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.
Nightly Build Progress and Developers Conference (Score:1, Insightful)
For those who are complaining about the amount of time Mozilla is taking to reach 1.0.0, all I have to say is take a look at the original Netscape 6 release (gag).
On a side note, is anyone else planning to attend the Developer's Conference at CMU mentioned on the (mozilla.org) page? More info located here [google.com]
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's New ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which will just lengthen the amount of time until 1.0 is delivered.
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: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:Mozilla is a badge of Open Source failure (Score:1, Insightful)
Besides, Netscape 6.2 is what you have to judge if you are talking about what has come of "Open Sourcing a company project." According to the W3C, Netscape 6.2 is the most standards compliant browser availabe. According to many browser comparisons by major consumer magazines/sites, such as this one [cnet.com], Netscape is also faster and less "crashy" than IE.
Jes, I come on here to read news, and I end up getting disgusted by people with bugs up their asses sounding like total assholes just trying to shit on peoples' hard work spreading pure propaganda about stuff they obviously don't have any real experience with or knowledge upon and it's just sad.
Are there any good people left out there who can appreciate a good thing and support it, or are we all just a bunch of bsers trying to scam enough money to buy status symbols while downplaying the admirability of actually doing something unique and/or significant?
Re:What encrpytion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ad counting (Score:1, Insightful)
I couldn't agree with you more on this topic. If I had a penny for every time a shady website caused my browser to refresh upon clicking the back button, I'd be a very rich man today. What happened to the days when we all just made quality websites and weren't so concerned about stealing pageviews with such underhanded tactics?
Re:Mozilla is a badge of Open Source failure (Score:1, Insightful)
Enlightenment is just one example. It's developers seem to consider it's development beta, and not yet version 1.0. In fact it is being rewritten again for about the third time.
So your point about mozilla being a beta for 3-4 years means what? It's a bad browser? It doesn't work? What? How has it's development been a bad thing? Obviously some people seem to think it is good enough for a version X release otherwise it would never have been released as Netscape 6. Granted 6 was crap till 6.1 but 6.1 has been considered a very good browser.
What is the problem with an Open Source project having very high standards? Or would you rather they released a buggy product that requires you to patch it a couple months later?
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: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.
Re:Spellchecker (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Here's your spellchecker (Score:2, Insightful)
ispell -l | fmt
Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything. What is the point of writing a spellchecker when there are several very good ones already available, and open source even so if you need to you can tweak as needed to get them to work with your program properly? Just pipe the text to ispell (or any similar already existing program) in the background and all you have to write is a simple parser to handle the results.
While I'm on the subject, why write an email client? There are plenty of great email clients out there, all the browser needs to know is what program to invoke to handle mailto links. Why write an entire widget library just to make pretty buttons? So you can turn around and add "native-style widgets on winXP and OS X" - wow, you can get mozilla to look like it belongs on the box it's running, at a significant performance hit, and it took how many man hours of coding to do that? I'm sorry, I just don't understand why anyone would spend all this time on duplicating so much work unecessarily. It would seem to me that your time would be better spent actually writing a browser instead of, it appears, spending most of the coding time on anything and everything but the browser.
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: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.
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:When to deploy... (Score:1, Insightful)
I DO have a comment. Any sysadmin that recommends software based on his own 'political' beliefs and not on a solid technical basis is an idiot, and belongs here on this site all day. Which he probably is.
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:When to deploy... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer (Score:3, Insightful)