Mozilla Roadmap Update

wikinerd writes "According to a recent roadmap update for Mozilla, the beta 1.8 version will be unveiled this month, while in the next month a second beta will be prepared. After the Beta2, Gecko engine 1.8 will be finished and it will power Mozilla 1.8, Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1. The developers will then start working on Mozilla 1.9. Here are some nice graphics depicting the roadmap."

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[eln]

Most likely the primary feature will be the Gecko 1.8 engine. It seems to be the primary purpose for the release, and there may not be any other new features at all except maybe some scattered bugfixes.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Burning Edge keeps a running ChangeLog for the next version. It's not offical, but it's still fairly accurate.

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.1 .html [squarefree.com]

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[goofyspouse]

From http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml :

We are still working on goals for 2.0 and are drafting a PRD for its development. Some likely goals include:

* Improvements to Bookmarks/History
* Per-Site Options
* Enhancements to the Extensions system, Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search and other areas.
* Accessibility compliance
* More ... ?

(Note: placing an item on this list does not mean it will not be complete until 2.0, rather we would like to be done by 2.0, it may be implemented by 1.1, 1.5 or 2.0)

Re:Composer?

[Jack Comics]

Your solution is at hand. [nvu.com] NVU is a multi-platform "spin-off" of Mozilla Composer, based on the Gecko 1.7.5 engine used by the Mozilla Suite and Firefox 1.0.

Re:Mozilla vs FireFox

[temojen]

Firefox is a browser. Mozilla is a Browser, Email reader, usenet reader, page composer, IRC client, and a few other things.

Re:Composer?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stand-alone Composer is known as Nvu. It's sponsored by Linspire (of Lindows fame), which as far as I can tell is why its not on Mozilla's page. However, MozillaZine does report on it from time to time.

Homepage - http://www.nvu.com/ [nvu.com]
Download - http://www.nvu.com/download.html [nvu.com]

Slashdot fix in 1.1

[TechnologyX]

Before anyone evens grabs the oblig. "Yeah but it still can't display Slashdot right!!oneone!1" post, the fix is in the pipeline for 1.1. And it's a race condition with Firefox, not with /.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[davron05]

From the Unofficial Firefox 1.1 changelog [squarefree.com]:
New features
* 245392 - Installer options for where to put start menu / desktop / quick launch shortcut icons.
* 231062 - Provide Firefox MSI package.

Major improvements

* 124561 - Anonymous ftp login failure should prompt for username/password.
* 98564 - Caret overlaps the last character in textfield (if positioned after the last char).
* 151375 - Focus outline should be drawn outside of element.
* 133165 - Focus outline should include larger descendants of inline elements.
* 65917 - :active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated.
* 175893 - Make XUL 's focusable.
* 20022 - :hover state not set until mouse move.
* 276588 - Rework toolkit command-line handling. You can now open local files easily from the command-line (e.g. firefox.exe README.txt), and command-line switches should do the same thing whether Firefox is running or not.
* 95227 - Make it possible to set different default font type (serif vs sans serif) for different languages.
* 16940 - [Windows] IME is now disabled for password fields.
* 151249 - [Mac] Middle click on link does nothing on Mac OS X (should open link in new tab).
* 242845 - [Mac] Firefox disk image should use .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz.
* 238854 - [GTK2] Changing GNOME2 theme doesn't apply until restarting Mozilla.

And yes, they are also targeting the famous Slashdot rendering bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2175 27). Copy&paste the link to your browser since diredt linking to bugzilla from slashdot doesn't work.

Re:Are they saying...

[bcmm]

Yes, this still happens to me if I slow down my connection a bit.
It is not just slashdot, but we are the worst affected.
Also a bit of optimisation/lower memory usage would be cool.

Re:But can it render Slashdot?

[md27]

There's actually a bug in Gecko [mozilla.org] that causes the mis-render, and it's fixed in the code that will be 1.1. I saw this on the burningedge 1.1 fix list [squarefree.com].

Re:Are they saying...

[bcmm]

Referer blocking - copy and paste:
https:// bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217527

Re:Why not dump Mozilla for Firefox?

[gothzilla]

Mozilla is using the NEW gecko engine and the article says that 1.8 will be final soon. How is that old? RTFA. Firefox uses mozilla's gecko engine as well.

From mozilla's FAQ:
"Mozilla (Application Suite, also known as SeaMonkey) is a complete suite of web related applications, such as a browser, a mail/news client, a chat client and much more. Firefox is just a browser, which makes it a better choice if you already have a mail client for example. Also, since Firefox is smaller than the whole Mozilla suite, it's faster and easier to use.
Note, though, that Firefox is not the standalone Mozilla browser. The user interface in Firefox differs from Mozilla in many ways. For example, Firefox has customizable toolbars."

