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Mozilla M9 Released 202

_m writes "The boyos at mozilla.org have dropped mozilla M9 and, from looking at the m10 nightly releases, it looks really promising. Go out and support your local developer. Still some small problems, but it looks like quite a lot of the important things have been sorted. Go alt tags! "
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Mozilla M9 "Rumba" Released

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  • Yo, duh -- install glib 2.1 *in addition to* your current libraries. You can have more than one C library, y'know...
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Just downloaded M9 at work and rushed home (no, I don't really have much of a life) to install it. First impressions, starting with the bad...

    BAD: Dammit, it's still basically brings my machine to a halt when I run this thing on Linux. Just running the mouse over the slashdot navigation to the left can bring my system up to 80% load. I know this is still alpha, but on the same machine in Windows 98 (with M8) this was not a problem. No one else seems to be complaining about this. Is it just me? I have a PII450 with 128 Meg of RAM...

    GOOD: Lots of Javascript fixes, including a bug I submitted that was marked as a "won't fix - as designed".

    REALLY COOL: It uses my Gnome widget themes! For some unknown reason, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside because of this :)

    I have to say to all the Mozilla coders out there that as a user of your product(s) and a web developer please keep up the great work! If any of you ever come to Boise, ID I will personally buy you a round at a local pub!

    David

    error: method `~` of object `~` failed
    Actual Microsoft Error Message
  • hehe.. not to be rude, but there was a contest on mozilazine.org and mozilla.org to create that icon.. you should have voiced your opinion back then
  • by azz ( 12928 )
    I also like KFM, but I have three minor gripes; first, it does something occasionally that crashes my X server (but hopefully that'll get sorted in XF86 4.0), second, Qt is horrendously ugly (although it's rather nicer in Motif mode), and third, KFM doesn't support HTTP authentication. I use authentication for several projects that I'm working on, so I have to use Netscape or Lynx to test them.

    Incidentally, this is off-topic, but why on earth does Qt in its Win95-lookalike mode replicate Windows' horrendous behaviour with dragging scrollbars (move the pointer more than 50-odd pixels away from the scrollbar while dragging it and it pops back to its previous position)? (Fortunately it doesn't do this in Motif mode.)

    "I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
    "All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

  • I have a cable modem and I find it's a big time saver. Nothing against /. but it can be disgustingly slow at times. I really love though, how in unix clicking w/ the middle mouse button is the same as right click->open in new window. God I miss that at work...
  • I feel sorry for all you linux whiners out there. M9 Works great on my RedHat 6 box, and my windows 98 SE box..

    The last thing you should bitch about is upgrading to libc 2-1, come on people.. get with the times.. internet explorer requires 40-50 meg updates almost each time you upgrade.

    The new netscape is a web and application framework. MUCH more powerfull and standard then internet explorer is and will be anytime in the near future.

    SO far all you people complaing about segfaults, standardize your system, get with the times. do a lil homework, solve your problems.

    Meanwhile, my code updates, my bugzilla notes and my fine running browser and working, and i'm developing websites around the technology based in mozilla..
  • And.... we have form widgets! And they don't even jump out of the way when I click on them! Woohoo! Mozilla has just joined the ranks of usable web browsers... On the other hand, apprunner doesn't want to work... it crashes silently at the end of its startup spiel. viewer works fine, though. I'm okay with that... I don't need all the junk they packed into apprunner anyway. I've already got a mail client and a newsreader... I just want a good, solid, standards-compliant web browser... This post finely hand-crafted using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686).
  • Somewhere in the KFM settings there is an option for "change pointer over links" or something along those lines. I can't check exactly where it is right now because I'm at work in nt*blech*4 but the options aren't that extensive.
  • It is really fast... Impressive since it does not even have a cache (memory or disk) !
  • Just as a heads up, in the last two weeks or so, the CVS tree has not been able to build for me on any RedHat 5.2 system -- the only functioning builds I've gotten are on RedHat 6.0 systems, so downloading the source may not help you.

    The configure crap makes a LOT of assumptions right now, and doesn't actually know what library versions it actually needs, so its often times a real bitch to figure out what everyone at Mozilla seems to have upgraded on their systems that you haven't.

