Mozilla RC3 Released

pjdepasq was one of many reader to submit the news that "Those fine folks at Mozilla.org rolled out RC3 on Thursday I noted. They say it's the last planned release before 1.0, which I'm guessing is right around the corner. As a fan of the project (I'm using it on 3 platforms!), kudos to all of you!" Here are the release notes.

Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP

[pmsr]

And without the speed of IE too. Honestly, Mozilla (and Netscape 6 for that matter), really redefine the concept of slow and bloated.

/Pedro

Re:Netscape 7

[HanzoSan]

AOL is using gecko. AOL 7 was switched to gecko, thats also why netscape 6.5 was renamed 7.0

Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP

[satanami69]

Edit->Preferences
Click on Advanced
Click in Enable Quick Launch.
Click ok.
Now it'll load just as fast.

Heres the post everyone should read first

[HanzoSan]

Basically, this is what posts you'll see.

"IE is faster, Mozilla cant beat IE"

Lets respond to this post right now. OF course IE is faster and always will be faster because its build into the damn OS. MSN msger is faster than ICQ and AIM, anything made by Microsoft should be the fastest considering Microsoft has advantages in terms of knowing the source code of the entire OS.


"IE has won, its too late, Mozilla team should just give up"

Isnt this exactly what the IE team should have done back in 1998 when Netscape 4 was winning 70-30 in terms of percentages?

"Opera's done it all first, Mozilla is copying"

Of course Mozilla and Netscape will copy Opera the same way Opera and IE copied Netscapes Bookmark system.

"Opera is better than Mozilla and IE because its faster"

Are you using Windows? Perhaps you should try linux on your 486, its faster. What? You arent using a 486? Well stop complaining about speed, if Mozilla is slow, its because you are too slow to upgrade

"Mozilla/Netscape cant render page X"

Maybe it WOULD render page X if you stopped using IE and wrote that same msg to the site owner

"Mozilla is bloated and slow"

Try Kmeleon, Galeon, or if both those are slow try lynx.

"AOL isnt supporting Mozilla, why wont they put gecko into their AOL package?"

They have. AOL 7.0 gecko beta. Also try Netscape 7


This ends all arguements you people will have before they begin, the rest of the arguements will be about bugs in mozilla, when will 1.0 release, why mozilla isnt availble for your obscure OS, or why the mozilla team took 4 years to build the best browser.

Re:Solution

[Tony Hoyle]

copy & paste? Too hard... :-)

Drag the link onto the tab-bar.

Re:A bug that has plagued me since the start

[Matrix]

If you're using a proxy, make sure the proxy is HTTP/1.1 compliant. If it's not, you'll get those problems you're talking about. I think if you tell Mozilla to use HTTP/1.0 (Look in Prefs/Advanced/HTTP Networking), it will work with your proxy, but don't quote me on that.

If you're using the JunkBuster, upgrade to Privoxy [privoxy.org], a newer ad filtering proxy based on the original JunkBuster.

Re:Some Questions I can't find Answers to...

[sconest]

1) What version of Mozilla is Netscape 7.0pr1 based on?

As the userAgent string says : "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020513 Netscape/7.0b1"
Thus on the 1.0 branch.

2) Is Mozilla ever likely to support the auto-update function that Netscape has just included? (Being a sys-admin of 50-odd M$ boxes makes it a nightmare contemplating to update them all with the latest release)

It is in the prefs but I doubt it will happen since Mozilla releases are not targeted towards end-users.

3) I know the party for 1.0 is June 12th but what is the projected/updated release date?

The usual response: "when it's ready" :)
But I think it will be ready for that date (pure speculation)

Re:Mozilla/Netscape usage & anti-Netscape sent

[ObviousGuy]

How about Google? [google.com]

Re:Heres the post everyone should read first

[AegisKnight]

OF course IE is faster and always will be faster because its build into the damn OS.

This is something I'm tired of hearing. IE is not built into the OS. It just happens to come with it. It also happens to use a bunch of DLLs that other pieces of Windows use, rather than writing its own (*cough* XPCOM *cough*) And just because something is "built into the OS" doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be faster. On my machine (P2 400, 640 MB of RAM, Win2K), K-Meleon [sf.net] loads a couple seconds *faster* than IE does. It also opens new windows faster than any web browser I can remember. Not all 3rd party software is slower than MS software.

Re:Netscape 7

[bunratty]

Well, I need netscape anyway because some sites won't let you install a plugin for mozilla but only netscape or explorer.

The Mozilla PluginDoc project [mozdev.org] was created to help Mozilla users with installing their plugins. Go to that website to get instructions on how to install your favorite plug-in without needing Netscape.

Re:Wow.. Still no AA font support!!

[riggwelter]

RC3 still has zero support for anti-aliased fonts.

Not true - the packages for Red Hat that are linked to by mozilla.org don't have it enabled by default. It's easy to enable it by editing the unix.js file in the defaults/pref directory of the Mozilla install tree, and setting these prefs:
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref(font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
// or whatever your freetype library is

Other packages, such as those built for SuSE (get them from ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla) have these enabled by default.