So firefox is different than mozilla because...it has a different user interface. Firefox relies on mozilla's work on the gecko engine so to abandon mozilla is to also abandon firefox.

Where's the freakin' roadmap??

[amake]

If you wanted to see the actual roadmap itself, starting at this /. article you had to wade through not one, not two, but three intermediate sites to get to it. Thanks a lot for not putting a direct link [mozilla.org] anywhere in the article, guys.

Re:I hope they improve on the Mac version

[Turf]

The memory consumption issues kept me away from firefix for a long, long time. Whether on MS XP or GNU/Linux systems, the result was always the same: after a day of heavy usage, Firefox was slow, slow, slow. Memory consumption was always higher than any other program I used. As it neared the 1.0 stage, the memory usage became better. Not ideal, but better.

Sorry I cannot corroborate your Mac usage, except state the same happens on other platforms.

Re:Firefox security updates?

[algae]

I'm using FireFox 1.0, and everytime i've seen a security hole announced, an auto-updater pops up within a day or so to install the hot-fix. It's a little green arrow right under the title bar.

Re:I hope they improve on the Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

Version 1.1 is going to be mostly dedicated to Mac fixes. Then new features and bug fixes are being aimed at 1.5

There will be _some_ new features in 1.1 (Like the new options window), but from my understand it is mostly to clean up the Mac issues that they know about

Re:Safari Innards

[TheRaven64]

The rendering engine in Safari is WebCore, which is based on KHTML, from the KDE project. A large number of changes have been made by Apple, many of which have not found their way back into KHTML yet (because KHTML is understaffed and can't handle the merging, not because Apple is hoarding them). While it is similar to Gecko in terms of features, I have found that it has slightly better CSS support[1], and produces nicer looking[2] output for several attributes (I seem to recall that bevelled boarders being one of them, although I may be wrong).

WebCore is open source, but it is written in Objective-C++ (core is C++, interface is Objective-C), which is currently only supported by GCC on OS X (mainly due to the size of the maintainers' egos). Once the main branch of GCC gets Objective-C++ support, it is probable that the GNUstep project will gain a WebCore based browser.

[1] Not in any way an objective measurement, I've just found that a few CSS tags I've wanted to use have been supported by Safari but not by anything else including Gecko.
[2] Again, 100% subjective.

Re:SVG?

[wikinerd]

About SVG: If you read my article [wikinerds.org] on Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 6 you will see that I mention "Improved support for SVG". So, Mozilla 1.8 already has better SVG support.

Re:Slashdot fix in 1.1

[TechnologyX]

Well yeah, I never said that /.'s HTML was correct, but the bug itself is a condition in Firefox that involved table overflows and painting. Sometimes Gecko would try to render the table without receiving all the data ( slow connections mostly ) and it would cause the weird overflow problem.

Personally, I've never seen it, but I'm on cable, so the whole page loads all at once.

Re:What new features in 1.1?

[Myen]

Also, (yet another) prefs window rewrite is expected. The new cookie manager (finally groups cookies by domain) looks good; too bad we can't try it yet. (It's on a branch, i.e., not in the nightlies)

Re:And where does Sunbird fit into all of this ?

[jbridge21]

Ummmm, haven't you seen Evolution [gnome.org]? Or is there some other reason that's not what you're looking for?

Re:Graphical display issues

[kryocore]

Examples:

The bluetabs template for Mambo CMS:
http://www.mambohut.com/content/view/367/

Slashdot

It will hide results from this search tool, despite showing up fine in IE:
http://windowssecrets.com/winfind/

Anything with ActiveX or VBSCRIPT (not such a bad thing, but people will still complain about it)

Windows Update - A very important site for any Windows user (not firefoxes fault, but this is still a disadvantage to illiterate users)

Sites with the Invision Powerboard have been noted to display threads with lots of posts incorrectly.

Some of these are no big deal, and there are just as many sites that IE displays incorrectly, but it will still be an advantage for IE if firefox displays the same site incorrectly, because people are switching FROM IE, not from firefox.

Re:Mozilla vs FireFox

[maxume]

Don't worry about it. They share huge amounts of code, most importantly the rendering engine. They interfaces for the suite and firefox are built quite differently, so it probably wouldn't be all that easy to integrate firefox into the suite...

Re:Firefox security updates?

[sjonke]

I have not seen this. I just tried starting up Firefox and no pop-up update was presented, no link below the toolbar. I do see now that there is a "Software Update" feature in the preferences, but even running this manually turns up no updates. I'm running it on Mac OS X.

Re:REQ: block flash / show url for failed page loa

[Ruediger]

2. show the url in the location bar for web pages that fail to load

Try this extension [pikey.me.uk].