    Updating imlib, gtk+ and gdk don't seem to have fixed the problem when I upgraded those yesterday (and promptly broke Gnome...), although the problem seems to come from imlib.

    There are often wierd problems running with older system libraries, and things like that.

    If you're going to delve into the dark and mysterious world of Mozilla building, here's a couple tips:

    1) Run the most recent versions of everything. If that means upgrading to RedHat 6.0, you're probably going to have to do it. They're having similar issues supporting VC++ 5 and 6 under Windows, and the growing trend is build with the newest, and fix it later...

    2) The client.mk script, and makefiles aren't very reliable. If you keep blowing core, and aren't seeing lots of other reports about it (and tinderbox is green), blow away the tree, and repull a new copy. Dependancies don't work all the time, nor does make clean, and that seems to be the only reliable way to fix it. Sucks over a modem, huh? I'm suspecting that may be the problem here...

    3) Sort of restating #1, but if you're running a stock RedHat 5.2, upgrade your glibc unless you've got a pile of ram. There's some issue with loading libraries multiple times that chows down LOTS of RAM on a stock 5.2 system.

    4) When gdb asks you if you want to load all the symbols, *SAY NO* if you don't have a quarter gig of RAM or something. Trust me on this one. :)


  • They both show so much promise! KFM is all you say
    but I have never been able to get it to accept a
    cookie-that blows email on the Web.Mozilla has great potential but alas lags sooo far behind the Winbloat/Netscape pair.Looks like I'll bite the bullet and shell out $35.00 for Opera...if that ever comes to pass.
  • First, it would make no sense to have a "shared" lib that only one application could use. That's static.

    No, that's Microsoft. From the above posts, it seems "shared" libraries on MS platforms have a fixed base address, set at build time. So you can "share" all you want... until some two DLLs you need decide they want the same piece of virtual address space. Then all hell breaks loose.

    At least this is my impression from reading the above. I don't touch MS stuff, so I wouldn't know, really.

  • Hooray! It actually runs!

    Mozilla is certainly look good - however, it still doesn't want to use our http proxy server like wot I am compelled to use. The autoproxy option doesn't work (I dunno if we even have javascript yet), but worse, the manual proxy configuration simply isn't hooked up.

    Which means I can see my own web page (gee!), but I can't give it a workout with real surfing.

    Is this on the cards for m10?

  • Of course not many people *USE* any of the
    current development releases. They are for
    testing and reporting of bugs. If you don't
    want to test and report (at least one) bug,
    don't bother downloading the release. Just
    wait until someone comes along on slashdot and
    says, "OK folks, Mozilla 1.0 is available!"

    On the other hand, if you want that day to
    arrive sooner rather than later, you'll go
    download the latest release and do your duty.

    -WW

    --
    Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
    When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
  • If two dlls with the same (or overlapping) base address are loaded the the later one will rebase itself. You take a (slight) performance hit while the things are remapped.

    So, then the windows DLLs *are* position independent, no? Which brings us back to the first question -- why are the linux binaries larger, and do symbol tables have *anything* to do with it?

  • Thanks for the tip! It's not exactly in an obvious place..

    Options/Configure File Manager...

    Then pick the Color(!) tab where you'll find a "Change cursor over link" option.

  • Head on over to www.mozilla.org and read the damned thing yourself. I remember a day when people actually actively searched for information rather than expecting to have it handed over to them on a silver platter.
  • Those were the days.. but now we have slashdot ;)

  • One improvement.. The size of the binaries for Linux have been reduced to a level much closer to the other platforms.

    Why are the Linux binaries still larger than the others? Does anyone know?
  • by Pac ( 9516 )
    So it os not worth discussing the kind of competition Mozilla is up against? So it is not worth discussing how a open source project deals with the marketshare issues (even if the answer is not to deal at all)? Or how standards compliance affects the public perception, in contrast with bells and whistles?

    And just as a sidenote, I knew this issue could be understood as a provocation, so I tried to write it so as NOT to sound as one. It seems that I failed.
  • I just got 8.5 ("PRE-NECKO") two nights ago. I wanted a "post-necko" release, but I couldn't get the nightly builds to work.