Re:Mozilla/Netscape usage - Charles Upsdell's site

[bunratty]

I've been using Charles Upsdell's Browser News [upsdell.com] for reliable browser stats. According to that site, Mozilla/Netscape/K-Meleon/etc. browsers currently have a 1.1% share of page hits, IE has about 92%, and Netscape 4 about 4%.

Mozilla and acceptance

[theolein]

I have just read one page of trolls and flamebait and the usual anti Mozilla responses such as it is bloated, slow, non CSS compliant, buggy, no one uses it, etc.

Consider this:
1. It is the *one* browser that is nearly 100% standards compliant. IE's non-standard standards may be de facto standards in many cases, but those pages on the web that do in fact use those are very small in number and are usually on websites which are not heavily frequented, Microsoft's own pages being the exception to prove the rule.
2.If you use Quick Launch with Mozilla, it loads part of itself into memory and then starts up about as fast as IE does.
3.It is the *one* browser that renders pages in the same manner across all supported platforms. IE does not do this for example between the mac and Windows. Opera is one version behind on the Mac and it remains to be seen when they get to 6 there.
4.It is, in my experince, more stable than IE on Win and Mac. I experience fewer crashes with the latest RC's than I do with IE on Win and mac.
5.It is definitely more secure than IE. It has it's security bugs, but in no way as many as IE does.
6.You can have an influence in the way this browser is developed. Do you have the same influence with IE or even Opera for that matter?
If Netscape dies, Mozilla will carry on.
7.For those who say that the browser share market belongs to IE, I say let's look again in a year. Netscape used to own the market and lost it because of Microsoft's tactics and a poor product that was less standards compliant than IE. This could change again.
8.For those who troll that Mozilla is only at 1.0RC3 and in one year has only gotten here from a 0.9 version, perhaps you should realise that the Mozilla developers are not in a competition for version numbers with IE. Netscape plays this game and has released version 7.

All that said, you're free to use whichever browser you like best on your platform.

Re:Wow.. Still no AA font support!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla has working AA support. It uses the same antialiasing that IE uses on Windows (only for big text, only slanted edges) and does full antialiasing on Linux and other operating systems.

Re:Their planning to release with a big bug still

[GnomeKing]

Well, the bug is classified as severity "major" and has 79 votes saying it needs to be fixed...

easiest way to replicate (windows only dun forget):
open mozilla from desktop/quicklaunch icon
minimize
open mozilla from desktop/quicklaunch icon again
FROZEN

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fonts/unix/enablin g_truetype.html

Re:I want landscape printing !

[Morky]

In Netscape 7 rc1 there is a "Landscape" button in print preview. Margin controls, too.

Re:Wow.. Still [] AA font support!!

[anno1a]

As stated somewhere else it's already included. Maybe you should set up your linux and read some howtos before complaining. FUI I've run with anti-aliased fonts on my mozilla since 0.9.9, when I found out it was possible. One reason I could think of, why mozilla doesn't support aa fonts on your system is that you need the damned true-type fonts. That's what did the trick for me. Why doesn't mozilla supply these? Because it isn't their responsibillity. In short: RTFM

Re:YAY MOZILLA!

[gnugnugnu]

You really should report this to bugzilla
http://bugzila.mozilla.org

Some sites have made their pop up/under advertisements even more evil and force you to click on a combination link so that to get the page you want you are forced to display both pages.
Other sites use timer mechanisms and other tricks to display the page.

Be under no illusion this is an arms race. Advertisers and unscrupulous page designers will conitinue to abuse browser functionality and ram every nasty dirty trick down your thoat and Mozilla
will continue to adapt (and some days you just really gotta appreciate lynx).

Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP

[gnugnugnu]

> I love Mozilla to no end... I'd just like a native version. (See Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Lynx, etc

I read that sentence it is a bit misleading, if you want a "native mozilla" rather than just a native browser check out the following gecko based browsers (gecko, the mozilla rendering engine).

For windows Try K-meleon
k-meleon.sf.net
windows look and feel, gecko rendering engine

For Mac see Fizilla: or, for the boring, "Mozilla for MacOS X"
http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/

This page is quite informative
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/distr os.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding /examples / ndex.html

Wrong! (Was: Bug #22274)

[dannyspanner]

Read this document [netscape.com] to find out why the spaces appear and what you can/should do to fix it. Nobody said standards compliance wouldn't hurt.

Re:YAY MOZILLA!

[selmer]

Does the problem disappear when you add:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);

From: the customizing mozilla-guide [mozilla.org]:

When the dom.disable_open_click_delay pref is set to a non-zero number, window.open will fail when called more than that number of milliseconds after a mouse click.

