Mozilla 1.2 Betas Start Flowing

Asa Dotzler writes "Today mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.2alpha. This is a preview of what's to come with Mozilla 1.2 expected in early November. The new alpha contains great new features like Type Ahead Find which allows quick web page navigation when you type a succession of characters in the browser. In addition to the new features Mozilla 1.2a contains stability and perfomance improvements including a major boost in the speed of downloading mail on Mac OS X.This release comes on the heels of the security and bugfix follow-up to Mozilla 1.0. If you're a 1.0 user and you're not upgrading to Mozilla 1.1 or newer then you are strongly encouraged to get Mozilla 1.0.1 for security and stability fixes."

Type Ahead Find

[Anonymous Coward]

...great new features like Type Ahead Find which allows quick web page navigation when you type a succession of characters in the browser...

Great and new...just like Opera has been doing since version 5.

Re:No major news, and still a memory hog

[Gerv]

Each quarterly cycle has an alpha, a beta and a final release. We recently released 1.1final, and 1.2alpha is the first release in the next cycle.

If you are looking for "major improvements worthy of a version jump", you need to compare 1.1final and 1.2final (for example.) Comparing 1.1final and 1.2alpha is not correct, because not all the 1.2 features are in yet.

I had Win2K swap trouble too, but new versions appear to be a lot better.

Gerv

It's an alpha.

[Gerv]

The headline is misleading - this is Mozilla 1.2 Alpha. See the roadmap [mozilla.org] for full details on the numbering scheme and release schedule.

1.0.1 [mozilla.org] was also released recently. This is a bugfix release for those people using 1.0 who don't want to upgrade to 1.1final or 1.2alpha.

Gerv

Re:Can i use ANY mail software?

[Mr.Strange]

Yes you can.

Put the following line in prefs.js, which is in your Mozilla profile directory.

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mai lt o", true);

Re:No major news, and still a memory hog

[n3bulous]

I liked pinball but the backwards and forwards buttons seemed flaky because they wouldn't work unless you hit them correctly. I then found the orbit theme here [deskmod.com] and like it better.

Re:Umm.. Just a question...

[mkoenecke]

The next release of IE isn't a story mainly because it's proprietary and Windows only. Mozilla is cross-platform and open source, meaning its development is accessible and relevant to everyone interested.

And those who don't like tabbed browsing, I believe, haven't given it a try. Take Slashdot, for example. I middle-click on all sorts of associated links on the right of the screen, which load in tabs in the background, while I continue reading the page. I can then peruse the other tabs at my leisure, and close them with another middle-click.

Another feature Mozilla has that IE doesn't: shortcuts to bookmarks. For example, if I type "gg [something]" in my location bar that does a search of Google Groups for that thing. "PW" takes me to Pricewatch. "Dict" to Dictionary.com. These can be combined with Javascript ("bookmarklets") for truly nifty automation.

Have you tried the preferences toolbar

[vrt3]

I know it's not really what you want, but the preferences toolbar [xulplanet.com] makes it a lot easier to enable or disable the popup blocker.

Re:Type ahead find

[chregu]

The mozilla people know, that it's not implemented in the best way right now (see bug #167921). If this stays, as it is, many JavaScript applications won't be useable anymore, for example our recently open sourced Wysiwyg XML Bitflux Editor [bitfluxeditor.org] (*shameless plug*) and other similar applications.
And there is no way to prevent it from the application side. But Mozilla promised a fix in the next week for that problem.

chregu

Re:Can i use ANY mail software?

[jonasj]

If you do a custom install and unselect the mail client, Mozilla will use your default mail client.

Re:Umm.. Just a question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabbed browsing really beats having 5 or 6 windows open and cycling through any day of the week. If IE were vastly superior in every other respect, but still didn't have tabbed browsing, many people would choose Mozilla for tabbed browsing alone.

A lot of these other issues are platform-dependent... I don't care about skins at all either, it would simply be nice to have a decent native UI on Mac OS X. Please don't tell me about Chimera... despite using Gecko, it isn't half the browser Mozilla is, yet it actually uses more system resources (i.e. CPU cycles, physmem) than does Mozilla, despite claims to being lean and mean and free of extraneous clients.

What Mozilla can do on Mac OS X at least that IE can't:

Run more than 5 minutes without a core dump.

Load a heavy page without blocking mouse and keyboard input long enough for me to make a cup of coffee and drink it.

Idle without consuming 50 percent of my idle CPU cycles.

Serve reasonably well for web development tasks.

TABBED BROWSING!

