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Mozilla 1.2 Betas Start Flowing

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Sep 12, 2002 07:52 AM
from the beware-the-lizard dept.
Mozilla The Internet
Asa Dotzler writes "Today mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.2alpha. This is a preview of what's to come with Mozilla 1.2 expected in early November. The new alpha contains great new features like Type Ahead Find which allows quick web page navigation when you type a succession of characters in the browser. In addition to the new features Mozilla 1.2a contains stability and perfomance improvements including a major boost in the speed of downloading mail on Mac OS X.This release comes on the heels of the security and bugfix follow-up to Mozilla 1.0. If you're a 1.0 user and you're not upgrading to Mozilla 1.1 or newer then you are strongly encouraged to get Mozilla 1.0.1 for security and stability fixes."
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  • Don't forget... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kappelmeister (464986) on Thursday September 12 2002, @07:54AM (#4243896)
    If humans had evolved with six digits on each hand, this would be a major, major milestone release.

  • Mozilla will become feature complete when compared to IE6 sometime in the beginning of next year :-) It's good to see the Moz boys picking up the pace when it comes to implementing some of the more convienent features we've gotten used to in IE on Windows and the Mac. While I wouldn't mind IE stealing the wonderful idea of tabbed browsing Im seriously beginning to wonder just what kind of "end user" enhancements will be released with IE 7.0.

    Seriously beyond the commonplace protocol upgrades and reworks I think that IE 7.0 will end up being quite the hard sell for the typical Windows User. This may present an opportunity for Mozilla/Netscape to steal a bit of marketshare if things go right. This will happen anyway as AOL is planning to move their browser engine over to Moz (already been done for the MacOSX version I believe) and the Gecko AOL betas run quite well.

    J

    • Re:Well at this rate... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by evilquaker (35963) on Thursday September 12 2002, @08:04AM (#4243944)
      Mozilla will become feature complete when compared to IE6 sometime in the beginning of next year :-)

      Really? IE6 has mouse gestures, tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking?

      Sounds to me like Mozilla is already more feature complete than IE... little conveniences like type-ahead find really don't compare to the three I mentioned above...

      • Those features in IE (Score:5, Funny)

        by yerricde (125198) on Thursday September 12 2002, @08:28AM (#4244075) Homepage Journal

        IE6 has mouse gestures

        Is Mickey [ O ] sticking his middle finger up enough of a "mouse gesture"?

        tabbed browsing

        Maximize IE, and your taskbar becomes a tab bar. Or install CrazyBrowser.

        and pop-up blocking?

        Press Ctrl+W real quick before the pop-up finishes loading.

        Such are the workarounds IE users employ to emulate Mozilla features.

      • and pop-up blocking

        Does anyone know if it's possible to selectively allow pop-ups on some sites you visit, but disallow from all others?

        There are a couple of web-based applications I use for work that require pop-ups be enabled. I want and need popups for that specific domain, but no others.

        Sort of like Apache's Allow From and Deny From commands.

        Anyone? Bueller?
          • You misunderstand: what Mozilla allows you to do is block *unrequested* pop-up windows. Other, requested pop-ups work just fine.

            Mozilla *thinks* the popups are unrequested, but, as part of the application, the behavour is desired.

            At times, the onLoad event of the document object opens one or more new windows as part of the application.

            Among other things, this is what the pop-up blocker blocks. 99.9% of the time, this is exactly what I want. But for this particular application, I really *do* want (need) one or more new windows to be opened on a document onLoad event.

            I have not found a way to enable or disable Mozilla's behavior in this regard on a per-site basis.

            After make the earlier post, I realized that what I need, for pop-up blocking, is the same as already offered with cookie and image management.

            Mozilla lets me block or allow cookies and images on a per-site basis. I'd like the same level of granularity for pop-up blocking.

            Is this possible? Does anyone else have this need?

          • Re:Well at this rate... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Tackhead (54550) on Thursday September 12 2002, @09:53AM (#4244648)
            > I believe each popup window gets a checkbox to allow you to turn off popups for each site.

            How about that goddamned modal dialog window [mozilla.org] that pops up when it can't load an unreachable embedded element.

            Please don't whine [mozilla.org] about how it's not nice to alias whatever.doubleclick.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. I know it's a kludge, but it's my hosts file. I don't want any traffic to go to those domains, whether it's from Mozilla or any other application.

            Bug 28586 has been open for over two years and has 115 votes against it. (Moz team, please just swallow your pride and deal with the fact that your users just might not use their machines the way you do.)

            (And the fact that hosts-based blocking is a kludge doesn't change the fact that modal dialogs for "document contains no data" or "ain't no host there" are just plain evil. The domain serving an image might be Slashdotted, for instance.)

            Until I switch to Mozilla for everything, I still need my hosts-based blocking for the crap my proxy doesn't catch.

