mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8

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

[aufbau]

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.

Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer

[EvlG]

About once I week I scan mozillazine's build comments and download the best of the latest nightlies. Helps me stay current to report new bugs, without risking too much. I recommend it for those that like bleeding edge, but still need to get Real Work (TM) done.

Next in line

[archen]

Isn't .9.8 the point where focus is supposed to shift towards the mail client? Or was that .9.9? Anyway, I'm just happy that shift + left-click isn't crippled anymore...

Re:What encrpytion?

[hangdog]

I'll answer the ? myself...From the Mozilla FAQ:


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:first `Mozilla has sucked for years` post

[irony nazi]

I don' t care for OmniWeb. It keeps crashing on my G4 PowerBook. This is my first Mac in years. Does it do this a lot or is it my set up? I was hoping for a good Macintosh web browsing experience but here's my run-down of the OS X webbrowsers...

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.

Spellchecker

[abischof]

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:Finally!

[orkysoft]

No, it was a bug.

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:Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer

[abischof]

For the link-impaired, Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] tracks the progress on Mozilla and, for each nightly, gives comments on the day's build [mozillazine.org]. Of course, using the nightlies [mozilla.org] can be bleeding edge, but the Build Comments [mozillazine.org] can help to ensure smooth sailing.

Re:What encrpytion?

[octothorpe]

Have you installed the mozilla-psm package yet? All the encryption goodness is kept in that package now. I do all my banking through the web using Mozilla 0.9.7 with no problem at all. So far I havn't found a secure site that bothers it.

Re:What encrpytion?

[jeffy124]

actually, SSL typically uses both RSA or Diffie-Hellman and DES to secure a connection. The server's certificate is signed by the issuer's private key, verified by the browser having the public key built in (hard-coded usually). Upon verification, the cert contains the public key of the server, and the server sends over a DES session key encrypted using the server's private key. Browser decrypts the key, and all communications from there are encrypted using that DES session key.

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.

The most important fix...

[weave]

When browsing slashdot, if you follow a link from far down in a long list of comments, when you follow the history back, your old scroll position will be remembered... No longer will it force a refresh and throw you back to the top of the thread.

My solution?

[dimator]

$cat newmoz.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd /home/dimator/newmoz/
rm -rf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz mozilla;
wget -c -t 0 -T 40 ftp.mozilla.org//pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozill a-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz;
tar xzf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz;
rm -rf mozilla/plugins/
ln -s /home/dimator/newmoz/plugins mozilla/plugins


(I keep all my plugins in a seperate dir to make things easier.)

Good news

[pinkpineapple]

New to this release is the fact that published APIs are now frozen. Mozilla has been really really annoying at changing their APIs, therefore breaking code from external developers because no backward compatibility and almost no turn around time was given from one release to another. Until 0.9.7 the Plugin API kept changing every time a dot build was made. Well, according to the cvs comments, not anymore. Developers will finally be able to release code which will work for more than 2 releases in a row? Great! This smells like Mozilla is going to be final pretty soon.

PPA, the girl next door.

Re:What encrpytion?

[bhaskin]

This is normally a sign that psm didn't get installed. Please try reinstalling and make absolutely sure that you install psm. If that doesn't fix it hop on #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org (you can even use the included chatzilla) and ask for help.

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

remove IE from Windoze forever!!

[Herr_Nightingale]

Think Mozilla's bloated? check out how much space you can save by wiping out IE 6.
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

Re:ok, nevermind, this one gets my stamp of approv

[Verteiron]

I had that problem, too, but it turned out I had merely neglected to install the Mozilla PSM stuff. Installing that fixed all my HTTPS problems under Galeon.

Re:Mozilla is a badge of Open Source failure

[Flower]

You must be kidding. Most of those years I would have considered Mozilla alpha software. Currently I'm running build 2002013103 on my PII 233 with 192 meg o' ram in it and that nightly was good enough to get me to uninstall Opera.

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.

Much improved startup times.

[Adhoc]

YYMV, but going from .9.7 -> .9.8, my startup times have gone from in the neighborhood of 10-15 seconds to 3-5 seconds. Also Flash seems to work without problems for the first time. I used to have strange audio problems, annoying clicking sounds. Not sure if this improvement is due to improvements in mozilla or in the emu10k1 driver though, either way I'm very happy with it.

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 :P For now I'm quite content though.

See www.libpng.org for testing

[konmaskisin]

... the MNG and JNG support.

MNG seems more complete and it certinaly nicer than animated GIFs for quality.

http://www.libmng.com/MNGsuite/

Re:It's the simple features that count.

[bunratty]

Actually, typing y, down-arrow, enter gets me to yahoo.com in just three keystrokes in Mozilla. But if you really want the Ctrl+Enter feature you describe, just vote for bug 37867 [mozilla.org].

