Mozilla 0.9.5

agotneja writes: "Check out mozilla.org for details :) Another fine (hopefully!) release." For whatever reason, 1.0 still seems really far off.

replies to self for clairification :)

[timothy]

... " DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON use at own risk" is not to say that it's actually risky :) In fact, I find Mozilla (recent nightlies) closer to crash free than most other software I use, certainly on a per-hour browser, since I spend most waking hours in it of late.

I just mean, if the "one point zero" is that important, maybe the wrong things are being evaluated. I bet every release is tempting to call one point zero, but Hey, aren't "point zero" releases supposed to be unstable / expected-to-be-updated anyhow? When 1.0 comes, wait for the "why only 1.0?!" flame ...

Mozilla developers, please ignore silly number flames.

timothy

p.s. time to break in 9.5 in Berlin :) Greetings to all from the KongreBhalle :)

Mozilla is the BEST browser!

[HanzoSan]

Right now no Browser even compares in terms of speed/power ratio.

Sure its debateable that Opera is faster, But Mozilla is more powerful, Its Debateable that IE is more stable, but Mozilla is faster.

Right now, in terms of speed and power Mozilla is the BEST browser you can have.

However if any Mozilla coders are reading this, what needs to be done now to make Mozilla even better, is to start intergrating tools into it, I know all the people on their 486s will scream "BLOAT" But this is what the average user wants, not the average geek.

By intergration i mean, why not tie winamp into Mozilla itself in the same way flash and quicktime are tied in so when someone clicks on an mp3 file the embeded winamp loads and plays it.

Intergrate ICQ + AOL into mozilla all on ONE list, I dont mean jabber but i mean OFFICIAL clients, Mozilla afterall is owned by AOL.

This sounds like feature bloat and yes it could be, but Most windows users have ICQ open and Mozilla open wasting vast amounts of ram, Intergrating these tools in a good way would be nice.

Mozilla also needs better memory management, I know its fast now, its as fast as it can be, but it seems they have stopped focusing on improving the speed, I say they should keep trying to make it as fast and as optimized as possible, this is for the linux using crowd, and the geeks, We want it to be fast and use LESS ram yet remain powerful. Difficult yes, but theres still room for improvement.

Some other features i want, when i download an mp3, or a file, i want to actually SEE it on the desktop or directory its downloading, i dont want to download it to a temp directory and then transfer, Some people like to open files before they are 100 percent complete, such as mp3s.

Last but not least, better and more intelligent cache, I know mozilla is fast right now, but some of us have broadband connections, while our browser is sitting idle we should have an option to allow pre caching of entire websites while we are reading that long article.

Once again, when more people get broadband it will be more important to pre cache websites by downloading BEFORE people actually click it, this gives them the illusion that things are faster because they dont have to "wait" for a page to load, its already loaded. For people on 56k i can see why they might complain, but please put some broadband options into Mozilla.

Theres alot of features i like, but Mozilla needs to be more innovative, I dont think its good enough for them to go around stealing all of IEs features, taking the old Netscape features, and stopping there.

Example, the password remember feature is nice, when i log into hotmail it gives me a list, but what if i dont want someone looking to see all my user names? How about auto complete in the username section to fill the username when i type "Han(autocompleted) HanzoSan and password autocomplete for people who cannot remember their password fully.

Thats just one useful feature that they COULD do that no one else has done. will they? I doubt it but maybe someone is reading this and will add some of these features.

Mozilla is the best browser, but in order to stay the best they need to innovate not copy Opera, IE, and others.

Link tag

[hereticmessiah]

What I like best about Moz 0.9.5 is its better support for the <link> tag. It's really about time the more browsers started to actively support this tag considering its great utility and vintage.

Re:Mozilla is the BEST browser!

[Mr Spot]

Its Debateable that IE is more stable, but Mozilla is faster.

But what use is a fast program if it isn't as stable as the program it is meant to replace? Don't get me worng, I use Mozilla too, but saying it's better because it is faster, even though it is less stable, is flawed logic to say the least.

Intergrate ICQ + AOL into mozilla ...

Mozilla's codebase is big enough already, adding features like these would simply be increasing the code's complexity while not being as well suited to the task as a dedicated program. This is also the basis of the Unix philosophy: make several programs to do one thing, and do it well, instead of one program to do everything and suck at them all. Add to that that you do not want your instant messaging programs to die when your browser does, and vice versa.

... pre caching of entire websites ...