            Of course, if I keep having to click on its goddamn modal dialogs instead of just seeing "X"s or broken image icons when a site's images are Slashdotted or blocked by my hosts file or firewall, I'll never use Mozilla as a web browser, let alone switch other parts of my life over to it. Pity. Apart from this bug, it looked pretty cool. But with this bug, it's unusable.

            This has to go into the main builds.

            (Disclaimer: if this made it into the 1.1 release, I confess I never bothered checking. Anyone knwo if it made it into 1.2? I can apply the patch and build the damn binaries myself if I have to, but most Joe Sixpack users can't.)

    • Im seriously beginning to wonder just what kind of "end user" enhancements will be released with IE 7.0.

      Easy. An all-new and improved EULA that gives Billg and the RIAA total control over your computer. After all, if you won't agree to such a reasonable thing, you're an Evil Terrorist Content Pirate(tm).

          • What sites are you talking about?

            The DMCA part was a joke, but the discrimination against Mozilla users is real. For example, click this link with Mozilla [tvthemetunes.net], and you get "You have accessed this page because you are trying to view MeTV in a browser other than Internet Explorer. To enter the site, please click here and download the latest version of Internet Explorer. (Mac users click here.)" For more such bugs click here [makeashorterlink.com].

            Now watch them lose 30% of their market when AOL 8.5 for Windows switches to Gecko. (AOL for Mac and CompuServe for Windows have already switched, but AOL for Windows has more market share.)

  • I can't see any major improvements over 1.1, so why the version jump? Although it's nice that they're keeping a steady release schedule.

    And I wonder if they're ever going to do anything about the memory footprint. Together with Windows 2000's awful VM handling, I'm in swap city every time I copy a large file, having to wait more than 30 seconds for my Mozilla window to be swapped back in.
    • Each quarterly cycle has an alpha, a beta and a final release. We recently released 1.1final, and 1.2alpha is the first release in the next cycle.

      If you are looking for "major improvements worthy of a version jump", you need to compare 1.1final and 1.2final (for example.) Comparing 1.1final and 1.2alpha is not correct, because not all the 1.2 features are in yet.

      I had Win2K swap trouble too, but new versions appear to be a lot better.

      Gerv
    • I personally rate improvement of the interface much (yes, very much) higher than performance improvement. I stick to Mozilla because i like its look and feel, even though opera might be a little faster, but i dont like the interface.

      Having many features and good accessibility is far more important if you want to reach a big crowd of users. IMHO it's mostly the techies and programmers who keep whining about it being too slow or too big.
      Yes, i can imagine my mother complaining about speed, but only if there is a very excessive lag (which is not the case in moz.), and even then she would probably blame it on the connection or so. Something like a memory footprint would never even come up in the mind of most regular users. It is easy handling, accessibility and standards support that will make mozilla a big player, and the type ahead feature is just one of the things i was waiting for.

      Fixing performance can wait, companies like MS and Apple know this (remember releases of Win95, 98, OS X etc)...
      • Mozilla's versioning is not like the Linux kernel. Each quarterly cycle has an alpha, a beta and a final release. We recently released 1.1final, and 1.2alpha is the first release in the next cycle.

        If you are looking for feature jumps, you need to compare 1.1final and 1.2final (for example.)

        Gerv
      • You are wrong (sorry). Mozilla 1.0.x is the stable branch, which is only getting minor tweaks and bugfixes. Any other Mozilla 1.x number to date is essentially a milestone off of the trunk, with new features/toys. I have no idea if there is a "Mozilla 2.0 manifesto" yet, but I dop know that their stated intent has been that a .0 release brings with it a commitment of API stability until the next .0 release.
      • I'm viewing your comment with Mozilla 1.1, and IE6 SP1, and Mozilla is taking 23mb, whereas IE is taking 14. Even if we add ALL of Windows Explorer's 7mb footprint on the assumption it's some kind of IE stub, we still score Mozilla 23, IE 21.

        Anyway, since I've got 192mb of SDRAM in here, I'm not complaining. It would still be nice to see Moz shrink the footprint, though!

      • Re:No major news, and still a memory hog (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Bonker (243350) on Thursday September 12 2002, @08:27AM (#4244066)
        I rather like the 'Pinball' skin. If you're dissatisfied with Moz's appearance, I reccomend downloading it here:

        http://themes.mozdev.org/skins/pinball.html [mozdev.org]

        That said, Moz can be quite the memory hog, especially on graphically intense pages. One of the big mistakes I see that can aggrivate this is the practice of tiling single-pixel graphics over a huge area. I'm not familiar with the gecko code, but I'm guessing that rather than rendering the tiled image once and keeping a handle for the resulting bitmap, Moz renders the image over and over again as it tiles and keeps a handle for each tile.

