Mozilla 1.1 Alpha Released

theBrownfury writes: "Mozilla.org has released Mozilla 1.1 alpha, the first post 1.0 milestone. This release has been in the works for almost 2 months now incorporating over 1700 bug fixes and more than a dozen new features. Including: Quartz rendering for OS X 10.1.5 users, new layout performance enhancements targeted at DHTML, faster startup times and more. Here are the release notes and the link to the releases page or FTP for downloads."

Wooo!

[Clay Mitchell]

Hopefully this version will fix the problems I get loading pages with lots of dhtml... takes forever to load those :( (for example, flat mode comments @ shacknews.com)

Hallelujah!

[larien]

From the release notes:

Image blocking for Mail & News has been implemented

This is one feature I found missing from 1.0 which I felt should have been in. Other than that, I've found Mozilla to be a good mail client, despite my normal hatred of intergrated mail clients in software; best of all, I can use the same program in Windows and linux to access my IMAP mail!

Next step is to figure out an easy way to automate transferring my contacts from Outlook (I've got an iPaq with all my contacts which syncs to Outlook) to LDAP, then both Mozillas (and my webmail program for externally accessing email) can use the same contacts list.

Re:1700!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its like the old saying, Too many cooks spoil the broth.

If you look at the about screen for the Konqueror browser they have about 25-30 programmers each doing a little job on their own. Thats why it really rocks!

Mozilla however was hacked together by thousands of serperate programmers each adding salt.

Maybe it would be better if mozilla was developed like the linux kernel was, and thats the main programmers reveiwing patches before they are accepted.

DoS in Mozilla/X

[kyhwana]

Anyone know if this has the fix for the remote DoS
when X/XFS is running?
(For those of you who don't know, you can kill X
by including "body { font-size: 1666666px; }" in a stylesheet

New release very soon after 1.0

[TuringTest]

It's a Nice Thing than Mozilla goes on dropping new releases after 1.0, because the release often approach of free software brings new features quite often.

If someone there is worried about people facing this 1.1 new release when, in press releases they have been told about 1.0, then don't worry. The big milestone of 1.0 is about compatibility: the interfaces have been frozen so further development will be easy to do. This is a concert only for enterprises developing applications based on Mozilla technology (PDAs, portable aps, embedded devices), not for the desktop end user.

Any comments on how this compares to Chimera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that Quartz rendering is supported, does anyone have experiences in how stable and fast this is compared to Chimera (the Aqua version of Mozilla, not the old X11 browser).

Re:Java Problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to play pool on yahoo games using sun java but the installation was very clunky. It would just lock up the computer until I installed the Blackdown [blackdown.org] version of Java.

Text comparison.

[saintlupus]

I took a couple of screenshots of Slashdot rendered with and without the Quartz rendering of Mozilla 1.1A.

Wow. What a difference.

http://www2.canisius.edu/~graciem/mozilla.html

--saint

Re:Download manager

[chabotc]

Actualy could not disagree stronger. Scheduling and a nice overview of downloads is very nice, but segmented / multithreaded download is the worst thing that ever happened.

Multithread/segmented download is based on the assumption that the other people downloading are using one download process. And by using more your self, you get more bandwidth which you steal away from the other people. This is a extremely anti-social stance.

Also, it is a bitch for sysadmins. If everyone used multi-process downloads, suddenly your site has to keep in mind that those 50 people downloading all use 5 processes, so you have to cater to 250 download processes (which eats mem, slows your machine down, and is generaly unfair for people who do play nice!)

What i have done on all my FTP servers, is to put this line in the /etc/ftpaccess file:

throughput /var/ftp * * 20000 0.2 *

The 20000 is the max download speed (set to 0 for unlimited), but the 0.2 is the interesting part. It means that every extra download processes for the same client only gets a factor 0.2 of the download speed! This way if someone is anti-social enough to download using 5 threads, his download is actualy _slower_ then when he would use a single process. Thus keeping the bandwidth available for the people who play fair.

