platform nature of Mozilla is very, very important, and very critical to its development. All features must be incorporated into the codebase and written in such a manner that the platform doesn't matter.
Aspell *is* the plan (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Here's your spellchecker (Score:4, Informative)
The crap that really turns me off about Mozilla is the arm chair quarterbacks who mouth off without a clue. You obviously didn't even read the freaking bug report [mozilla.org].
You might be particularly interested in the attachment to comment 23 [mozilla.org] which is an email from the author of Aspell/Pspell which gives a gap analysis of the various open source spell checkers.
In fact, it appears that Mozilla and Abiword have some alignment in goals for making a library based spell checker, so far from the picture of "reinventing everything" that you paint, this is actually an example of synergy between diverse projects that exemplifies open source development code sharing.
dynamic theme switching (Score:2, Funny)
Whoohoo, we're back to where we were several months ago!
What's New ... (Score:2, Redundant)
... and then goes on to mention the 6 new bugs introduced with this.
Not meant as flamebait, but I think i'll wait for 1.0 all the same.
Re:What's New ... (Score:2)
If you look at the bugs in question, they're all bidirectional-text bugs. For example, the "pasting is busted" bug is really "Hebrew text pasted from Mozilla appears as question marks". Hebrew text wasn't supported at all before the change, so I can't see why that made you decide to wait for 1.0.
Re:What's New ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which will just lengthen the amount of time until 1.0 is delivered.
Late at Night. (Score:2)
The build hasn't made it to a lot of the mirrors yet. I checked about a half dozen before I went back to the main ftp server.
Fortunately, it is late at night, when nothing important usually happens.
;-)
Replace outlook express with mozilla mail (Score:2)
Hopefully, I can replace all my colleages Outlook express mail after Mozilla go 1.0
flash plugin (Score:2, Interesting)
Michael
Re:flash plugin (Wild Hack) (Score:4, Informative)
flashhack.c [netspace.org]
I have a script ~/bin/mozilla that I use to run mozilla which has:
#!/bin/sh
export LD_PRELOAD=/whereever/it/is/flashhack.so
/usr/local/bin/mozilla $@
Compiling instructions are in the file.
It just makes sure to do a nonblocking open if you open the file /dev/dsp
Totally hacky, I take no resposibilty for any nasty side effects.
The printf ("foo!\n") is there purly for aesthetic reasons.:)
The most important fix... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The most important fix... (Score:2)
Re:The most important fix... (Score:5, Interesting)
The compromise was to ignore no-cache for speed purposes on http requests but don't ignore it for https requests.
The full gritty details is in big 112564 [mozilla.org].
Ad counting (Score:3, Interesting)
Advertisers should penalize sites that use no-cache to increase ad impression counts. It slows down browsing, doesn't increase the total nubmer of times a user sees ads, and annoys users who are actually interested in the ads. And, now, the double-counting effect is harder for advertisers to account for because some browsers (eg Mozilla) correctly ignore no-cache for the Back button in most situations.
Re:Ad counting (Score:3, Funny)
Unexpectedly the joy of watching grown men play with pig bits took off and now some people come just for the that. But never forget that the real reason for "superbowl" is the annual grass endurance competition. The truth is out there.
Re:The most important fix... (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to think that the fact that Netscape worked differently was just some deep down lossage; I didn't even consider the case that anybody would do this sort of thing deliberately. It results in accidental duplicate orders over the web, for example. Netscape printing also used to reload the page--very bad.
In any case, the current behavior, where it sometimes reloads and sometimes doesn't, is just inconsistent.
Re:The most important fix... (Score:4, Informative)
The real benefit becomes obvious when you start using tabbed browsing. You can set middle click to open in new tab instead of open in new window. Now you save the huge penalty of opening a new browser window, since tabs are relatively fast to open. On top of that, you can set links to load in the background, so the link loads silently behind the page (and tab) that you're looking at, without interrupting what you're reading. When you're ready to go and look at the new page, it's loaded and ready.
This feature alone has nearly sealed my conversion to Moz (although there are several other features I could say the same thing about, like cookie management, or mouse gestures). IE6 irritates me quite severly now that I'm used to Moz's extra features. Yes, I know there are bugs, but I'm happy to live with them. Of course YMMV...