        PHPBB sites are particularly bad about this, since the 'Sub Silver' theme uses several images that are about 5 pixels wide x 30 pixels tall. 150 pixels total. If you have to cover an area that is 1000 pixels wide, you need 200 repetitions of that 5 pixel wide image. If you repeat that area 25 times, and keep seperate instances of the image for each tile, you end up keeping the image in memory 5000 times.

        Anyone more familiar with Gecko willing to comment on the actual mechanism of how it handles tiled images like this?

  • Alpha suddenly equals Beta? (Score:4, Funny)

    by fr2asbury (462941) on Thursday September 12 2002, @08:05AM (#4243950)
    Is this some sort of new twist on mathematics or Greek?
    The headline states Mozilla 1.2 "Beta" only to be told that the MOzilla 1.2 Alpha was released.
    I swear you're like my wife who says's it's almost 7:00 at 6:30.
    It's all relative I guess.

    Cheers,
    Jonathan

  • Download Manager with no restart functionality? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bonker (243350) on Thursday September 12 2002, @08:12AM (#4243977)
    In all other ways, Moz has completely replaced all other browsers for me. I always laugh at friends and coworkers who send me a link, but then tell me to be careful because it comes with several popup-ads.

    I have to wonder what the rationale behind including a download manager with no scheduling or restart functionality is.

    Oh well. I assume that this will come along eventually, just like everything else. The team has fixed both the bugs I submitted for 1.1a (table layout problems), so I will assume that they will eventually get around to this kind of functionality.
  • Has anyone noticed that there's no installerless .zip release of 1.2alpha for Windows on the releases [mozilla.org] page? I will use the .exe for now but being able to unzip testing versions in a self-contained directory (as was the case with previous releases) is rather handy.

    The release notes even say "In this release the feature does not work in installer-builds you need to get a .zip distribution", yet there is none. Perhaps it's just an oversight.

  • It's an alpha. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gerv (15179) <gerv AT gerv DOT net> on Thursday September 12 2002, @08:28AM (#4244072) Homepage
    The headline is misleading - this is Mozilla 1.2 Alpha. See the roadmap [mozilla.org] for full details on the numbering scheme and release schedule.

    1.0.1 [mozilla.org] was also released recently. This is a bugfix release for those people using 1.0 who don't want to upgrade to 1.1final or 1.2alpha.

    Gerv
  • Is there any reason to switch from Opera to Mozilla? The only big differences on my machine between Opera and Moz is that Moz is slow and it's a memory hog. And those aren't really good reasons to switch.
  • I'll admit I haven't downloaded Mozilla, for one main reason - I don't have the bandwidth to do so (56k modem? Eta 22 hours!) so maybe this question will be really easy to answer - or not:

    Is there some sort of preferences manager that deals with all the options this new functionality is bringing about? The reason I ask is that whilst type ahead find looks and sounds rather nice, I don't think that adding a line of text to a flat text file is exactly the most user-friendly way of doing things. Especially not in a Windows world anyway.

    On a side note, it's like when NS7 is mentioned without the pop up ad filter and you invariably get the posting that says "edit this file, add this line, remove this comment and it's done!". Might be easy to us, but probably not to those people that we'd like to encourage to use something apart from IE.

        • The mirrors list [mozilla.org] is your friend.

          Also, 10Mb at 3k per second -> 55 minutes. In actual fact, it's about 13Mb so it might take you an hour and a quarter. I don't know where you live, but that shouldn't cost you more than a pint of beer in local currency.

          Gerv
  • Type ahead find has existed for years in IE for Mac, just like it has existed in the Mac Finder since system 7. The behaviour of typing a fiex letters and getting the closest element of a set has been implemented everywhere : file lists, dropdown menus, etc.

    That is the problem with the behaviours of the mozilla interface widgets : they don't behave like any plateform.

    Would it be too hard to make the widgets behave diffently depending on the plateform ? For example, when you click once in the address bar, all the text gets selected. That works on Windows, but not on the Mac, where the standard is to insert the bar cursor at the point where you clicked. The same for clicking in the scrolling bars : it only pages once, not repeatedly like on a Mac. The same for the dropdown menu (see the comparison of the windows drop down menu and the mac one by Bruce Tognazzini), etc etc.

    I think people like visual inconsistency (themes, skins), but hate behavioural inconsistency.
  • ...considering Mozilla follows the kernel-style odd/even unstable/stable release numbering format, 1.2 should be a stable build.

    Does this mean I'll be able to download a version with XFT anti-aliased font support, like I did with 1.0? I have 1.0 with XFT which I downloaded from here [mozilla.org], and I've been waiting to upgrade but I couldn't bear to lose my AA fonts.

    In case you haven't seen it, I have a screenshot of Mozilla with AA fonts here [swoo.net].