Re:Spellchecker

[abischof]

What would be nice is getting the spellchecker integrated in the text entry controls, like this one with which we post to /.

That would be bug 16409 [mozilla.org] (bug 58612 [mozilla.org] is also related). You can vote for it [mozilla.org], if you like.

Re:See www.libpng.org for testing

[bunratty]

I'll save you some trouble. The bugs in MNGs are bug 44866 - MNG dosn't support Chromaticity correction and ICC profiles [mozilla.org] and bug 116307 - MNG alpha partly broken [mozilla.org].

Re:Mozilla is OK. Opera is great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla does have gestures. It's a mozilla project called Optimoz.

Check it out at:
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/

To the naysayers...

[vex24]

I don't mean this in a rude way, but if you're really concerned about how bad Mozilla is, get yourself a bugzilla account and try helping out a little! Just using Mozilla and posting your comments or problems to the appropriate bug page can help out a lot, and who knows, you might even find the answer to your question!

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. :)

Re:flash plugin (Wild Hack)

[bperkins]

So this bug is still around. Well here's something I hacked up. I've been using it for a while and it seems to work.

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.:)

Re:Debian releases?

[asa]

The RPMs are daily and milestone build contributions from Chris Blizzard. If DEBs are important to you then make builds and contribute them or find someone that can.

--Asa

Try Enigmail !!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed enigmail, and wow, it just works!

First install Moz 0.9.8, then gpg (or pgp) and generate keys. Then install enigmail from http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download.html . After some minor tinkering (mostly just trying to understand how it works) I figured it out.

This is what I did:

First I sent an email to myself with a signature attached (can be done automatically)

Then I fetched that email with Mozilla Email, which picked up the signature automatically, and didn't even display it (it looked like a plain vanilla email without a signature)

Then I sent a new email to myself, but this time Mozilla automatically encrypted it, since by then it knew the key to use for that address!

So, it all becomes pretty much transparent encryption.

Way cool!

USA-centric or what is it?

[demon-cw]

I mean the part:

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!

Re:Forget 1.0 -- it's ready NOW

[Explo]

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:Mozilla needs to focus on correctness, not feat

[Salsaman]

"Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch. "

Not so. Netscape pays people to write the features and fix bugs which are needed for a 1.0 release.

Only the external contributors could be said to be "scratching an itch".

Re:Skins

[Salsaman]

"Is that all that's available for Mozilla in the theme department? "

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:Disabling cookies

[orabidoo]

This works well, but current mozilla has a better option: in the preferences window, go to "privacy & security", select "cookies", click on "limit maximum lifetime of cookies to", and select "current session".

This works with all sites, and forbids them from saving permanent info on your hard disk (i.e tracking you across sessions).

Re:Debian releases?

[jbmadsen]

Both the milestones and daily builds are packaged by Debian. They naturally only appear in unstable (well, 0.9.5 made it to testing), but you can use the pinning feature of apt if you use testing to install mozilla from unstable.

Re:What encrpytion?

[DrXym]

Ummm, the security libs (NSS) that are part of Mozilla and do SSL amongst other things have been developed over years and are use in all kinds of Netscape & Sun server & client products. I'd love to know how this is "reinventing the wheel".

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?

Aspell *is* the plan

[mattdm]

Or at least a key part of it. See Bug #56301 [mozilla.org].

So use Galeon - 1.03 just released

[Nailer]

I hope that Mozilla 1.0 will have native widget support for Windows 2005.

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.

Re:If only it is faster...

[bunratty]

Mozilla is slow with a large Slashdot page probably because it's a large table, and Mozilla is slow on large tables. See bugs 74888 [mozilla.org] and 54542 [mozilla.org].

Ispell problems on classic Mac and Win32

[yerricde]

But as I pointed out, the source is open, and there are in fact even binaries for most platforms available anyway. Ispell binaries are available for MS/DOS, Win32, OS/2, and even the Amiga, as well as *nix.

But not classic Mac. Classic Mac OS apps don't even have a concept of a "pipe" or a "command line," instead exposing local services through AppleScript; to my knowledge, nobody has made AppleScript bindings for Ispell. And under both Win32 and classic Mac OS, spawning a new process (any process) is very slow.

get bleeding edge Mozilla easily with getmoz

[Anonymous Coward]

automatic downloading, installing, copying of plugins and archiving of old builds.

http://getmoz.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

"get bleeding edge Mozilla easily with getmoz"

Re:Here's your spellchecker

[bwt]

Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything.

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.

Re:The most important fix...

[Mike Schiraldi]

Dude, just use the tab browser. Set middle-click to open links in new tabs, have new tabs open in the background, and you can open up links and keep reading the page you're on

Re:The most important fix...

[Christopher Whitt]

Except if you use mozilla, you get the middle click opens new window functionality.

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