Re:Heres the post everyone should read first

[DZR]

The problem is with IE NOT Mozilla. You could be referring to one of two CSS property/values pairs:

• position : fixed;
• background-attachment : fixed;

Mozilla gets both right. IE/Win has no support for the first, and implements the second incorrectly. The CSS spec clearly states [http] that background images should be fixed relative to the view-port and NOT the element box. IE/Win does the opposite. So, why not take the trouble to know what you are talking about before posting nonsense like this?

Re:One thing I'd like to know...

[sconest]

It was fixed in RC2 (and netscape 6.2.3)

Being in the kernel isn't magic

[jlusk4]

People make this fallacious assumption a lot. Sure, you get more privilege, and you don't have to worry about timeslicing and competing w/other user processes, but there ARE other kernel "things" going on you have to compete with, and you still have to service device interrupts, in a minimal sort of way.

Plus, you can still do stupid things with locks and totally throw away your advantage.

Case in point: I myself did a benchmark of Samba on a vendor's Unix vs. SMB on NT 4.0 SP3 a few years back (on the same hardware, duh). (It wasn't quite formal enough to publish, we didn't get written permission from ZD Labs, etc. etc., you know the drill, but I did spend a month on it.) We outperformed NT by a factor of 2 under fairly high loads (~30 workstations on 3 sublans hitting the server as hard as they could). How could that be, when SMB was a kernel process on NT, but Samba was a user process on our Unix? My only explanation (apart from the possibility that I fucked up the benchmark [pretty small, I had some assistance from our local gurus]) is that NT/SMB do some stupid locking things in the kernel and slow themselves down.

So, the kernel ain't magic.

John.

Re:Mozilla and acceptance

[killmenow]

1. It is the *one* browser that is nearly 100% standards compliant.

For everything you say but this, I agree. However, this [opera.com] would indicate Opera is very nearly 100% standards compliant as well.

I don't know if we should concern ourselves with a debate over which is closer to 100% compliant. It suffices to say there are at least *two* browsers that are nearly 100% standards compliant...and IE isn't one of them.

Stats from Google

[Malc]

Google has some information. [google.ca] Netscape 6+/Mozilla is too insignificant to register in its own category.

Off-topic aside: when I go to google.com, it redirects to google.ca (hence my link). Google's up to something. They don't know my geographical location from any cookie information, etc as this is a clean install of Mozilla 1 RC3.

Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP

[scrytch]

XUL is merely a nifty declarative way to construct GUIs. There's java implementations of it as well, and there's really no reason XUL couldn't be used to build native GUIs. The fact that Mozilla's XUL currently only targets the gecko engine is simply a consequence of the implementation -- it should be quite possible to make it render into native widgets and have them control mozilla "from the outside" through some sort of COM/XPCOM adaptor. But they really have no reason to -- end users are getting used to applications like mp3 players and the like that look and feel nothing at all close to "standard" -- witness RealPlayer, or even MS's latest windows media player on non-XP systems, for example.

Re:Netscape 7

[Khalid]

AOL didn't start Mozilla. The Mozilla project has been started mainly thanks to Jamie Zawinsky Eric Raymond efforts, prior to the AOL take of Netscape.

Re:Netscape 7

[cybermage]

"You might be able to save yourself a step in there somewhere with a symlink. "

This person is using windows.

Windows makes symlinking of folders very obscure, but not impossible. (If anyone knows a faster way to do this under Windows 9x, feel free to follow up):

1. Using Windows Explorer, locate the item or folder to which you want to link.
   
2. Right click the item and select "Send to" then "Desktop." This will create a shortcut to the item and drop it on the desktop.
   
3. Go to the desktop and right click the new shortcut. Select "Cut" from the list.
   
4. Return to Windows Explorer and locate the folder in which you'd like to place the symlink.
   
5. Paste the shortcut into the folder and rename it.
   

Follow these steps, and you have a fully functional symlink to a folder. It's way easier with normal files. Seems Microsoft never imagined putting folder shortcuts anywhere but the desktop and start menu. But, the desktop and start menu are just file system folders at the end of the day.

Re:Netscape 7

[doug363]

As has been said before, that's a shortcut, which does have to be interpreted on a program-by-program basis. Microsoft says that programs should follow them, but you can't type a complete path with a shortcut in it, and many programs don't support them as they should. By the way, you can also make a shortcut from one folder to another by right-dragging the target folder to the source folder in explorer, and choosing "create shortcut here" from the menu that appears. Then rename the shortcut if you want.

On systems with NTFS v5 and above (i.e. Windows 2000 and XP), there is a symlink capability -- it's called a "reparse point". Microsoft calls them "junction points" when they're a symlink to a directory, and "volume mount points" when they're used to do something similar to Unix mounting (or the old DOS "join" command).

They work quite well at the command line, but many programs written for Windows don't support them because they assume that a file can only have one name, for example. Or they don't correctly handle symlink loops, where a symlink in a directory refers to one of it's own parent directories. They're not very well documented or supported under Windows 2000 - you have to download some utilities from Microsoft or System Internals or someone - but they're better documented and supported under Windows XP from what I've heard.