    For

    --Jon

  • Normally, at this point, I would mention that there's a Spellchecker available for Mozilla [mozdev.org]. However, it appears that the Spellchecker is broken with all nightly builds after August 30th [mozdev.org] (and I'm not certain whether 1.2alpha is affected as well)

    The spellchecker-broken bug [mozdev.org] has been filed as a "blocker" (highest possible severity), but there's been no progress since August 31st (when the bug was filed). :-/

  • Bayesian anti-spam filters (Score:3, Interesting)

    by abischof (255) <alex&spamcop,net> on Thursday September 12 2002, @09:04AM (#4244305) Homepage

    Remember that Slashdot article [slashdot.org] on Paul Graham's method of spam blocking through Bayesian filters [paulgraham.com]?

    In case not, the basic idea is that spam can be fairly reliably detected through statistical analysis of word choice. For instance, a message containing the word "GNU" probably isn't spam, while one containing "remove" might just be (but see the write-up [paulgraham.com] for more detail).

    Anyhow, there's been a bug filed [mozilla.org] requesting Bayesian filtering for Mozilla. If you're interested in the feature, you may wish to vote for the bug [mozilla.org] (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account [mozilla.org] to vote).

  • VI syntax for searching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ceswiedler (165311) <chris@swiedler.org> on Thursday September 12 2002, @09:28AM (#4244466)
    Apparently Mozilla developers use Vi. On the feature description [mozilla.org] for TypeAheadFind, it says: Type / before your string to search all text.

    Wonder if it supports ? for backwards searching, i for case insensitive... ;-) This is good, 'cuz I've found myself hitting / occasionally to do a search in Mozilla.

  • Type ahead find (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Pim (140414) on Thursday September 12 2002, @09:36AM (#4244535)
    It's about time that the keyboard became useful during browsing! I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to navigate with the keyboard in a browser as easily as I can in a text editor. Hopefully (I haven't tried it yet), this is a step in that direction.

    However, I'm slightly concerned about the description [mozilla.org] of this feature. I gather this appeared in IE, and I fear that mozilla is more concerned with "parity" than with the most usable implementation. (Do you realize that when using the mouse wheel to change text size, going up makes the text smaller? Copied from IE. Won't fix. Bug 146491 [mozilla.org])

    It appears to start searching as soon as you type a letter. This rules out all other possible uses for the letter characters. All of the most accessible keys on the keyboard "used up", just to avoid having to hit a command key to start searching in links. Even though you already have to hit a command key ("/") to search in the full text. If we want more keyboard functions, only punctuation keys (or key combinations) are available. For example, to seach for "foo" I can type "/foo", but to get the next hit, I have to do Ctrl-G, instead of something convenient like "n". This seems shortsighted.

    Well, I'll have to try it before I can be sure of my criticism, but from what I understand, this feature could become much more powerful if the implementors design it well, instead of merely copying IE.

  • Still waiting for deb... (Score:3)

    by Robotech_Master (14247) on Thursday September 12 2002, @10:57AM (#4245060) Homepage Journal
    ...of mozilla-browser newer than 1.00-3. Don't need all that other stuff on my system; just the browser. But there's no mozilla-browser 1.1 yet...let alone 1.2a.
    • What can the new mozilla do that I can't already do in Opera or IE?!?!?

      That you can't do in Opera? Don't know, I don't use Opera.

      That you can't do in IE:

      1. Tabbed Browsing

      2. Use mouse gestures

      3. use radial context menus

      4. use type ahead search (ala Emacs)

      5. Use Mycroft search plugins to search from the URL bar or Sidebar.

      6. Use other neat Sidebar plug-ins

      7. use custom themes to "skin" the browser.

      8. chat on IRC

      I'm sure there are other things as well, but those are the first ones that come to mind.

      • Re:Umm.. Just a question... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        9) Block adds

        10) Block pop-ups

        11) Trust that the browser is not spying on me

        The 3 "killer features" of mozilla for me.

        • 2) dont care.. I prefer keyboard shortcuts, and hardly touch my mouse.

          Must be hardwork tabbing to all the links :-)
          The beauty of having mouse gestures/pie menus is you dont need to alternate between mouse and keyboard. I wish mozilla would have the rmb+lmb =forward/back buttons that Opera uses, that is really easy to use.
      • What isn't up to par, featurewise? As far as I can tell, it's as far as IE, and with the addition of tabbed browsing and the composer, it's even slightly better.
    • I've been slightly annoyed by this behavior, though you can work around it pretty easily. Mozilla to the last tab you were in so I just usually open a new tab (hit Ctrl-T) and then do the link. An annoying extra step I'll concur but I think if that is the only thing holding you back work around it. Mozilla has too much OSS goodness to let something so small ruin it for you. :-)
    • I'm always surprised that yet another Mozilla version does not fix big usability bugs.
      If you give us the bug numbers, we can vote for them or even nominate them to be fixed in an upcoming version. Throw us a friggin' bone here, people!

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