Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed

asa writes "Mozilla 1.2 has just been released. New to this version are features like Type Ahead Find, basic toolbar customization (text/icons/both), support for GTK themes on Linux, multiple tabs as startpage, Link Prefetching, "filter after the fact" and filter logging in Mail, Palm sync for Mozilla addressbook on MS Windows, and more. This is the latest stable release from mozilla.org, and all users of Mozilla 1.0, Mozilla 1.0.1, Mozilla 1.1 or any of the alpha/beta/release candidates are encouraged to upgrade to this release. You can get builds and more info at the Mozilla releases page and you can find daily Mozilla news and discussion at mozillaZine.org."

Xft support is there, but you've gotta work for it

[AmunRa]

Although XFT (Anti-aliased font) support is now in Mozilla 1.2, it is not enabled by default. you have to 'roll your own' and pass the appropiate configure flag (--enable-xft) to get it to work!

are we there?

[muyuubyou]

With Type Ahead Find and some IE skin [mozdev.org] we might port grandma to Mozilla without complaints.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[ciryon]

I'm using Phoenix in Linux but Mozilla in Mac OS X.

Mozilla is a good, stable browser with lot's of plugins available. It you have a fast computer it's probably a better choice than Phoenix.

Ciryon

Directory listing

[Ace Rimmer]

One of the first things I noticed is great speed improvement. For example the directory listing
(which used to take a few mugs of coffee) is now reasonably fast.

Whoohoo. I can finally try to look inside a doxygen generated documentation on a local disc! ;)

New roadmap

[edgrale]

For those of you who are interested, here is a link to the new roadmap [mozilla.org]

source: mozillazine.org [mozillazine.org]

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[AmunRa]

Well seeing as phoenix uses the gecko rendering engine, any improvements to Mozilla/Gecko will get incorporated into pheonix, so development on Mozilla is good for Phoenix....

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[colinramsay]

I don't know if that was a play on words or a reference to Type Ahead Find, but either way Type Ahead Find is a feature of the latest Phoenix milestone.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Opera 7 beta has also been released long ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Slashdot mentions every .1 release of Mozilla and Phoenix, but I have seen no mention of the release of Opera 7 beta. [opera.com] It's incredible, but they have actually managed to improve the speed from Opera 6. Especially on sites that are heavy on tables (Slashdot). It's a bit crashy, and configuration dialog is not complete (and I don't like skinned programs), but for the most part is a great step forward from Opera 6.

And sorry for riding on your frist ps0t...

Re:funny

[ultrabot]

I thought content providers have to explicitly specify what links to prefetch?

Re:Immediate theme change?

[__aatgod8309]

I'm using the same theme with 1.2 (orbit retro [mozdev.org]) that i was using for 1.2b... Apparently themes were broken between 1.2a and 1.2b, but no idea what will happen with 1.3a...

Re:Why do they all go to GTK/GNOME?

[ultrabot]

Why is it that they all go in for GTK/GNOME not QT/KDE? Are the latter combination more difficult to integrate? Something about the QT license? Better mktg by the GNOME guys?

Something about the QT license. It's GPL or proprietary (it's your choice), while LGPL (the license of GTK) is more corporate-friendly.

Re:funny

[Rovaani]

If you'd read the whole FAQ you are quoting you wold see that

Are anchor (<a>) tags prefetched?
No, only tags w/ a relation type of next or prefetch are prefetched. However, if there is sufficient interest, we may expand link prefetching support to include prefetching tags, which include a relation type of next or prefetch in the future. Doing so would probably help content providers avoid the problem of stale prefetching links.

So content-providers can decide all by themselves if they want to pre-serve the content. Althoug it is possible for a malicious web-site to set pre-fetch headers pointing to third-party web-site , thus draining their bandwidth.

