Mozilla 0.9.4 Released

asa writes: "Lots of bug fixes (1,467 at last count) since 0.9.3 including the ability to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. You can find more information on what's new at the release notes and mozillaZine."

Re:Looking good

[maggard]

If Mozilla is going to be able to compete with the major browsers...

What other major browsers? Opera? Lynx? The legions of other 1%'ers?

As far as most webfolks are concerned there's IE for Wintel, IE for Mac (they've different code bases and behave very differently), Netscape et al v.4x, Netscape/Mozilla et al v.6x then generic text-browsers for ADA compatibility. That leaves Netscape/Mozilla as one of the two major names and the rest lost in the "other" catagory*.

*Yes lots of browser-partesians will howl at this but for most web sites the vast majority of browsers hitting them regularly are IE or NS. No comment on quality or anything else, just reading the logs.

Re:Speed issues. Moz 9.3/9.4

[zachlipton]

In my mind, I don't think of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x to be an upgrade to Netscape 4.x, I think of it as a completely different product. Any time that you rewrite 100% of the product, you can expect the new version to be slower, more infested with bugs, and just "feel" worse than the older version which has been tended for many years.

However, if Netscape decided not to do the 5.0 rewrite, disaster would be the only end. The old code was not mantainible and doesn't allow for the powerful new features and embedding that seamonkey allows for.

Speed is something that is being worked on and is significantly better than before. I won't mention full names here on /. without permission from the people involved, but someone at Netscape (d. hy.) did a lot of work on page loading and a new contributor did a lot of proformence work as well recently (jes.). Mail/news also uses the widget in the folder-paine, which has great speed increases as well.

So we are trying the best we can. As always, patches are welcome.

Zach

Re:Proxomitron

[Todd Knarr]

How about not optimizing your page code instead? Just write HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 or CSS1/CSS2 or Javascript 1.2 or whatever according to the standards ( see www.w3c.org for all of them ) and make life easy on all of us. I find it annoying to go to a site and see "Sorry, Netscape 6.x isn't supported.", flip the user-agent string to IE5.5 and discover that the site renders perfectly in Mozilla 0.9.recent. To me it says that the site doesn't care what customers it annoys and that the designer doesn't know how to create HTML pages.

Re:Oh Great!!

[tester13]

not at all. I want to see what I want to see and don't want to see what i don't want to see.

I'm not averse to changing content per se. I just want to be the one changing it.

Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla

[drfireman]

"Apple wouldn't dream of making a feature that didn't have a UI interface whereas with Linux it's the norm."

I'm not a particularly savvy Mac user, but over the years I've made dozens of modifications to various system features via resedit and by downloading little hacks. I'm sure there have been hundreds if not thousands of such undocumented features. With OSX I'm sure there are easily thousands of features you can alter that don't have a nice interface. So I don't think your statement is well-supported. It would be much more correct to say that Apple wouldn't dream of documenting a feature that didn't have an interface. I don't think it's productive to fault Linux software for not taking this same shield-the-user attitude. People may be trying to make Linux more idiot-friendly, but I have yet to hear anyone suggest that it should also be made less geek-friendly.