Planning For Mozilla 2.0

wikinerd writes "The MozillaWiki maintains a number of pages on Mozilla 2.0 which reveals lots of possible new features of the popular browser. What does your wishlist include about Mozilla 2.0, and how has the release of Firefox affected your use of Mozilla?"

Use of Moz

[StevenHenderson]

Personally, I use Mozilla a lot less now that I have a Gmail account. With having a web-based e-mail service, I really have little use for a bundled email client.

Plus, Firefox seems quicker and more stable to me since I have been using both.

Re:Wishlist: Slashdot

[byolinux]

The problem is not Mozilla. The problem is Slashdot's piss poor HTML.

Granted.

[sethadam1]

This has been fixed in the trunk for a long time (but not the branch Firefox 1.0 comes from), and will be in Firefox 1.1, whether Mozilla increments to 2.0 or not.

Bug 217527 [mozilla.org]
Bug 264913 [mozilla.org]

If you really, really need a fix now, visit this URL [scarlet.be] and download one of the nightlies from the trunk [fair warning - some nightlies have some annoying bugs in them, but generally, are pretty good]. It works just fine there, but I'm told requires too many changes to backport into the ff1/mozilla whatever branch.

Re:Firefox never worked for me...

[AC-x]

I thought that this was the whole point of FireFox? Is there actually anything you can do in Mozilla that can't be done in FireFox?

Re:Use of Moz

[space_dude_27]

erm, I thought it could... I'm having no trouble using Thunderbird to get mails from pop.gmail.com anyway. Would be nice to see Mozilla Mail and/or Thunderbird do the GMail conversations thing though :-)

Re:Firefox never worked for me...

[Mornelithe]

Mozilla can be compiled without a lot of frills. For example, on Gentoo, there are Mozilla flags as follows:

mozcalendar : Enable mozilla calendar extension, http://mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
moznoirc : Disable building of mozilla's IRC client
moznomail : Disable building mozilla's mail client
moznocompose : Disable building of mozilla's web page composer
moznomail : Disable building mozilla's mail client
mozxmlterm : Enable mozilla's XML-based command-line terminal

There may be some I missed. In other words, you can install Mozilla with just the browser. However, you have to compile it for yourself if you want that.

Re:Wishlist: Slashdot

[S4t0r1]

Slashdot rendering bug was fixed too late for firefox 1.0. It's going to be in version 1.1 (march) or if you cant wait download a nightly ( here http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/ )

Re:Gecko Rendering Engine

[richwklein]

Those plans have morphed somewhat, but are in fact still a live. They are now called libxul or xulrunner, and I believe are part of the Mozilla 2.0 plan.

It's also the HTML

[SamMichaels]

Slashdot won't let you validate it...so I had to save a copy and validate it:

File: slashdot.html
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 3.2
Errors: 60

With a community full of nerds, you'd think SOMEONE would make an XHTML 1/CSS 2 version...that is, unless slashcode is such a mess that it's nearly impossible to make the changes.

Re:just out of curiosity...

[sethadam1]

1. Backup your Mozilla profile, or at least copy it, before using the new one. You certainly may break extensions.

2. If you're on Windows, rename \Program Files\Mozilla Firefox to \Program Files\Mozilla Firefox.old or somesuch. That way you can revert. Your extensions are generally in the profile anyway. If you're on Linux, just keep the old files.

3. Upgrade to the nightly.

4. Open a new tab, type about:config search for app.extensions.version. Change it to 1.0 to avoid the extensions disabling themselves.

4a. Close and restart Firefox.

5. Give it a shot. If everything gets hosed (not likely, but possible - it has happened to me, though very rarely), you can backout and replace the executables and your profile data.

That's the best I can offer. I am not a Moz developer, I just follow the stuff closely. It's a PITA to play with Mozilla profiles and extensions and frankly, the worst part of Mozilla administration - a failed upgrade or bug can hose your extensions/configuration unless you know which files in the profile can be replaced and which can't.

In general, for what it's worth, Adblock has *never* broken for me, and that's the toughest one to reconfigure.