What Mozilla can't do on Mac OS X (at least 1.1 or newer):

Play well with Apple's Java runtime. Interesting that there was no mention of this being fixed again in 1.2a. Perhaps they're waiting for Apple to fix its Java runtime. ;-)

As for "not Microsoft" being a selling point, I think it's a valid one. I don't pay extra for Macs because I want to welcome Bill Gates into my life. IE for Mac looks lovely, until you start to use it. Its standards-compliance is, well, not bad for a Microsoft product, and for a while it was all we really had on Mac OS, but Mozilla just works, and is much faster than Mac IE will ever be (Mac IE could be made much faster if Windows IE didn't need to have a competitive advantage...).

More importantly, Mozilla runs on more platforms than IE ever will, and most importantly, it is free software, as in freedom. You can't check out IE's source code, modify it to suit your needs, etc. If you don't like the way IE works, too bad. If you don't like the way Mozilla works, you have options.

Face it, if you don't accept the MS hegemony, Mozilla and derivatives are about the only real alternative. Even if you put politics aside, Mozilla is improving constantly and is quite the equal (or superior) of IE in most respects. It has different creature comforts, but it has almost as many.

Lastly... Mozilla is touted as a technology demo by the developers, NOT as bang-on-it-every-day production software. And if you realize that, it is really quite impressive that it works so well for real-world use.

To those who are not happy with Mozilla's behavior... file a bug report, feature request, whatever. Or start your own fork. :-)

Re:Spellchecker may not work - what about 1.1?

[abischof]

I can confirm that the version on the Spellchecker installation page [mozdev.org] does indeed work with builds from mid-August and earlier (likely including 1.0 and 1.1).

Really, it's just the recent nightlies (and possibly 1.2alpha) for which the Spellchecker is broken.

Re:Moz 1.0.x is better than 1.1

[expro]

The most important thing to ask: did you file a bug?

Bannerblind

[rvr]

Downloaded and installed 1.2a. Typeahead works well and also took the time to try bannerblind [mozdev.org]. It works well for the few sites I tested it on - no more banners on pages. With a tool menu item you can turn it on and off and you can tweek its effect - removing them entirely or hiding them (leaves page layout the same). Way to go mozilla.

Re:Spell Checker?

[bunratty]

The Mozilla Spellchecker [mozdev.org] is scheduled to be added to Mozilla [mozilla.org].

You have to download a JRE with the plugin

[GroundBounce]

You need to download a recent Linux JRE (Java Runtime Environment) from Sun [sun.com] and link to the included Java plug-in from your mozilla plugins directory. I believe there are more detailed instructions in one of the readme files that come with the JRE.

Re:mozilla 1.1, gcc 3.2 & jre 1.3.1 - problems

[yokem_55]

You have to build the sun jre from source code. This is something that Gentoo 1.3/1.4 users have had to do for quite some time, and it is quite a pain in the bum. You can find instrutcions on how to go about building the jre from soure here. [linuxfromscratch.org]

Re:switch from Opera to Mozilla?

[ChristTrekker]

OK, I'll give that a shot.

1. It's pioneering. It had mouse gestures and a tabbed interface before Mozilla. These are UI features I use constantly. If there are new innovations in browser UI, I'd wager that Opera will make them first.
2. It's small. I can download it in under 10 minutes at 56k. This is one reason I don't use Mozilla at home at all.
3. It's fast. Opera is a speed demon on my wife's PII-350. I'm not sure I'd want to use Mozilla on that machine as my primary browser.
4. There's a version of Opera for my OS 8.1 Mac. OK, this is pretty minor, as I'm upgrading to OS X within the next few months. But it's another reason I haven't used Mozilla at home yet.
5. Keyboard shortcuts for virtually everything I'd ever want to do. Most them I don't use, but the ones I do use I wonder how I lived without before. It's almost a bother to reach for the mouse when using another browser.
6. If it does crash, it remembers all the pages I was on at the time, and brings them right up when I relaunch.
7. In general, support for web standards is excellent. I'll give a nod to Mozilla as the leader here, but it's not by much, at least in the areas I typically encounter. The UI features more than make up for these things.

Those are the features I personally like that I can think of right now. There may be more if you ask other Opera users.

There is no uninstall for the preferences toolbar

[leighklotz]

If you install the preferences toolbar and decide you don't like it, you'll have to delete some files and edit some XML RDF files to uninstall it.

Emacs lisp engine

[xerofud]

Yes, "lisp" is powerful, but emacs' lisp engine does not implement lexical scoping. Quite frankly, this is a serious flaw of "elisp" (as well as other early lisp implementations) which the folks who subsequently set the standards for Scheme and Common Lisp obviously realized.

Vim itself has powerful scripting capabilities, as evidenced by all the goodies you can find on www.vim.org. They have attempted to build a language independent model, kind of like GIMP allows users to script in Scheme, Python and whatever else. An interesting article appeared in a recent Linux Journal or Linux Magazine issue that compared the VIM and the GIMP's attempts at providing a language independent scripting framework. Their conclusion was that the GIMP is more successful on this front ... might want to check out the article for details if this sort of thing interests you.