Christopher
Re:The most important fix... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The most important fix... (Score:2, Funny)
sorry, couldn't resist
Good news (Score:5, Informative)
PPA, the girl next door.
A bit of realism... (Score:2, Interesting)
BUT I don't think I'll ever be able to use Mozilla as my primary browser. I tried multiple times to migrate to it, yet every single time my humble computer kindly let me know that it can't keep up.
I'm not trying to start a flamewar, I think Netscape is bloated as much as the next person, but at the same time I can't see why Mozilla is so slow and resource crazy either.
All in all, if Mozilla doesn't get *much* faster by 1.0, I won't be using it for a while.
---
Re:A bit of realism... (Score:2, Insightful)
They are just now beginning to work on performance, and they are doing a pretty good job if you read the comments above hear, such as this comment by PlaysWithMatches:
"Everything in the GUI seems to be noticeably faster though, in 0.9.8. This alone makes it worth the upgrade.
One can hope that its performance will improve at the same pace, but it is unlikely to ever be as fast as the minimalist Opera browser.
It is, however, open source and much more functional than Opera.
Mozilla needs to focus on correctness, not feature (Score:2, Flamebait)
Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.
The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them [mozilla.org]) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.
As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.
Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?
Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout [mozilla.org] (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget [mozilla.org] that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail [mozilla.org] with an editor that works.
In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.
So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management [mozilla.org]. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto [mozilla.org], they've been saying the right words for a long time now:
But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.
Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:
1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.
2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.
So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.
Re:Mozilla needs to focus on correctness, not feat (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the favicon in the url is aesthetically pleasing only, but the favicons in tabs becomes really usefull when you have lots of the open. Almost to the point where I can't live without them.
And with favicons in the personal toolbar, you can rename your bookmarks to nothing, and you can cram about 30 or so of your favorite sites on one toolbar, each with their own icon. It makes my browsing easier, and it looks damn cool.
Re:Mozilla needs to focus on correctness, not feat (Score:2)
Thats also my biggest grief with IE 6.0, it's favorites icons bar is so damn buggy. Half the time the status bar in the bottum disapears, and I keep having to re-turn it on, and the links bar will never stay open, ends up stuffing them by default into a little links dropdown next to the URL bar which is only visible from a pull down. *ugg*.
On OSX IE , it's not quite so bad.. but not wonderful.
It's little things like that can make the browsing experience better. I hope that the Moz team can continue to innovate new ways to make my navigation experience better and more efficient.
Re:Mozilla needs to focus on correctness, not feat (Score:5, Funny)
One man's gold is another man's crap. A spell checker is completely worthless to me, along with the entire Mail/News package. On the other hand, tabbed browsing is my life, my love, and my passion.
remove IE from Windoze forever!! (Score:5, Informative)
There's a tiny and FREE FREE utility called the IEradicator can wipe out internet explorer from Win98/NT and 2000 if you run pre-SP2
Use Mozilla as your only browser (or, like me, use Opera too) if you like.
check out http://www.98lite.net/ieradicator.html
performance (Score:2)
On all of my machines (Linux/x86, Solaris/SPARC, and IRIX/MIPS) Mozilla seems to be significantly more sluggish than Communicator 4.79 in all areas, with the exception of actual rendering. I realize there are alternative GUIs to the gekko engine, but it would be nice to have one end-all app and engine bundle.
Any word on future (significant) speedups planned for 0.99 and 1.00?
Re:performance (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a complete list of performance stuff that they're working on.
I've been watching it for a while because I like Mozilla but just can't use it because the GUI is so damn slow it feels like I'm browsing drunk.
It's the simple features that count. (Score:2)
Type yahoo in IE then hit CTRL+Enter and you will understand. Saves a lot of typing.