This is a horrible thing to do! In essence, you would end up downloading countless megabytes of data that would never get read and cause needless congestion on the internet. Say you follow a link from an article: you may only end up going to one page in that site. But your browser has downloaded the whole thing, only to end up throwing it away. That would be extremely pointless and possibly perceived as rude by the operators of the server whose bandwidth you have just wasted. Also, broadband users wouldn't need to have pages pre-cached -- their connection is fast enough without the help of a web accelerator.

Not meaning to attack you personally, but I had to voice my opinion on some of your ideas, so don't get offended by what I say.

I forgot to mention

[HanzoSan]

stability speed and power are all ratios.

Having too much speed and not enough stability is a problem.
Having too much power and not enough speed is a problem.

Having too much stability and not enough power is a problem.

Having too much speed and not enough power is a problem.

Opera = too much speed not enough power.

Lynx = too much stability not enough power.

IE = too much stability not enough speed.

Mozilla = just enough speed, power, stability, its good at everything, but not the best at anything, well rounded software is usually best.

Re:Mozilla is the BEST browser!

[zmooc]

... pre caching of entire websites ...

Indeed a horrible thing, but it might be usefull if implemented in LARGE caching proxy-network with a LOT of users. This way browsing would be faster on average while the traffic doesn't necessarily have to increase; if browsing using a caching proxy is noticeable faster, more people will use it. This way the load will be kept from the webservers itself and will be moved to the caching proxies.

Rebuild for faster operation.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing you should do is pull down the source and reconfigure and build with --disable-debug "--enable-optimizations=-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro" in addition to what ever components you want.

You would n't believe how much more snappier it makes mozilla run, for example the java sdk framed docs index pages goes down from 2.5sec to 1.5sec's on my athlon 850.

Also add this line to your prefs.js file:

user_pref("nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache", false);

This speeds up loading time by using the pre-compiled versions of the javascript controls.

Q: Why should an IE user switch?

[Sara Chan]

Consider the typical Windows user, who uses IE 6. What are the reasons that I should give to such users for switching to Mozilla, or perhaps Netscape 6.1?

Please note that political arguments about open-source software are not what I'm looking for. The typical Windows user isn't going to listen to this.

What about features, speed, reliability, etc.? The things that I could tell users.

Google Toolbar

[ecliptik]

I know this sounds pretty stupid, but one thing that I like about IE is the google search toolbar you can add. Is there a way to have this in Mozilla?

AOL, Winamp, ICQ, Intergrated.

[HanzoSan]

Most Windows users use AOL, ICQ, and Winamp, these tools should all be intergrated into a package.

I dont mean crappy intergration like what was done with Netscape 6 either.

I mean GOOD intergration, example, you have a feature where you go to a website and you see all the other AOL and ICQ users on the site and can even initiate a group chat with them.

Imagine going to slashdot with this feature and getting into a debate with serveral people, pushing a button and ICQ chat opens up and all of the people are now in an ICQ chat with you where you can continue your debate.

Also Imagine the file sharing possibilities, of going to a site and deciding to send files to people on the site via ICQ in annonymous fashion.

Imagine embeded winamp to play your mp3s as they download similar to how quicktime works.

Imagine AOL instant messager people and ICQ people all being able to communicate via the MOzilla instant messager, which basically connects to both, all your important windows tools on one menu, Mozilla.

This is how Microsoft beat Netscape, and its how Mozilla should beat IE.

Not biased, just practical

[marm]

First there IS NO standard Window manager in linux.

Correct. However, KDE is the de-facto standard. Of the major distributors: Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera and (now) Turbolinux use KDE as the default. Only RedHat uses GNOME as default. Debian has no distinction between the two (at least in the forthcoming Woody release) - and previous releases have used WindowMaker as the default.

I dont know any distro which comes with just KDE.

Caldera? Big name in 'business' Linux desktops. All the major distros ship both KDE and GNOME apart from Caldera, which only ships KDE.

Konq will never be an IE because it will never be standard because there is no standard Linux Browser.

If you keep saying it it might not happen. But look at the evidence: All but one of the major Linux distros use KDE by default. Konqueror is the default browser for all those KDE desktops. Isn't that how IE got popular? It was just the first browser that new users came across. Unless a seismic shift occurs in the Linux desktop world, Konqueror is going to be the first browser that most new users discover. Sorry. Perhaps the mozilla team could push the distros a bit harder to get included as the default? (KDE doesn't have to use Konqueror as the browser...)

