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."

Anyone still using Mozilla?

[rpjs]

Now that we have Phoenix, I mean...

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[IamTheRealMike]

Er, yes. I find Moz to be plenty fast enough, and I use a truckload of extensions which don't quite work in Pheonix yet.

I don't really see what all the fuss is about, I'm using XFT builds for Redhat 8 that Blizzard puts out and they're snappy and look great. I did try Phoenix when I was on Windows, but found it to be no faster than Mozilla but with fewer features. I might try it again in a bit, but Moz is just fine for me.

I'm waiting on Galeon 2 myself, at least then it'll integrate well with gnome.

New flash player, too

[darCness]

In case you weren't aware, a new Flash player for GNU/Linux [macromedia.com]
has been released too. It's recommended that you upgrade to this version if you're
going to use Mozilla 1.2. Unfortunately, audio seems
to be broken (at least for me under Mandrake GNU/Linux 8.1).

I've filed a bug report with Macromedia about this. Keep
it in mind if you upgrade.

Running it now...

[haxor.dk]

Moz 1.2 runs great. Fast, stable, the HTTP pipelining is a *gem*.

And, of course, no M$ spyware.

What more can a nerd want?

funny

[jki]

from the link prefetching FAQ [mozilla.org]:

What about folks who pay-per-byte for network bandwidth?
- prefetching is a browser feature; users should be able to disable it easily

Is there a preference to disable link prefetching?
- Yes, there is a hidden preference that you can set to disable link prefetching. Add this line to your prefs.js file located in your Mozilla profile directory: user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false);

Although I admit link-prefetching may be good, but if it becomes a on-bydefault feature in most browsers, the ones that it will damage are the content providers. Those cannot turn it off (and actually do not have anyway of knowing whether their content is being prefetched (and not potentially viewed at all) or not. Well, I am just whining. Generally, Mozilla seems to be doing great :)

Why on earth?

[Binarybrain]

Why the heck do we need Palm sync for Mozilla. I think its neat and I thank the open source dude that wrote the code for it but geez.. Bloat city. Do these people that write Mozilla realize that most people just want a quick browser that does the job.

Why do they all go to GTK/GNOME?

[deadmantalking]

A serious question. OpenOffice started incorporating GTK/GNOME widgets, Mozilla builds support for GTK themes...
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?
Anyone has any insights?

Re:are we there?

[WWWWolf]

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

And with Lo-Fi Classic skin [mozdev.org] it probably runs on my mother's computer (P166, Linux) without problems. And on my father's (Celeron 300, Win98SE) and mine (PIII-600, Linux/Win98SE) even better =)

(I wonder why people complain that it "doesn't look like IE"? Lo-Fi is admittedly uglier than IE, but it at least honors system defaults and is damn fast, which is why I love it...)

Re:shame there aren't more users

[great om]

how much of this is because people with 'alternative' browsers (like opera, for instance), change their reported browser tag?

I, personally, have no idea, but I thought I'd throw this possibility out there

-Om, Posting from Omniweb

Re:shame there aren't more users

[G-funk]

Mozilla now is like ie 3/4 at the time... A far better product to use (standard compliance not withstanding), but as stable as a 2 legged stool.

I love mozilla, I use 1.0 all the time under linux at work, but it just can't cut the mustard when it comes to windows. It was a sad moment when I had to return the little "e" to my quicklaunch bar after a few weeks of bittersweet mozilla pain.

Re:Running it now...

[Tet]

What more can a nerd want?

The ability to run multiple instances of Mozilla on different screens. This worked until 1.0rc2, and then they removed it. Since I *need* this funcitonality for my job, I have to keep a copy of the old version lying around :-(

Prefetch paranoia

[codexus]

Is that prefetch thing such a good idea?

For example, it will prefetch a document from another host that the one you're browsing. In the FAQ they say that they don't see that as a security risk. 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).

Yes it can be disabled but not from the GUI preferences, so many people won't even notice it.

Well I'm probably just being paranoid. :)

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

[Shillo]

In the case of Mozilla, they needed a lightweight windowing system abstraction (on top of which they built their own set of widgets), and gdk was the right choice. GDK is a layer underneath Gtk, and it provides a lightweight portability system sitting directly on Xlib. Qt (AFAIK) has something similar, but Qt's portability layer is canvas-like (again AFAIK), which isn't so convenient if all you want is simplified drawing primitives.

