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."

With some limits

[Martigan80]

Building on Mozilla's customizability, you can now show toolbars as text/icons/both (in the default Classic theme).

So not all things are available unless you use the classic theme-that sux.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[mirko]

Actually, as Phoenix is a cut-down version of Mozilla, it means we shall soon "type ahead" with it too.
BTW, Mozilla is better for those who also want an integrated mailer, we're not discussing the very same app, here...

shame there aren't more users

[DrSkwid]

less than 7% of my million monthly hits are something other than Internet Explorer

it's a damn shame esp. when Mozilla is now the superior product.

Immediate theme change?

[SurfsUp]

What happened to it? The last time this worked was around 0.95 or so. Having to restart to change themes is, for one thing, primitive, and another, a pain in the butt.

Anybody know what's going on here?

Wow, important features

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, all those wonderful cool colourful bells and whistles and STILL no cocksucking NTLM support, which means 99% of corporate workers have no fucking use for this piece of shit.

(Not a troll...I use Mozilla exclusively at home under Linux...but it's as useful as tits on a boar at work)

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[0x0d0a]

Sure. You want a web browser these days, you use Phoenix. You want a "communications suite" that lets you chat, send email, etc, you get Mozilla. Different goals.

Of course, since you change a single #define and then compile Moz to get Phoenix, I'm not sure that you can really say that you aren't using Mozilla...

Without Mozilla, IE would not be free

[dagg]

If AOL stopped supporting Mozilla development, then they wouldn't be able to hold it over Microsoft's head. It is quite a dance those companies play.

This was posted using Mozilla 1.2

--

Your sex on a platter [tilegarden.com]

Mozilla to win this war

[i_luv_linux]

I like Mozilla and I think it is the only challenger to IE now.

However there are certain shortcomings. Number one is that there is no WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla. Something like HTMLArea. There is sort of such editors, but they do not work as nicely as IE WYSIWYG editors. I mean they are not even close to IE editors. So Mozilla should work very hard to bring such features. As the number of applications that use such features increase Mozilla will destined to doom unless it brings such features.

Second there is no support for drag and drop. There is drag and drop but not using onDrag and onDrop type of events which makes the programming extremely simple. That's a must have in my mind.

Third Mozilla for some reason is a little bit slow in Windows. Not the engine itself, but the program. For some reason it feels less responsive compared to IE. I thought that it is because of this skin, someone claimed that that's not the case, I am not sure whether he is right or wrong. But there is no point of having skins on the browser, it is totally stupid, useless. Get rid of the skin thing permanetly. Try to make sure that your program feels like a native application. Mozilla on Mac OS X is somewhat joke. It doesn't feel like a native application.

Mozilla's being standard complaint is good, however on the net lots of articles are written for IE, because of the historical reasons as we know it. So Mozilla should allow the users to make a nicer transition by enabling certain non-standard IE-only features as much as possible.

Before Mozilla I was only using IE, because Netscape was not good enough, even though at first I tried not to use IE. Now with Mozilla that changed a little. I still use IE most of the time, but I like Mozilla too.

How about Flash for PowerPC Linux?

[MichaelCrawford]

Why is it that commercial vendors who say they support linux only provide packages for Red Hat?

Last I heard, Red Hat only ran on x86. Or actually I remember they had an S/390 distro too.

On other x86 distributions, you at least have the hope of using alien to switch the package format. But I use Debian on a PowerPC Macintosh.

I'm pretty sure Macromedia wrote software for the Macintosh before they even had any products for Windows. Flash right now is supported on the Macintosh, so the software is supported on PowerPC architecture.

How about getting us a Flash for Debian PowerPC Linux?

The "Red Hat" only mentality is why I think there isn't much hope of companies succeeding in shipping proprietary products for Linux. People on other distros or architectures get particularly irritated that they can't do whatever the product provides and write an open source replacement, where they wouldn't have bothered if the commercial app supported all the platforms.

If a bunch of volunteers working for no pay can support, what is it? 8000 packages on eleven architectures, why can't a commercial vendor support all the major Linux distros and architectures?