Also:

As a server admin, can I distinguish prefetch requests from normal requests?
Yes, we send the following header along with each prefetch request:
X-moz: prefetch
Of course, this request header is not at all standardized, and it may change in future Mozilla releases.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[colinramsay]

Not true. From the Phoenix 0.4 release notes:

Why didn't you call it, say, Mozilla Lite? It's not Mozilla. It's backed by mozilla.org, sure, but with each milestone you'll see it further diverge from Mozilla.

Phoenix is just Mozilla with a couple UI tweaks. We wonder when people will stop saying this. 30,000 lines of code have already been added or changed from Mozilla. We've forked the global history and download manager backends. And XHTML2 is coming to Phoenix.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[Universal Nerd]

I do and will continue to do so, actually I use the daily builds with the spam filter. I really like Mozilla and it's mailer is just great for me - nothing flashy or fancy.

Oh, I run it on a machine with 512Mb RAM so Mozilla doesn't seem like that much of a hog.

Please use mozilla net installer

[suds]

Please use the netinstaller (~250kb) which would find a closest mirror for you automatically to download.

Re:Why on earth?

[samfreed]

I, 4 1, would like to keep only one database for my contacts. At the moment, I have 3: on the palm/jpilot, in Mozilla (for Email), and on my Nokia phone.

This consolidation is important to me. Looking forward to having in on Linux.

Mirrors

[melvin22]

Well, someone had to do it. You can find mirrors here: http://mozilla.org/mirrors.html [mozilla.org]

Re:shame there aren't more users

[jonr]

The more I use Mozilla, the more I like it. A good mesure of a quality software (or anything else). IE feels like a toy browser now. Mozilla is stable, fast and support correct standards. I just don't understand what people are doing wrong to get Mozilla unstable, on my Atlhon 750/XP it runs for days.
J.

How to selectively install "testing" packages

[deek]

Follow these steps, and you too can install the latest software on top of a nice stable Debian base.

• Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file
• ADD the following lines to it:
  deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
  deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
  
• Edit your /etc/apt/apt.conf file
• Make sure there is a line like the following, inside the file:
  APT::Default-Release "stable";
• Run the "apt-get update" command

And that's all there is to it! So all you need to do now, to install the Mozilla from the Debian testing suite, is to run the following command:
apt-get -t testing install mozilla

Voila, you have now installed it. It will probably take a few weeks for the Mozilla in the "testing" suite to be upgraded to 1.2. Well, they DO have to test it out before putting it in there, after all!

DeeK

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[The Original Yama]

Take a look at the Thunderbird/Minotaur Project [mozilla.org].

With moz 1.2, my banking service stopped working.

[bjornte]

I have been a happy moz 1.1 user since it came out. Particularly, I like tabbed browsing and anti-pop-up. Also moz 1.1 supported my Internet Bank, which uses certificates and https.

Unfortunately, with moz 1.2, my bank no longer accepts the certificate, even though I have a clean, new install. Why? Also, the keyboard shortcuts for tabbed browsing (like ctrl-shift-click), is gone. Why?

I use Moz because the older Phoenix didn't have a Quick Start. Does the new Phoenix support this?

Install in /usr/local

[hughk]

I'm on RPM, but I had a similar problem with installing 1.1 on a Redhat x86 system with 1.0.1. I installed into /usr/local/mozilla and linked from /usr/local/bin/mozilla to/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla. I edited the script o reflect the new location and everything ran well without touching the official installation of 1.0.1 (/usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin in PATH).

To get rid of this mozilla when you install a real deb, just remove the link in /usr/local/bin and kill /usr/locall/mozilla.

Re:Immediate theme change?

[caillon]

It never worked quite right. Either things would get confused and give you hybrid skins (bug 115940), or cause you to crash (bugs 125518, 98359). There are various other bugzilla bugs regarding this, but basically it will be disabled until it works.

Wanna volunteer to fix it?

Re:Xft support is there, but you've gotta work for

[cduffy]

Many of the third-party binary packages already do use it. When they judge it ready, the distributions' builds will too. It's not some conspiracy to make Mozilla forever "look like crap" -- these things just take time.