OO.O is benefitting from Ximian work, and that naturally involves GNOME.

Sun/HP/the rest of the CDE people wanted something that can easily replace Motif in all the places where Motif appears. Since this means a lot of legacy pure-C apps, Gtk seemed a natural choice, too.

So in each case, it was a different issue, rather than a single, obviously decisive feature.

As for the technical differences, yes, Gtk and Qt are different, but not as much as the advocates of either like to think (personally I prefer Gtk/GNOME, but the only strong technical reasons I can name are bonobo-activation, atk and gstreamer systems, which I consider uber-cool, but not absolutely essential).

--

Re:shame there aren't more users

[Plutor]

I'm not entirely sure where you got this impression of Mozilla. I started using it around M8 or so, and at that point I would have agreed. But ever since it hit 1.0 (and even arguably before that), it has been as stable as MSIE. I have used Mozilla exclusively for my web browsing needs for the past couple years, and I could not be more happy with it. Cheers to asa and the rest of the Mozilla crew for making a high-quality product I'm extremely happy with!

I can't remember the last time Mozilla crashed on me.

Re:shame there aren't more users

[Woogiemonger]

The main reason why I have never loaded Netscape as my default browser.. well, at first IE was simply better. Then it was because Windows is unstable enough as it is.. why would I want to have two browsers loaded? (IE forces itself into memory of course).. XP seems stable enough now though, and with Netscape's little "web development" menu, that somehow convinced me IE was better. Now it seems Netscape is coming out with new features and IE is outright stagnant. I think Netscape's CSS compliance has always been better as well, plus IE always made it a pain to clear the cache.. any Java developer probably has the same experience... that tabbed browsing feature is pretty nice as well, allowing you to have more than one page as your homepage... load up as many pages as you're interested in, then go Edit->Preferences->Use Current Group. During this post, I have already set Mozilla 1.2 as my default browser, and found out that Mozilla mail and address book happily imports MS Outlook address, mail, and settings.. It appears in the Tools menu when you open a mail or address book window, then allows you to siphon settings from both Outlook and Outlook Express, and Eudora.. The biggest hardship is redoing my message filtering rules.. I couldn't find any way to import that. It's a pain but not too bad. I guess it's just a matter of thinking things through.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I've written some GTK frontends for some Perl scripts that were previously using curses.

When I was starting out, I looked at the easily obtainable (ie: google search) tutorials, documentation and CPAN modules. In all cases it leaned towards GTK. This despite the fact that I use KDE for my desktop.

If you make it easy or at least well documented with real world examples, developers will come.

single most annoying thing(bug)

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want to download plugin for xyz?.... Cancel
Do you want to download plugin for xyz?.... Cancel
Do you want to download plugin for xyz?.... Cancel
Do you want to download plugin for xyz?.... Cancel
Do you want to download plugin for xyz?.... Cancel
Do you want to download plugin for xyz?.... Cancel ....

a neverending nightmare, I don't want that &$&%$
plugin so never ask me again!

I think it's interesting...

[MungoBBQ]

...that after hearing so much about the user's right to freedom of choice when it comes to browsers, the Mozilla Messenger makes it impossible to use MS Internet Explorer to view the URLs I receive in e-mails.

Yes, I use MSIE for web and Mozilla for e-mail since its IMAP functionalities blow Outlook Express out of the water (actually, it does that just by being bug-free), but why on earth am I not allowed to open links I click in my e-mails with MSIE?

Maybe it's just me, but I think it's ironic that Mozilla is trying to tie me down to its web browser just because I want to use it for e-mail.

Re:If we could get rid of AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

This can actually be done in Mozilla through a hidden option. To make it so that your system's default mail client is used instead of Mozilla, add this to your user.js file inside your profile folder:

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

(and remove the space between the T and O)

Re:1.0x

[MarcQuadra]

This isn't how version numbers work here in MozillaWorld. any release without an alpha/beta/nightly on it is 'stable'. 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 are all 'stable' 'branches' off the unstable 'trunk'. right now the trunk is moving towards 1.3, after some things get settled in stone, they will make a copy of the trunk and start hacking out the bugs and getting it ready for prime-time, after it's reasonably well fixed it will be released as 'stable'. 1.0x are stable, yes, but they are no more stable (and possibly less so) than the 1.1 and 1.2 releases as the focus of most recent development has been on these more feature-filled releases.