Re:shame there aren't more users

[Anonymous Coward]

less than 7% of my million monthly hits are something other than Internet Explorer
>
>
Maybe it's because you're runnning a site that's of little interest to non-windows users?

Hooray!

[Koyaanisqatsi]

One of the last uses I had for explorer was to browse CNN. Mozilla 1.1 had problems formatting HTML on some (most) CNN articles;

Upgraded, tested, and now it works like a charm. What is that procedure to remove IE again?

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

[mgkimsal2]

Net effect: pretty much no one will use it, and Mozilla will continue to look like crap to the majority of end users.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not because _some_ application is very unstable, that the libraries being used are to blame.

If your reasoning was valid, I could write a crappy Qt/KDE application and use that to prove Qt/KDE sucked.

Applications such as Nautilus and Gnumeric show that the underlying GNOME technologies _are_ stable.

tabbed browsing still "broken"

[X_Caffeine]

I can't believe they still haven't incorporated "single window mode" into the built-in tabbed browsing features of Mozilla. Every person I've talked into trying Mozilla wants to know why windows still open all over the place when they're using tabbed-browsing mode. Instructing them to go find an obscure plug-in, and then configure it, is not an acceptable solution for Joe Mousepad.

P.S. The default theme is impossibly ugly. ORBIT

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[Fwonkas]

I've noticed this kind of post several times in response to stories about Mozilla.

I don't get why they are modded so high.

Granted, I haven't tried phoenix for maybe a month. But these sort of comments seem a little trivial to me. Phoenix has not yet (correct me if I'm wrong) fully achieved the lightweight status it aspires to. In fact, the build of Phoenix I tried actually felt like just a crippled Mozilla. Is there really *that* big of a performance increase (or any other benefit, really) over, say, installing Mozilla w/o the extra features (that is, "Browser Only" install)?

That said, I'm sure that Phoenix will become a fine lightweight browser. I'll stick with Mozilla for now, though.

Re:Prefetch paranoia

[codexus]

Trusting the site owners is not the same as trusting the content from its users. I trust the slashdot people, I don't trust the trolls that are posting goatse links.

Re:Mozilla to win this war

[ragnar]

Mozilla's being standard complaint is good, however on the net lots of articles are written for IE, because of the historical reasons as we know it. So Mozilla should allow the users to make a nicer transition by enabling certain non-standard IE-only features as much as possible.

I would prefer to see more articles describing how to avoid proprietary IE methodologies, like document.all in favor of w3c standards. In most cases there is a standard-compliant way of doing things. If IE has some worthwhile proprietary features maybe we should be encouraging w3c to adopt them, but it is a slippery slope to conform to IE-only features.

Re:are we there?

[StormReaver]

I don't understand the attraction to I.E.'s appearance. It has always looked uglier than Netscape and Mozilla.

While I'm on that subject, I don't understand the claims that Mozilla looks ugly. I suspect it's coming from people who would bitch about anything just for the sake of bitching.

Re:shame there aren't more users

[BJH]

Well, you must be doing something wrong, because I've had perhaps two crashes in three months of usage of Mozilla 1.0 on NT.

On the other hand, IE tends to go down once every two or three days.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[Eil]

Remember that Mozilla is two things, a browser and a development platform.

You bring up an interesting point. If I may nitpick, I've always held that "Mozilla" is two things: a development platform first and a internet communications suite second.

You say "browser," I say "internet communications suite." What's the difference? Well, the former renders web pages but the latter lets you do that and then some. Calling Mozilla (the software) just a browser is like calling Microsoft Office a word processor or calling a PalmPilot an electronic addressbook. When I mean to talk about the portion of Mozilla that renders web pages, I try to refer to it as Mozilla Navigator. Likewise for Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, Mozilla Addressbook, and Chatzilla. Referring to these components by names can clear up a lot of confusion that some people have, especially those who aren't familiar with the whole Mozilla project.

Not that I'm going to *insist* that people correct their naming conventions, it's just that my method makes more sense to me.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[mosch]

Personally I love the whole download manager thing, makes it much easier to keep track of multiple simultaneous downloads.