Tabbrowser Extensions

[__aatgod8309]

If you like the standard tab browsing setup, you might like to try Tabbrowser Extensions [sakura.ne.jp] for some nice enhancements to the tab browsing system.

Re:shame there aren't more users

[rseuhs]

You should really try Phoenix. It's very stable (I only had 2 crashes in 2 or 3 months of near-exclusive use) and fast.

Also very nice is the fact that Phoenix needs not to be installed. It just works anywhere you unzip it. No registry problems, no risk of destroying settings, etc. And when you don't like it you just delete the directory and it's gone. Really gone.

So unlike most other browsers (including IE) you don't risk hosing your system when you install/upgrade.

So I would really recommend you to give it a try.

Re:Prefetch paranoia

[caillon]

But I really don't like the idea that I could be tricked into prefetching stuff I don't want by a simple HTML tag (goatse, copyrighted material and other illegal stuff).

Well, blocking link prefetching from other hosts would not help you any: there are other ways to do that sort of thing. You can load stuff from other hosts via <img>, <script>, <object>, etc. elements. If someone is intent on pushing content to you, they can do it.

Re:Popup Manager not included in this release

[sighup]

Privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/ [privoxy.org]

Re:Immediate theme change?

[Christopher Whitt]

The feature was called Dynamic Theme Switching or something like that. I can't get to bugzilla right now to search on it. I remember that it caused a whole pile of regressions and new bugs and it was backed out. I think there was an intention of giving it another try later, but I would say that any patches that are lying around are probably completely bit-rotted by now.

When mozilla.org recovers from the 1.2 release and slashdotting, try searching for dynamic theme switching in bugzilla.

Christopher

I like "view selection source"

[BroadbandBradley]

hightlight an area of a page, right click and there's an option to "View selection source". which opens the html source and cues it to the area you had selected.

Mozilla is IMHO, the best available.

Re:Why do they all go to GTK/GNOME?

[Skweetis]

Mozilla has used GTK to render its widgets as long as I can remember (since M7 or so). It sounds like they just added support for the theme portions of GTK.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[Lord Ender]

The Mozilla html editor is TOP NOTCH. It has never crashed on me. The code it produces is human readable! If you just want a quick, straight-forward HTML page, it is the way to go. Pheonix can't do that.

Re:shame there aren't more users

[Dog and Pony]

Opera still reports itself as Opera, just fools crappily written browser checks.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows 2000) Opera 7.0 [en]

If your log analyzer can't handle that (nowadays), it is time to switch to one that actually get updates. Because this is how it has been at least since Opera 4. :)

Re:Why on earth?

[MarcQuadra]

I've een waiting for palm sync with mozilla for over two years. I use Mozilla Mail and it really bites to not be able to use the mail feature on my Palm because nobody wrote a conduit/sync mechanism. One thing Mozilla should do is integrate with as many devices as possible, it will seriously enhance the marketability of the suite. Mozilla is NOT a browser, it is a compresensive collection of MANY programs running on it's own portable toolkit. If all you want is a lean browser there is Phoenix, which uses only the parts of Mozilla you are looking for. The 'bloat' in mozilla is a GOOD thing, as developers will be able to suck out code to spawn other projects, like Phoenix. In the meantime, there are people adding features to the trunk, others are making them work, and a few are concentrating on tweaking it so it doesn't get REALLY messy and slow. This model works, as evidenced by the portability, speed, and footprint of Mozilla today. Please don't dismiss projects that add features to Mozilla if you are looking for a small browser, that can be found elsewhere, the rest of us want features (many of which can be switched off at configuration or install time anyway).

Try it, it looks sweet...

[BrokenHalo]

I've been using the 1.2 beta that came with Dropline Gnome 2.?? for [dropline.net]
Slackware for a few weeks now, and it looks damn fine with true-type fonts (you won't notice much difference with Type1 fonts).

My recommendation for serif font BTW and FWIW is utopia.ttf - vastly more readable than the others on my setup).

I'll definitely be taking the time to roll my own when the source becomes available.

Re:are we there?