Re:It's the simple features that count. (Score:2, Informative)
do you feel lucky? (Score:2, Interesting)
The 'y'-down thing only works if you've typed it before ;-)
Re:It's the simple features that count. (Score:3, Interesting)
DennyK
Where's the Deb? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Where's the Deb? (Score:2)
--Asa
Much improved startup times. (Score:2, Informative)
The java plugin install did crash, but java works now, so it must have gotten far enough
Anyway, seems like a worthy upgrade. Once the spellchecker is up to snuff, I can't think of anything mozilla will be missing. Java/Flash/Real all work. Browser and Mail are are fast and stable and getting better all the time. I'll have to wait a bit to see how much the footprint has improved. This is one area that could stand to see some more work. It has come down about 40meg in the last couple releases, but 50 Meg is still a lot.
Well, maybe after a couple week use I'll find something really bad to say about it
See www.libpng.org for testing (Score:3, Informative)
MNG seems more complete and it certinaly nicer than animated GIFs for quality.
http://www.libmng.com/MNGsuite/
Re:See www.libpng.org for testing (Score:2, Informative)
When to deploy... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been impressed by the reception so far... only one user has rejected it wholesale, but the first question after I loaded on Netscape for him was, "Now how do I turn off pop-up ads in this one?". That seems to be the most-loved feature so far, as many websites now have pop-up ads (I wouldn't know, as I turned them off at 0.9.4!).
IMHO Netscape has made a very bad name for itself by releasing 6.x too early from buggy Mozilla builds, and loading them up with advertising and AOL stuff to boot. I've found that telling clients that Mozilla is a new browser based on Netscape is a good way to go.
I've actually found that the few problems users have had have been minor, and the mozilla bug tracking site almost always has workarounds for those show-stopper bugs...
Anyhow, just something to think about; this is a nice foothold that open source software can make in your office workplace. It's kind of the Apache of desktop software I suppose...
Where is M$ on this one? (Score:2, Funny)
If only Microsoft was as open an honest about such things on windowsupdate.com...
"This Version of Internet Exploder (6.0) is extremely buggy, has many features you won't like, and makes browsing the internet feel more like browsing the 2002 Toys R Us Christmas Catalog"
"This version of Windows (aka MacOS knockoff) is called WindowsXP. It stands for eXtremely Pissed off, which you'll be when you see that most of your software no longer works, but the boys in marketing thought up something about an experience or something."
To the naysayers... (Score:5, Informative)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]
It's no use for us to stand around leaning on our shovels cursing that the hole isn't being dug fast enough.
Stability, people, stability (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla suffers from excessive featurism. For example, putting in "themes", let alone dynamic theme switching, before achieving stability is truly lame. Mozilla should have been at 1.0 years ago, but with a smaller feature set.
And the thing is so slow. Huge performance degradation since Netscape 4. There are sometimes noticeable waits for pop-up menus, opening a blank page can be sluggish, and you can watch the windows close one by one on exit. This on a 1.3GHz machine with half a gig of RAM.
Re:Stability, people, stability (Score:2)
Its Galeon. And its my favorite browser.
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/
USA-centric or what is it? (Score:2, Informative)
Cards with addresses in the USA have a new Get Map button in the card preview pane which creates a map for that address at mapquest.com
Well, i'm not shure if i'm extremly lucky, but mapquest is doing just fine with any european address i can come up with!
I just tried it for the first time... (Score:3, Interesting)
I love it - I suppose it will "compete" with my Netscape install now. I think I might install it on my Winders box at work (yeah, it sucks).
Wow - a new set of fun!
Am I the only one? (Score:2, Funny)
Logarithmic progression of version numbers (Score:3, Funny)
Release dates of previous versions:
Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
Mozilla 0.7 - Completed January 9, 2001
Mozilla 0.8 - Completed February 14, 2001
Mozilla 0.8.1 - Completed March 26, 2001
Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.1 - Completed June 7, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.2 - Completed June 28, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.3 - Completed August 2, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.4 - Completed September 14, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.5 - Completed October 12, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.6 - Completed November 20, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.7 - Completed December 21, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.8 - Completed February 4, 2002
I took the release dates of Mozilla and made a list
of version numbers in number form, and months where
the length of each month is averaged to 30 days.