Get rid of 10 "managers"...

[Vo0k]

...and include one central firewall-like facility that lets you perform advanced selection of media you allow/deny from a host, domain, IP range etc. (plus access to ports, like 8080 hurting Mozilla for a long time...)

ad.* DENY images, flash, cookies
*.mozdev.org ALLOW xpi
*.yahoo.com DENY flash
*.gmail.com ALLOW cookies, store-passwd
*.microsoft.com DENY all

Re:build in page validator.

[GregWebb]

Try Chris Pederick's developer toolbar [chrispederick.com] - built in validator plus a bunch of other bits. I love it, makes my job lots easier :-)

Re:Wishlist: Slashdot

[tehshen]

Slashdot does have piss-poor HTML, but there's also a minor Gecko bug (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21752 7) which is why it works fine in other browsers.

A List Apart did an article on how to fix it [alistapart.com] but nothing seems to have happened.

Re:build in page validator.

[jiggity]

I would like to see a build in page validator.

You can download an HTML validator for Firefox [skynet.be] that builds it right into View Source. It will validate it within the browser and also provide accessibility warnings. It's based on Tidy [sourceforge.net].

Re:Firefox never worked for me...

[ThogScully]

In other words, you can install Mozilla with just the browser. However, you have to compile it for yourself if you want that.
Or use Debian and just install the parts you want. I'd think other distros break it up too.
-N

Features I'd like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Smaller, faster. A lot of people still won't download it because it takes too long.
2. More modular. You should be able to install a basic Mozilla installer app which then asks you which modules you want: browser, web client, HTML editor, chat, etc. Then you can use this app to upgrade any of these pieces at any time. This installer can make sure that the shared components all work together, no matter what version. (or at least can give warnings). It can also remember where it left off downloading should the user want to download the rest at another time or should the machine crash. There is currently an installer which sort of does this, except that all pieces are running at the same time instead of as separate apps. I don't want my browser to crash my mail client (and vice/versa).
3. More Outlook like features: calendaring, contacts, to-do lists, syncing with Palm, etc. These could all be separate modules that all work together. We can never get business people to use Mozilla Mail because Outlook, which eats their mail and gives them viruses, has a few features that Mozilla doesn't.

That's pretty much it. #3 is probably the most important. If we could ween our clients off of Outlook, that would give us less business but would also give us fewer headaches and more options.

John

Re:A Manual

[asa]

I know it does not sound like much but I think a manual is what Mozilla really needs.

Like this? [mozillastore.com]

--Asa

Re:It's also the HTML

[Scaba]

They only fixed the resultant HTML, not the underlyng slashcode [slashcode.com], which is what the OP is talking about.

Re:Wishlist: Slashdot

[c0p0n]

Nope, not true. It's a Mozilla problem with relative table sizes. It simply calculates the distribution the wrong way (before the end of the document load), so it can only render the page properly if it's on the cache.

Re:Fix the bloody build system!

[CTho9305]

P.S.: your "Firefox" code still unpacks itself in a directory named "mozilla". Not "mozilla-1.7" or "firefox-1.0" either... just plain "mozilla". It looks like a CVS snapshot to me.
It is a CVS snapshot. It unpacks to "mozilla" because the cvsroot for both Mozilla and Firefox is shared - Firefox is the mozilla source plus the browser/ and toolkit/ directories. The rest is shared.

Re:Wishlist: Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not Mozilla. The problem is Slashdot's piss poor HTML.

Um, no, even Mozilla acknowledges the problem as a bug [slashdot.org], they just don't have it as high enough a priority to actually fix it. And don't tell me it's fixed in the nightlies. a) It's been broken since at least ff 0.7, WTF is taking so long, and b) nightlies suck

Re:It's also the HTML

[STrinity]

Slashdot won't let you validate it...so I had to save a copy and validate it

You've obviously missed this nifty little tool [mozilla.org] -- it let's you run the W3C's Tidy in Firefox's view-page-source window. The only thing it's missing is a way to send the cleaned up HTML back to the browser window.