[SCHecklerX]

Annoyance of type-ahead find:

• Can't go to stuff that isn't on screen
• Cant't navigate well with it. Being able to use "G" or "1G" to go to the bottom/top of the page, respectively, would be a welcome addition (most web pages have their navigation at the top or bottom of the page or both)
• Can't easily use 'open in new tab' from the keyboard once you have 'found' the link you are after. No, I don't want tabs by default.

Until I can do these things, type ahead find isn't really all that useful.

File a bug report!

[MarcQuadra]

That doesn't seem like proper behavior, you're right. File a bug at bugzilla.mozillla.org. That's the best way to get things changed in most open source projects (besides fixing it yourself)

Re:We want Bayesian filtering!

[caillon]

It is currently in the nightly builds [mozilla.org], and it's likely that 1.3alpha [mozilla.org] will have it when it is released. Check out the Mozilla mail spam page [mozilla.org] for more details.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[rmohr02]

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

Re:shame there aren't more users

[NineNine]

For me, non-IE users are only somewhere around 3% of my 10 million or so hits monthly.

WARNING - online banking likely to fail

[bjornte]

Due to this bug:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172097

online secure banking that works in Mozilla 1.1 may not work in Mozilla 1.2. It seems that Moz 1.2 does not send cookies to HTTPS sites, thus preventing some kinds of authentication.

Until this problem is fixed, people who use online banking etc. should stick to Moz 1.1.

Re:With moz 1.2, my banking service stopped workin

[bjornte]

Yes. This is the bug:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172097

Re:1.1's not in testing, let alone 1.2

[Cupis]

Well damn.

paul@kippax:~$ apt-show-versions -a mozilla
mozilla 2:1.1-1 install ok installed
mozilla 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1 stable
mozilla 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1 testing
mozilla 2:1.1-1 unstable
mozilla/unstable uptodate 2:1.1-1
paul@kippax:~

Mozilla 1.1 might not be in 'testing', but it sure seems to be in the 'unstable' distro. and I can assure you it is there for PowerPC, check the /debian/pool/main/m/mozilla/ on your local mirror.

As for 1.2 - it's _just_ been released.

Paul Cupis
--
[e-mail]

Toolbars non-collapsable

[madprof]

I downloaded a toolbar that lets me turn graphics, colours and cookies on and off at the click of a button.
This no longer has the little thing at teh side that lets me shrink it down - this was mentioned in the Release Notes.
What I'm puzzling over is why they removed that. Is there any way to make the toolbar shrink up and free screen space now it has gone?

Re:content related difference

[NineNine]

That's on your porn site I presume?


Yup... There aren't a whole lot of other types of sites that get that kind of traffic. Besides, I think that porn is one of those truly universal web apps that has a good cross-section from all parts of society. Very representative. My sites by OS:

Windows 98 49.78%
Windows NT 39.13%
Windows 95 4.29%
Macintosh PPC 2.45%
Unknown 1.97%
Windows 3.1x 1.55%
LINUX 0.79%
BSD UNIX 0.02%
SUN OS 0.01%
Macintosh 0.00%
Amiga 0.00%
OS/2 0.00%
HP-UNIX 0.00%

Re:Xft support is there, but you've gotta work for

[brsmith4]

You must first do an rpm -ivh on the package. You will then find the .spec file for mozilla in /usr/src/redhat/SPECS. Go into the file and find the area that gives options for ./configure. Add a / to the last option and then under it, add --enable-xft. That should do it

Re:are we there?

[MattHaffner]

Can't go to stuff that isn't on screen

Er, mine does... and Alt/Cmd-G cycles through all hits on the page, scrolling to wherever the hit is. It also spans frames without you needing to do anything special.

Cant't navigate well with it. Being able to use "G" or "1G" to go to the bottom/top of the page, respectively, would be a welcome addition (most web pages have their navigation at the top or bottom of the page or both)

Er, what's wrong with your Home and End keys? And how would you search for anything that started with G if they added this?