Mth Ver
0.2 0.6
1.3 0.7
2.5 0.8
3.9 0.81
5.2 0.9
6.2 0.91
6.9 0.92
8.2 0.93
8.5 0.94
10.5 0.95
11.6 0.96
12.8 0.97
14.1 0.98
I graphed it and got what looks to be almost a logarithmic
curve (besides the large dip around month 4) with an asymptote
around 1.0 - Available at:
Graph Here [netdemonz.com]
I'll try to remember not to get rid of this image or move it.
What does this graph mean about the release date of Mozilla? I'll
let you draw you're own conclusions.FWIW, I wouldn't take the implications of the numbers
too seriously, but thought you might be interested.
Re:Cool Beans... (Score:4, Redundant)
Re:Cool Beans... (Score:2)
Re:Cool Beans... (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla is a badge of Open Source failure (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla is now about as fast as IE in rendering pages. And I'm talking ~1-2 seconds. Small enough that I don't really care. It is at least as stable as Opera which, for myself at least, was annoyingly "crashy." Mozilla's mail client is light years ahead of what Opera has to offer. Even with the inability to run a newly created filter on your inbox. Btw, that's a damn useful feature which I hope they "cram" into 0.9.9.
The tabbed interface is more flexible than what Opera has to offer. I use a trackball at home and after toying with gestures in Opera found that feature not very useful. Memory usage, while still kinda high, keeps coming down but it isn't bad enough to bring this old PC down.
What is irritating is installing the Java plug-in still doesn't work right. And now, with version 1.3.1 you have to copy five dlls. I'm assuming their recent pow-wows with Sun have rectified this because the bug is considered a show-stopper. I'll have to see. OTOH, Mozilla had no problem picking up my Acrobat install and Shockwave wasn't too bad either.
Oh, and another thing that really irritated me about the latest version of Opera for Windows. They changed the way you put links into the personal toolbar. In earlier versions it was a piece of cake. Now the only way Opera would let me do it was through the sidebar.
I'm not going to reccommend that you try out the latest and greatest build. You have your opinion and are entitled to it. But, from my experience, I think you're wrong. Mozilla is coming along very well and I think version 1.0 will be competitive against the likes of IE and Opera.
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:2, Informative)
Have all the issues with Mozilla and crypto now been resolved?
Almost. Now that the RSA patent is in the public domain, Mozilla crypto development can proceed with minimal restrictions. In the near future the Mozilla code base will include a complete open source cryptographic library, and Mozilla will include SSL support as a standard feature.
Anybody have more (better) info?
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't they just use OpenSSL? Mozilla - reinventing the wheel, one spoke at a time.
Seriously, Mozilla's biggest problem is that they don't know how to narrow the scope of what they want to accomplish. They've written all these abstract libraries, widgets, and application frameworks just to write a browser. There are easier ways to build a cross platform browser than rewriting everything from scratch. How about using other open source libraries? Partnerships with or just taking over existing projects? These guys are almost as bad as the KDE guys. The other (related) thing they are fundamentaly wrong-headed about is staying with the integrated news-reader,mail-client,address-book,(internet-app -of-the-week), browser plan. Huge apps that do everything suck. Build a nice browser. Work with others on how to communicate between your browser any MUA out there, etc. Release 1.0 in 2 years instead of 5.
That said, I use mozilla or galeon (mozilla rendering engine) exclusively, it's really coming along - nice work guys.
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:2, Insightful)
In your opinion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms. Probably the reason they didn't use OpenSSL is due to limited support on other platforms, I don't know.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure they could have used OpenSSL, but what is the point? Why throw away all that robust, mature, cross-platform, MPL/GPL licenced code (that does a lot more besides SSL) for something that does a subset of what is required and isn't very cross-platform either?
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:3, Informative)
Most sites use the DH algorithm because it's faster, but others use RSA because they need to maintain backward compatibility to older browsers. Those algs are only used for authentication and key exchange, DES is used for actual messages because it's faster than asymmetric cypto.
note that the above is for unverified clients (meaning the server does not check client certificates), and is simplifed to exclude finer details like message integrity.
so basically, Mozillas problems might be more than it's RSA implementation.
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:2, Informative)
BTW, the latest nightly have a much better error message. I'm not sure if that made it into 0.9.8 or not though.