Problems showing images

[m_evanchik]

I'm using mozilla 1.2 in Windows '98. why won't this [bigassscience.com] page or this other [citizenchris.com] one display all of their images properly, but rather show a broken image link placeholder? Works fine in ie 6.0.

Re:Anyone still using Mozilla?

[axxackall]

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.

Phoenix doesn't build whatever I've tried. So I use Mozilla. Mostly.

I've stopped using Mozilla mail client, once Evolution evolved finally to what it is now - Outlook killer for Linux users.

I am not interesting in plugins, but, very rarely, when there is no way arount to get to the site rather than through stupid flash - I use Opera. On the same platform with the same plugin binaries Opera works. Mozilla doesn't. I mean Mozilla doesn't work with plugins out of the box - the best is it shows the flash (somehow, in ery bad quality), but any mouse click on it sends Mozilla to the crash.

Basically, the only way to call Mozilla 1.x stable is when you don't use it for anything else besides HTML browsing. Everything else (mail, calendar, custom built XUL forms) will crash Mozilla sooner or later. With HTML it's oppositely different - it shows more than 20 tabs in 3-5 windows for weeks on my testing Linux box without crashing. And if it's getting slower - I just restart (close-open-load) some of tabs. Opera is far bellow such stability level. With HTML.

Everything above is true for Linux. On Windows, I use Mozilla with plugins without such problems - it's stable. And when I name plugins, I mean Flash and Java. So, the problem with plugins is the problem with Linux binary plugin code, not with Mozilla. Perhaps, both Macromedia and Sun have no interest in Linux platform, but have very strong interest to keep their source code closed.

P.S. But why Opera (by the way, also distributed in binary code) works with same binary plugins better than Mozilla?

Re:How to selectively install "testing" packages

[jilles]

Well the problem with testing and unstable is that these labels are rather accurate. Doing such stuff as updating to kde 3.x or gnome 2.x, sooner or later gets you into dependency hell. In unstable, stuff frequently breaks for several days. And even testing has regressions from time to time. Been there several times and it can mess up stuff pretty badly on your machine. A stable debian desktop is by definition also obsolete.

If you want all the latest, usually vastly improved stuff, debian forces you to rely on unstable and untested packages. Woody was obsolete the day it was released. Featuring outdated packages for most desktop stuff, including kde, gnome, xfree and even the linux kernel. This makes it an excellent distro for those who care more about stability than features. I'd pick debian stable for a server any day. However, as soon as you go the unstable route (which is actually what most debian desktop users do) you lose the stability advantage. Therefore, if you care about features and stability, Debian is a bad choice.

BTW. I wouldn't wait for the debian mozilla packages and just download the thing from mozilla directly. The tar.gz installs just fine. Be sure to read the stuff about permissions though. The mozilla developers spent months tuning, optimizing and debugging this thing. Arguably it is more stable and better tested than any previous mozilla release. Yet, Debian developers will continue to regard it as unstable/testing for the next couple of years (which is the irony of Debian, for stability reasons you need to install outdated software with known & fixed bugs).

Should Netscape == Mozilla?

[eonblueye]

Only if Netscape could be as fast, stable and super un-bloated as Mozilla releases are. I think they might have a chance of gaining some market share. The reason I say this is that I still know people who use Netscape 4 releases and they are die-hard-core fans too.
The sad part is this will never happen. AOL has just polluted that hell out of the new 7.0 releases. Its really sad too, because they done the same to ICQ, the new Winamp 2, Real player and pretty much every other inet company they have eradicated.

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

[LizardKing]

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

I rebuilt Mozilla this morning (latest nightly, so its reporting itself as 1.3a) with Xft and GTK+ 2.0. The font anti aliasing has given me such a headache from eyestrain that I'll be recompiling *without* Xft ...

Chris

LitePC (98lite)

[Anonymous Coward]

Just download the free version of 98lite from www.litepc.com and use it to uninstall IE (and even install the older faster win95 shell). This is of course if you're on Win9x, if you're in Win2k then you're out of luck.