Now if only they'd fix the download manager in OS X (it shows nothing right now, and hasn't for quite some time), and add an option to automatically close the download manager if all downloads have completed successfully.

Prefetching

[mnot]

I'm extremely wary about the new prefetching feature in Mozilla. The Web caching community has tried this from about every angle, but the general consensus of professionals (with one notable exception [bluecoat.com]) is that prefetching is a bad approach.

For one thing, it assumes free bandwidth; not such a hot idea in a lot of places (e.g., Australia, where you pay per Mb).

I've also had network and server administrators calling me in a panic because they're being flooded with requests from a single machine - whoops.

Prefetching is generally pretty antisocial; it says "my browsing experience is so important, damn your network, damn your servers, I'm getting it all!"

This doesn't mean that it isn't of great interest to the research community, of course; go to any caching-related conference and you'll see earnest proposals for prefetching (along with yet more hyper-optimised replacement algorithms... *sigh*).

Specifically, I'm concerned that the Mozilla implementation won't fare any better; in one way, it's better that it uses explicit prefetching hints (rather than some "optimized" algortithm... I hate heuristics), but OTOH it's horrible; this is ripe for abuse by over-zealous webmasters. I wonder how long it'll be before we see a demo of a DOS attack based on this...

Also, not providing a preference UI to control this isn't so bright; Mozilla has matured past the "world is my debugger" stage, at least in this respect. There are legitimate reasons for turning this off; in fact, I think there's a strong argument for turning this off by default.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[MarcQuadra]

Phoenix isn't SUPPOSED to do that! Phoenix is just a browser. Mozilla is a suite of internet applications that includes HTML authoring. Phoenix is just the browsing components of Mozilla stripped out and refined to provide a smaller, faster, simpler interface.

Re:funny

[asa]

SlashDot uses them -- look at the document nav bar in Moz/Opera, you'll see Next/Previous, which go to the next/previous story. Unless you have a habit of reading every article, Moz will pointlessly prefetch the next story up, and you'll happily ignore it. Users who used to (e.g.) read every other story now actually end up fetching every story anyway.

rel="prefetch" is fine, rel="next" makes me nervous. I don't want content providers to stop using rel="next" because of the deranged behavior of some clients :P

If slashdot uses link rel=next and no one uses it then why are they including it in the source? Authors use this tool to specifically connect pages. It is assumed that people will be navigating to the next document linked or the author wouldn't include that tag. Authors who are using link rel= next that don't want people navigating to that linked document shouldn't be using next so you shouldn't be nervous about content providers stopping use of the tag. What have you lost if slashdot removes the tag if, as you suggested, no users actually uses the link rel=next to get to the next article?

--Asa

Wish I could build it...

[koreth]

This'll probably get modded -1, Pathetic, but so far I've been completely unable to get a working Mozilla binary to build under Windows. Builds and runs fine under Linux. I've uninstalled and reinstalled all the required tools a bunch of times, checked and rechecked my environment against the build docs, etc. Here's a web page [midwinter.com] with more details. If some kind soul could tell me what I'm doing wrong, you'd have my undying admiration!

(Yes, I've tried posting to the Mozilla newsgroups, but this is exactly the kind of request that gets ignored by everyone there.)

Re:Prefetching

[Ezza]

> For one thing, it assumes free bandwidth; not such a hot idea in a lot of places (e.g., Australia, where you pay per Mb).

I really don't like this, and won't touch Moz 1.2 because of this "feature", which not only defaults to on (bad), there is no easy way to disable it (worse!) - (read "easy way to disable" as "a way that my mom could figure out").

Nobody should have to dig through a preferences file to turn off a "feature" that will cost them money.
In Australia where I live (and many other countries) you pay for every byte that you download.

Mozilla also isn't any good for browing with images disabled - all of the image placeholders and the alt text that goes with them become invisible if you turn images off, and this makes browsing most sites difficult if not impossible with images turned off.

These things make Moz harder to use (esp. for people on low bandwidth or pay-per-byte) which is the last thing any of us need or want...