Brian Haskin
Re:first `Mozilla has sucked for years` post (Score:5, Informative)
Internet Explorer - for OS X this is an excellent browser. It has many awesome features. A customizeable and cool look. Kudos to MS for making a great browsers. The major problem with it, is that it hangs for a long time whenever rendering a large page. For example, this slashdot story will cause IE to hang for ~30 seconds (on my 667MHz G4) after downloading and prior to displaying. Note that each IE window is frozen until after the hung one renders. This is unacceptable
OmniWeb - This browser seems light, fast, efficient, but why the heck does it keep crashing on my OS X.2 powerbook? Crashes appear to be caused at random and usually occur within 10 minutes of web browsing. Since this continues to happen, I haven't had a chance to try out the features of OmniWeb.
Opera - I was hoping that this would be as good on OS X as it is in Linux. The version seems to be a bit behind the Linux version and it lacks Mousewheel support and tabbed windows. Mousewheel support is neccessary to me and tabbed windows is a *very* nice feature.
Mozilla - This is my workhorse webbrowser. Although it is slower than the others and has too many features, IMHO, it doesn't hang like IE, doesn't crash like OmniWeb, and has tabbed windows/mousewheel support, unlike Opera). Still it is slow. I'm anxious to start using a galeon-ish OS X browser as soon as I hear about one. Mozilla wins by default.
Can anybody add anything to my list? I haven't heard of many other graphical OS X browsers. I figured that OS X would have plenty of great web browsers since the web designers tend to use it. Although Quicktime and Macromedia plug-ins are cool, they still don't seem as fast they do on my roommates P3. Especially under Mozilla. IE playes Quicktime movies fast, but only after it loads the pages.
Re:first `Mozilla has sucked for years` post (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, I agree with you about IE, it's pretty nice. The only things I don't like about it are the slow rendering of big tables that you mentioned, no popup-blocking, and the Carbon text doesn't look as good to me as the Cocoa text that OmniWeb uses (especially for serif fonts).
Anyway, get the latest OmniWeb and give it a spin. Be sure to clean out any junk in ~/Library/Application\ Support/OmniWeb/ first, corrupted history files have been known to cause problems.
Re:first `Mozilla has sucked for years` post (Score:2)
Re:first `Mozilla has sucked for years` post (Score:2, Interesting)
> Can anybody add anything to my list? I haven't heard of many other
> graphical OS X browsers. I figured that OS X would have plenty of
> great web browsers since the web designers tend to use it.
There's iCab. It is a Mac only browser (has an OS X native version), kind of shareware ($29 once it is released) that is currently under developement and nearing its first release. http://www.icab.de/info.html lists some of the features. It seems to work fine at Amazon and other eCommerce sites. It's a champ at stopping pop ups, pop unders, and other advertising nasties. It has a kiosk mode, the ability to read (aloud with voice synthesis) web pages to you, and can check web sites for errors. I used to love its printing capabilities because I could make it print pages the way I wanted them printed. Now it mostly just crashes instead of printing. Still, it is a pretty good browser, considering it is about where Mozilla is (pre-first release), only it is based on all new code, not on a browser that has been released before.
Please make sure that if you get iCab, you get Preview 2.7.1 or later. Preview 2.7 has a nasty habbit of chowing down on your bookmarks (and hiding them in other folders deeper in the tree). Preview 2.7.1 doesn't seem to have that problem.
BTW, is Mozilla fully OS X native (ie. Carbon or Cocoa), or are they just displaying an aquafied look in Classic?
OS X: the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Informative)
I finally fixed it by changing the master password and restarting Mozilla.
I recall trying this with 0.9.7 once, and failing, so I assume they did something to it after all.
Good job, guys!
Re:Debian releases? (Score:2)
You can usually get the latest version, as well as nightly cvs builds, from sid. And no, you don't have to upgrade to it to use the packages.
Re:Debian releases? (Score:2)
Re:Debian releases? (Score:4, Informative)
--Asa
Re:ok, nevermind, this one gets my stamp of approv (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Skins (Score:2, Redundant)
it takes a while to load, so be patient.
Re:Skins (Score:2)
Re:Skins (Score:3, Informative)
There were a lot more, but mozilla's API's kept changing and breaking the older skins.