Konq is not the fastest at rendering, Opera and MOzilla absolutely destroy it in terms of rendering speed, I tested myself.

Are you sure? [canadacomputes.com] Subjectively, Konq seems the fastest browser I've used, but I think that is mostly due to its incremental rendering of tables and the visible relayouting it does. Some people hate that. I really like it. It's particularly useful if you read a lot of slashdot over a modem link - no waiting for the whole page to load before it's rendered. :)

Konq is not powerful enough, its years behind Mozilla, and its on the level of say Opera.

In what way?
KHTML renders the vast majority of sites at least as well as Gecko - in some cases better, especially on brain-dead sites that rely on IE quirks to look right. Where's Gecko's anti-aliased font support on X11? Where's the UI to change User Agent? Ok, Konqui doesn't have a password manager. That would be nice to have. Please, be more specific on what is missing from Konqueror.

Because jack of all trades = master of none, A browser should be the best BROWSER

Then tell that Netscape, who decided Mozilla should be an email client, news client, IRC client, instant messenger and HTML editor as WELL as a browser. If that's not being a jack of all trades, then I don't know what is. Using that as an argument for Mozilla over Konqueror is total hypocrisy.

Re:90 percent of MOzilla staff work for AOL.

[Gerv]

Heard of the GPL?

Sure I have. What's that got to do with Mozilla? ;-)

Until the relicensing is finished, Mozilla is effectively under only the MPL.

Gerv

Nightmare nightmare nightmare.

[Mikesch]

I realise that these features you want could presumably be turned off. BUT, why would I want the overhead of a web browser if all I'm doing is running ICQ (yes, I know recent builds of ICQ actually take up more memory than most web browsers).

The integration that quicktime does with the browser prompted me to swear off EVER installing it on any of my machines. Sorenson may be great, but I'll pass, thank you.

What's wrong with clicking on an mp3 and using a default program to open it. Presuming I want to listen to an mp3 repeatedly, I'll typically actually save it. A web browser should browse the web, that is it. It doesn't introduce a whole lot of hardship to open a dedicated to the task at hand. The user interface issues alone make it a tough task. Would the instant messaging client be docked inside the browser somewhere, or outside, what kind of controls would it have, would it be sleek, like you can force ICQ to be with some twiddling, or would it have the bulk of a web browser (typically what happens when you try to do things like this). On a fast enough machine (most of them now), IE opens instantly, mozilla nearly so (I'm not turning on the cache feature), ICQ usually sits there since I want it around all the time, as does AIM. Winamp opens instantly, and is usually docked somewhere anyway out of convenience. PERHAPS, including a link on audio files with a right click that says "stream from this location" would be a good idea, it would take the .05 seconds to open winamp and start streaming the media when it came in, which winamp will do anyway. It is just a manner of pointing winamp to the file where you are saving the data.

There was an instant messaging client that did what you are talking about, Odigo (is it still around?), I tried it for a day, the first time I went to a website and it showed everyone else with an Odigo client browsing the website, it freaked me the hell out. I dont need the entire internet knowing I'm browsing goat porn, thanks.
The more I try to talk to people online, the more I find out that I really don't have a whole lot in common with most of them. My ICQ list is reserved for friends that I've met in real life, and people in the few channels I hang out in on IRC. I dont want Joe in Utah messaging me because I happen to be looking at google.

I realise I'm saying this as a geek, but I also come from a background of a couple of years of ISP tech support. In addition to currently being a sysadmin, I do desktop support for decidedly non tech savvy users in my department, and such features wouldn't be useful or wanted by them, either. Right now, if icq or aim, or winamp screws up (We dont care what is installed on their machines as long as they get their work done and don't completely hose the os, most users have admin on their machines, until they prove themselves incompetant), it gets deleted and reinstalled. I dont want to have to completely uninstall a web browser simply because the AIM component screws up.

This wasn't intended as a flame but I think the way things work now is the best way. I'm not scared of change, I just dont like integrating everything, only to have a mess that isn't even remotely as useful as the individual parts.

i don't really understand you

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of your posts seem to deal with making Mozilla good for "the average user" instead of "the average geek". I'll put aside for now the fact that you have no fucking clue what "the average user" wants. But you seem to take it axiomatically that Mozilla should be used by the average user. I would like some rationale as to why.

"Average user is using IE right now because mozilla lacks the features needed to make them switch over." "make them"?! What frightening language. How about this: if they like IE, let them use IE? What good could possibly come from getting them to switch from IE to an IE-copycat?