GTK2 port of Unix versions?

[Turmio]

In traditional /. style I prefer to ask silly questions instead of go googling or reading Bugzilla so here it goes.

Does anyone know if they're planning to replace GTK 1.2 with GTK 2.0 soon as default toolkit on Unix platforms? By default I mean it uses GTK 2.0 if found without having to use --with-toolkit=gtk2 configure option of whatever it's called. I think basic GTK 2.0 support has been in since February or so and I personally tested it sometime in April or May (had to get some patches somewhere and apply to source from CVS, wasn't yet committed back then) and it worked fine on my mainstream system (i686 PC running Debian/unstable). Also some days ago I grabbed some snapshot debs from an APT repository announced on galeon-devel mailing list. Packages included Mozilla with GTK2 support and Galeon compiled from source from the HEAD branch of their CVS. That GNOME 2.0 version of Galeon is already almost quite usable, very cool.

Anyway, IMHO, it would be appropriate to begin public testing of new rendering back-end in early stages of 1.1 alphas by compiling official snapshots for Unices with GTK 2.0 support enabled. Any words regarding the issue?

Downloading of different sites?

[barnaclebarnes]

Point taken, What about downloading of different sites for the same file. This would reduce the load on individual servers ad get your download out of the way for other users quicker.

Even taking away the segmented download features I think the browser should still have some of the other features of Gozilla/Getright/etc.

/b

Features Mozilla really needs

[aoty]

Kudos on the excellent browser. I couldn't be happier with it... well, maybe a little happier.

I'd love to see a way to allow/block particular plugins for certain websites, as we can now with cookies. A way to globally turn all plugins on/off easily would be useful as well.

OT... the start up speed from 1.0 to 1.1a is significantly faster on my machine, and 1.0 was fast enough for me!

Xlib

[Per Abrahamsen]

Last I heard (which is a long time ago), the plan was to use pure Xlib. Mozilla already uses its own XUL widgets for almost everything.

People who prefer Gtk over XUL should probably use Galeon [sourceforge.net] instead of Mozilla.

Re:excuse me but

[rabidcow]

Yes, I wish they'd add a "disable pipelining for this site" option, as for image loading and such.

Re:roadmap: Re:This is a milestone

[asa]

I wonder if the developers working on the 1.0.x releases will get bored quickly?

They are the same developers that are working on the 1.x releases. Why would they get bored checking in a fix to the trunk and to the branch?

--Asa

Re:roadmap: Re:This is a milestone

[asa]

The branch will have a subset of the fixes that land on the trunk. It will not have all of the new features that the trunk has, although some of the features will eventually migrate to the branch after they are well tested on the trunk.

Mozilla builds a set of technologies from which end user products can be built. We provide these technologies to everyone but our primary consumers are companies and organizations that use our technologies in their products. The stable 1.0 branch and the 1.0.x releases on that branch are intended for companies and organizations looking for the most stable technologies they can get. The 1.x development trunk is intended for testing large changes and new features as well as working toward a Mozilla 2.0. We intend to have stable points on the 1.x trunk about once a quarter for those vendors who are a little less conservative or need the latest and greatest feature set for use in their products.

So to answer your question, yes, we will have two different development paths but one will be tracking the other as closely as stability will allow. You won't _have_ to choose from anything but if you're interested in helping us test our latest technologies then please grab trunk (1.x) builds and report any problems. If we need help testing builds on the more conservative 1.0 branch then we'll let you know.

--asa

Data pipelining...

[RealityThreek]

is awesome. I'm on a 28.8 modem connection for the summer, and I was pretty bummed about how slow webpages were loading up. After turning on the pipelining option, load times dramatically decreased.

There's an explanation on how it works here [mozilla.org].

Re:Text comparison.

[edwdig]

I agree. In the 1.1 screenshot, the text looks like a blurry mess to me. If I look at it from up close, the blurring is painfully obvious and just doesn't look good. I tried backing up away from the screen, and it's hard to read. I don't get why it's supposed to be an improvement.