No need to wait

[paul248]

A lot of the new and fixed stuff (including the /. rendering bug) is already available in the nightly builds. I wouldn't install a nightly for Grandma, but they're definitely very usable by anyone of sufficient geekdom:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/latest-trunk/ [mozilla.org]

Re:Graphical display issues

[mopslik]

It's not a matter of whether you or I who are fully capable of finding what we need are able to workaround Firefox not working with Windows Update, it's a matter of whether "Cletus" from the sticks of Mississippi can figure it out.

Why do you think you get the "You must upgrade to IE..." page when you visit Windows Update with FireFox?

If the page wasn't handled correctly, you'd see garbage on the screen. Or an empty screen. Or half of a screen. Basically, you would see the elements that FireFox parsed correctly.

What you're seeing on Windows Update is the result of a script that checks if you're using IE. If you are, it lets you access the main page. If you're not, it tells you to switch to Microsoft's browser. How does FireFox get past this? Clearly, it can't change the script on Microsoft's site. Should it use some fancy algorithm to try and decide which scripts it should ignore and which it should obey? That's opening a whole new can of worms.

It's not an issue of FireFox displaying the page incorrectly. It's an issue of FireFox being blocked at the door.

If you have an example of a page that displays incorrectly without such a limitation on it, then you've got something to discuss.

Re:But can it render Slashdot?

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

For many people, current releases of Firefox and Mozilla Suite will randomly render Slashdot with incorrect widths for the left column--sometimes the middle column will be too far to the left and overlap text in the left column, other times it will be way over to the right and you have to scroll horizontally to read it.

The issue is due to a race condition in the reflow code in pre-1.8 versions of Gecko. Whether it gets triggered on a given load of Slashdot depends on the timing of interactions between the incoming TCP packets containing the page HTML, the browser cache if parts of the page are cached, and the rendering engine. Some people never see it, due presumably to the vagaries of their Internet connection. Those who do (like me) can very quickly fix it by forcing a page reflow--the easiest way to do this is to quickly decrease (and then increase) the font size.

The proximate cause is malformed HTML generated by Slashcode, but obviously a race condition that leads to inconsistent rendering of the same page is a bug, and has been fixed in the Mozilla trunk. Apps based on versions of Gecko from the 1.8 codebase onward (Mozilla Suite 1.8, Firefox 1.1, Thunderbird 1.1, etc.) will have the fix applied.

Congratulations! Now you can understand half the comments every time a Mozilla/Firefox story gets posted on Slashdot.

Re:Firefox security updates?

[jesser]

I'm pretty sure there haven't been any security hotfixes for Firefox 1.0. There was one for Firefox 0.9.x. Perhaps you were getting new versions of extensions you had installed, rather than hotfixes for Firefox itself?

Nightly builds have fixes + regressions

[timealterer]

Some of those security issues have been fixed in the nightly builds, but right now the nightlies have a whole whack of regressions that make them pretty close to unusable.

Usually the nightlies are quite usable, but after 1.0 was released they merged in all the Mozilla 1.x changes that had happened in the last 8 months or so, which brought about a whole load of regressions. I expect you'll be able to get more usable nightlies of Firefox 1.1 in a couple weeks leading up to the developer preview. (Also these builds include the perennial Slashdot rendering bug!)

Re:Why not dump Mozilla for Firefox?

[CTho9305]

I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about. If this [mozilla.org] is enough for me to claim I'm a developer (or even if it doesn't... I don't really care what trolls think of me).....

Here's a list of the source directories for Mozilla & Firefox:

accessible browser build caps chrome config content db dbm directory docshell dom editor embedding extensions gc gfx intl ipc jpeg js l10n layout lib mailnews modules netwerk nsprpub other-licenses parser plugin profile rdf security storage sun-java themes toolkit tools uriloader view webshell widget xpcom xpfe xpinstall

Of those, only browser and toolkit are exclusive to Firefox, and most of the code in xpfe is exclusive to Mozilla. Pretty much everything else is shared. There are not different "development teams". Developers working on the core (rendering, networking, the image libraries, etc) are working on both products, since those parts are shared. Other people work on the Firefox frontend mostly, or the Mozilla frontend mostly, or both.

Development is active in both products. It just happens that the Mozilla front end is very mature and stable, so it doesn't change as rapidly. That doesn't mean features aren't being added - I've added a few little things (some of which happen to be in Firefox, some of which aren't), and I'm not the only one working on it.

There are two kinds of fool: one who says, "It is old, and therefore good", and the other, who says "It is new, and therefore better".

Bugzilla blocks referrers from slashdot, so for your copy/paste convenience, the link above is pointing to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_for mat=advanced&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=exact& email1=cst%40andrew.cmu.edu&chfieldto=Now