At first I dismissed you as being one of the "average users" you talk about. That you say that you're the "average geek" makes your argument make even less sense. As I'm sure you know, of the graphical web browsers out there today, about 100% of them are for the "average user", which leaves about 0% of them for geeks like you and me. Mozilla offers the potential to be useful for geeks, and for some inexplicable reason, you demand that it stay targeted at the "average user", a marketplace that is already horrendously overcrowded, and one that Mozilla cannot compete in.

Can't we geeks have at least ONE fucking browser for ourselves? Is that too much to ask? The software industry is full of geeks with inferiority complexes, saying "yes, this is good software, but it's not good for 'the average user', so I must redesign it". Never mind the fact that they have NO idea what "the average user" is; they just have some terribly insulting stereotype in mind. Is it any wonder then that the software industry pumps out tonnes of CRAP each year? Instead of targeting at diverse markets, they all target at a single market (the "average user"), and since they're so misinformed, that single market doesn't even exist really.

I know there are a lot of soccer moms and illiterate secretaries out there using computers, fine. People exaggerate how big that market is, and they exaggerate just how stupid those people are, but still, they are fairly large and stupid (in terms of computer knowledge). But they do not make up the ENTIRE market. You may be surprised to know that there are a lot of people, a substantial amount of computer users, who actually know how to use a computer, and, wow, even like computers. Is it too much to ask that they get ONE FUCKING BROWSER THAT DOESN'T GIVE THEM BRAINDAMAGE? I don't care if 99% (horrid over-exaggeration) of users are too stupid to figure out anything beyond IE. Does that mean that there should never be anything designed for the other 1%, the 1% that will actually accomplish something with their software?!

Mozilla 0.9.5 is getting better and better

[agupta_25]

Starting with release 0.9.4, I have been using Mozilla exclusively, both on my Windows and on my Linux PPC machine, without even knowing it! I mean ... originally I used to come across sites that had problems with mozilla and had to use IE or Opera, but now, without even realizing it, mozilla has become my default browser of choice.

I suspect it has something to do with the 'Quick Launch' feature. Without this feature enabled, I had to wait almost 10-15 seconds before mozilla even started up, while IE almost loaded instantly. And I was unwilling to leave mozilla running all the time since it was such a memory hog. But with the 'Quick Launch' feature, I am pleased to say that mozilla loads as fast as IE on my machine and works better too! Plus, I don't have to keep mozilla running all the time.

I love certain features, e.g. being able to turn off those annoying javascript popup windows, and now ... with 0.9.5 tabbed windows! It just keeps getting better and better.

I definitely have to disagree with people who claim 'There is no such thing as a free lunch ...'. Mozilla 0.9.5 proves them wrong.

Mail/News/Chat clients, better Java support

[jonabbey]

Mozilla is being built as a successor to Netscape Communicator, and so includes a bunch of tools to take advantage of a variety of open Internet standards, including POP,IMAP,NNTP,LDAP, and IRC. Mozilla also includes a web page editor (Composer) which can be used to create mail and news posts as well as web pages, if you're into that kinky HTML stuff. This makes Mozilla vulnerable to the (misleading) bloat charge, for those who don't like flexible tools, but it also gives you a one-stop tool that can take you all over USENET as well as the web.

One of the most important benefits that I can see on Windows is that Mozilla comes with support for using Sun's recent, vastly improved, Java VM's integrated into the browser. Yes, people can write HTML for Java applets that will work on IE and Netscape 4.x using the Java plug-in, but Mozilla automatically uses the Java plug-in for all Java code, with significant benefits in performance and stability. If you have any use for Java in your browser, Mozilla will support things better.

There's also things like themeing, the sidebar, the improved cookie management, and the lack of operating system exploits that IE and Outlook seem to continually fall prey to.

Middle mouse button w/tabs

[Starship Trooper]

Is there a way to make it so that clicking the middle mouse button on a link opens it in a new tab, instead of a new window? That would be very nice, since tabs open a lot faster than new windows do and I've become used to using the middle mouse button.

Woohoo! Thanks dude!

[edunbar93]

You would n't believe how much more snappier it makes mozilla run

Actually, yes I would, because Mozilla's performance on my machine (K6-2 400) leaves *much* to be desired under Unix, while it runs as fast or faster than Exploiter under windows. (albeit very unstable... that might have had something to do with how unstable windows was on my machine before I "replaced" it shortly after buggering my drives)

I thank you very much for the tip. :)