Can't easily use 'open in new tab' from the keyboard once you have 'found' the link you are after. No, I don't want tabs by default.

Er, try Command/Control/Alt-Enter? You might have to turn this on in the Tabs prefs panel, but it's right there. Works great in combination with TAF.

TAF is the single coolest addition to Moz in a long while. Period. :)

Multiple Mozilla Launches

[Alethes]

Ever since 1.0, I believe, Mozilla now has had the @lock file in your personal mozilla directory that prevents multiple instances of Mozilla from being running. The way to work with this is to use something like this Mozilla Starter Script [kingant.net], which you use to replace your existing mozilla starter script (the one called "mozilla" that sets the MOZILLA__FIVE_HOME and executes mozilla-bin). This script allows you to specify whether a new window opens for each new instance or just have it open the URLs in a new tab. I've been using it for a while and I find it very handy.

Re:are we there?

[Planesdragon]

Can't go to stuff that isn't on screen

Sure you can. Hit a key again, and it takes you to the next occurance of that letter. (I just hit "y" twice and Mozilla auto-scrolled.)

Cant't navigate well with it. Being able to use "G" or "1G" to go to the bottom/top of the page, respectively, would be a welcome addition (most web pages have their navigation at the top or bottom of the page or both)

How about "ctrl + home" or "ctrl + end"? Or just use the arrow keys, or the PageUp / PageDown keys...

Can't easily use 'open in new tab' from the keyboard once you have 'found' the link you are after. No, I don't want tabs by default.

Ctrl + Enter = open in new tab.

You were saying?

RedHat 8.0 XFT builds now up

[AmunRa]

As subject, if you look under the Red_Hat_8x_RPMS folder in the mozilla-1.2 directory, there is now two folders: vanilla and xft , with pre-built RPMs! Get them now from a mirror [mozilla.org]...

Now if only I'd waited a couple of hours ;-)

Re:shame there aren't more users

[asa]

You said that you plan on waiting for tonight's nighly build to pick up any 1.2 fixes but that's a bad idea. There are no fixes that have landed on the 1.2 branch since yesterday (and probably won't be any) so if you get or build a 1.2 branch nightly build today you'll have exactly the same thing and if you get a trunk nightly then you'll be getting development builds containing all kinds of new code being developed for 1.3. If you're looking for stability you don't want a 1.3 nightly build. See http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html#tree-managemen t for what this looks like.

--Asa

Links to RPMs for 1.2 with XFT

[brsmith4]

Here is the link for pre-compiled rpms for 1.2 with XFT support (i'm writing this on them):

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/2002-11 -26-21-1.2/ [mozilla.org]

Have fun!.

Re:Still no UPGRADE path!

[rmohr02]

I have had MultiZilla [mozdev.org] installed since 1.1b, and all I've had to do to upgrade is dowload the full file and install in the same directory as before. I've never had to mess around with preferences (except when new features come out, which I generally enable, and all the new options MultiZilla has gained since the time of Mozilla 1.1b) and I've never had to reinstall plugins.

Oh, and I upgrade nearly every day, though I'll keep 1.2 for about a week before upgrading--it'll be different to use an extremely stable release in place of a relatively stable (compared to IE) nightly build.

Re:WARNING - online banking likely to fail

[tcoady]

This is not a bug! I reported it originally but have changed it to WFM. This was my comment:

OK *now* it WFM! I had to change Edit Preferences Advanced, Scripts and Plugins to allow javascript to change, create AND read cookies before it worked though.

Re:WARNING - online banking likely to fail -WRONG

[egoots]

WRONG!

I have been using 1.2 versions for ages without any problems with online banking.

Check your preferences for enabling cookies.

If you look at the bug again, you will notice it is now marked WORKSFORME (and indicating that it was a user settings issue).

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1720 97

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Toolbar collapsing grippies gone

[Cardinal]

As the AC mentioned, the grippers to collapse toolbars were removed for usability reasons. The details, if you really want to know (or just skim) are chronicled in several bug reports. Here's one of them [mozilla.org].