Now that (apparently) the API's have been frozen, expect to see a lot more skins appearing.
Re:smime support (Score:4, Funny)
You're there! Get 0.9.8
--Asa
Re:Forget 1.0 -- it's ready NOW (Score:3, Informative)
Whichever is correct, you are not. IE blows Mozilla away and will for quite some time. You don't have to like this fact, but you do have to live with it for the foreseeable future.
I can honestly say that Mozilla performs infinitely better on this Linux box than IE. ;) (Well, I think that some people actually have had success with running IE under Wine, but...)
Re:I don't know if I like the additional features. (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, do you want it to be a great release, or just some ordinary release? From your statement, it seems you want it to be special. If so, then why try to pressure us into releasing it too early? I realize you were joking, but there is a lot of pressure coming to freeze parts the code.
If we freeze too early, then people might not be happy with the way the code we freeze is laid out. If we freeze too late, we might anger a lot of people and also slow down development also because code changes too often. There has to be a balance that makes most people happy.
A lot of things are going on before the release of 1.0 including: increased modularization of the code, UI changes, functionality additions, build system enhancements, cleaning of the code, testing, feature additions, performance tuning, XUL/XPCOM etc documentation, stability improvements, and legal issues.
Some people want it to come out on time. Others want it held back until they are happy with it (including I). Some people have long lists of things they want finished and have to finish. Therefore, it is unrealistic to give any estimates on arrival time. All I can say is that we are going to try our best.
I know I'm not unique... (Score:3, Redundant)
I also know not everyone agrees with me. But, for whatever it's worth, I gave up on Mozilla along time ago. Why? Featuritis. God, no offense, but on this issue you guys are worse than MS. Every release has more and more features that I don't want or need, and takes the inevitable hit from that on speed and reliability and footprint.
I'll be happy to give it another try when I find out that you have a usable configure script that will let me simply compile all that stuff out (I've heard rumblings about that possibility on and off,) but I'm not holding my breath. You could throw at least half the code right out the door and I, and many others I know, wouldn't miss it at all. At the same time, the few features I do want never seem to be a priority.
For now I'm using Opera, and except for being closed source, I really like it. Fairly small footprint, very fast, the few features I want (like intelligent cookie handling) are pretty much there. Unlike Mozilla, it doesn't make my PII/128MBram system perform like a 486.
Re:I know I'm not unique... (Score:3, Insightful)
At the same time, the few features I do want never seem to be a priority.
*sigh* Welcome to the world of being a software user.
Re:I don't know if I like the additional features. (Score:2)
That is a common mistake. However, lots of people are waiting for 1.0:
- End users who just want something stable. A 1.0 version label is a good indication that at least developers trust it to be stable and usable. And yes I know it has been usable pretty much since the 0.7x versions.
- 3rd party component developers/ plugin developers. They need stable APIs -> 1.0 will be a stable API.
- Gecko based browser developers who have been faced with a moving target for the past few years.
- The mozilla people. They've been criticized a lot for feature creep and not delivering a product. A 1.0 release will end that and allow them to focus on new features rather than producing a 1.0.
That in short is why a 1.0 is so important.
Re:I don't know if I like the additional features. (Score:2, Insightful)
Once Mozilla reaches 1.0, what will be next? That's right, 2.0. Stuff that didn't make it into 1.0 will be lumped into 1.x/2.0. Developers will wait for these features, and we're back where we are.
Mozilla 0.9.7 had serious problems (Score:2)
problems with certain forms.
Now that 0.9.8 is out, and if it works well my guess is that they let you upgrade to it.
Re:Sure, it's not 1.0, but (Score:2)
Quazion.
Re:Mozilla is OK. Opera is great! (Score:2)
No.
In Opera you're given the choice: multiple windows or a window with multiple children.
Mozilla permits a combination of these.
So use Galeon - 1.03 just released (Score:3, Informative)
If you want native widget support support on Linux now, with the added bonus of your web browser not being a flaming pile of shit (sorry, I truly believe that although gecko rocks, XUL is still unusable on every box I've tried) use Galeon. Version 1.03, which works with Mozilla 0.98 has just been released [sourceforge.net].
Linux RPM packages for both should be available soon.