Re:Xft support is there, but you've gotta work for

[Anonymous Coward]

For RedHat 8.0 there are xft-enabled rpm packages available at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla 1.2/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft

prefetched links are noted

[timothy]

when they are sent, pre-fetch requests are labeled as such. So a site getting the requests can keep track of regular vs. pre-fetch requests.

timothy

Re:Why do they all go to GTK/GNOME?

[Omega Hacker]

> Ubercool and none of that stuff is working reliable. Gstreamer is crashing the hell out of my system. So who wants to deal with unfinished crap ?

Head over to irc.openprojects.net (or whatever they call it now) in the #gstreamer channel, and we'll see what we can do about finding and fixing whichever problems you're having. There are several known problems, i.e. with i386 glibc linuxthreads, that we're hunting for workarounds for, and can cause random crashes.

Re:Please Understand Why My Wife Can't Stand Mozil

[Anonymous Coward]

First, the Bugzilla bug reporting interface has recently been simplified. Nevertheless, reporting a bug is not something that a non-technical person should do. You can't just report a bug and expect other people to do all the work for you. You have to keep troubleshooting, etc, even as a bug reporter. It's a lot of work. If a non-techie finds a bug, they should tell a technical person about it and have that person handle the reporting of it on Bugzilla.

Second, I agree with what you said about all the little bugs that make Mozilla a very annoying experience. There are a lot of intermittent bugs. Right now in 1.3a, Find in Page/Ctrl+F sometimes stops working. Then, starts working again. The basic problem is that Mozilla is not run like Apache or OpenBSD. There's not enough quality control at the developer level. There's also a huge problem with the Mozilla Organization frequently doing things for reasons that they never bother to explain. Why this instead of that? They won't bother to tell you.

Third, I wish you would have been more specific about the bugs your wife has found. Just saying "bugs" isn't descriptive, as there are over ten thousand open, known bugs.

Fourth, I would suggest providing Phoenix instead of Mozilla. Phoenix has fixed a lot of old problems. The application suite known as "Mozilla" is not really intended for the average end-user. It's more like a proof-of-concept that shows everything that the Mozilla codebase taken as a whole can do. For just browsing, Phoenix is probably superior. On Mac, try Chimera.

How to convert the Mrs.

[Jedbro]

Well, first off I would suggest you getting her on Phoenix, and not Mozilla.

1) Phoenix Looks better (and is more costimizable*)
(*meaning in an easy drag and drop way)
2) It's faster and doesn't inculde all the rest of the things your wife doesn't use
(mail/chatzilla/etc.)
3) Themes... Funny enough as it sounds, this way you can make your wife "feel at home" again.
4) Stability. For some odd reason Phx, feels a bit more secure than Moz.

I just converted my girlfriend and her familyover to Phoenix. I understand your pain.
I'm a mozilla user, (I use mail, chatzilla, all of it) and am so happy with it. But when my girlfriend would get on my computer, she hated it. Saying it respondes slowly, was ugly, etc.
I then installed Phoenix on her computer, and installed the Qute theme (and LUNA) here;

Qute [texturizer.net] , Luna [texturizer.net]
(Luna's a copy of IE's interface)

(my girlfriend loved the Qute theme)

I loaded it up, changed the Phoenix Icon to
on her desktop (download the icons here;
ICON site [mozdev.org]

And in 10min, taught her to use Tab browing, (how to save tab groups as a bookmark (great for research), easy searching, and how to costimize her toolbar (drag'n'drop can't be easier). She was hooked.
At first her impresion was "No, not mozilla please" but within a day, she grinned at me and said "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually really like it allot better than IE)

This coming from a 20year girl who's studying Finances. I was pleased!

My next step is to teach her Mousegestures, that will definitally get her hooked (no way going back after that).
Mouse gestures [texturizer.net]

For all type of way to custimize Phoenix I recommend you start here;
Phoenix Help [texturizer.net]

Cheers, and hope this has helpes you out with your convert!! =)