    Oh well, I have a few days of vacation so I guess I can spare the dl time.
    ---
    Put Hemos through English 101!
    "An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
  • FTP install at 56k is not going to be any fun. Try getting a $2 RH6 cdrom delivered. I got mine at cheapbytes.com; you will pay more in postage to NZ than the disk costs, but it will be the easiest thing.
  • by Rayban ( 13436 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @02:13PM (#1723021) Homepage
    I know everyone loves getting the milestones, but the project could always use a few helping hands for stuff like QA (general bugfinding), development or even just suggestions.

    Take a look at bugzilla (bugzilla.mozilla.org) and get an account there. Browse the bugs to see what the report looks like and see if you can submit an original bug, make a test case for an existing one or whatnot. We're all going to be using this browser in the end, so you may as well have some say in how it turns out. ;)

    Enjoy M9! :)

  • See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/release- notes/m9.html

    They explain that Mozilla is unstable with glibc 2.0x due to a bug in these releases of glibc. (glibc 2.1 fixed a couple of bugs in some of my heavily threaded programs)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • fwiw, dude, win95 can run a nameserver ;)
  • I'll probably get flamed for this, but here goes...

    I think Mozilla is great, but I don't use it. I've gotten every milestone since M5, and they've al been unusable. I am not a coder, and although I realize that my bug-reporting services are needed, I am not masochistic enough to use Mozilla. It has terrible page-load times, layout bugs that make it unusable, and the mail client doesn't work at all, and I'm not so altruistic that I'm willing to put up with all that, even though Netscape sucks so much. M9 is 15% done downloading, but I don't hold out much hope for its quality.
  • Yeah, you were right, you'll get flamed.

    Its the crucible of stupidity. Maybe you should think about a few things first.

    1) These are development releases. You don't seem to be able to handle them. Its okay to realize your own deficiencies.

    2) Give constructive critisism, rather than general "its unusable...I don't hold out much hope for its quality". Layout problems and strange refreshes are a hassle. But its a development release. But without much specific to share, it sounds more like FUD.

    There is probably a 3 and a 4, when i think of them I'll write later.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^ ~
  • It was the result of a contest. The contest directors failed to enforce the constraint that the icon needed to fit within the mozilla color limitations. A vote was taken, and the winner looked *awful* when rendered in mozilla. I submitted a color-fixed version that looked better, but pr'ly i didn't yell loud enough, 'cuz no one took it.
  • Can I just take this back? Seems the glibc 2.0 problems are due to linker/loader problems (from reading Bugzilla) and it seems that getting the 2.0 linker to co-exist with the 2.1 linker may not be easy...
  • I hear you. KFM kicks. It's fast, and doesn't drop out on me nearly as much. The memory/performance savings make me feel much better as well, especially when multiple people are using my machine.

    There are a couple of things that bug me though. I *have* to drag-n-drop to save a link. I prefer the right-click-save-as myself. Having to continually move around windows to facilitate dnd has always drove me.

    There are also those very rare times I need JavaScript. Even in Netscape I turn it off unless I need it. Great for avoiding those annoying popups certain sites force on you, specifically the free homepage sites.

    Right-click-back is missing also. I hate having to go to that widget everytime I go back a page. Actually, I like having everything in Netscape's right-click menu, especially "open link in new window."

    Pointer doesn't change over links. A small annoyance. I think I can live without that.

    No SSL. I do a fair bit of online shopping. It was the reason I went out and got a VISA.

    If it weren't for those things, I'd be using KFM right now.

    I did try KDE 2 a little while back. Konqueror is *really* promising, although fairly unstable... Hmm, I think I'll try it again tonight.
  • While I agree with the setiment, this kind of mindless advocacy doesn't work, and might even turn people off to debian. Debian 2.1 does not use glibc2.1 like redhat 6.0 does, and so this release of mozilla will not function. Unless you're suggesting s/he upgrade to potato, which is insane if you actually use your computer to get any work done.
  • I finally got around to looking at the Mozilla source and as expected it's enourmous. I've also looked around the mozilla site and I have to ask: Do the resources exist to allow outsiders to contribute to Mozilla?

    Yes, I know that the source is available, but this is a huge object oriented project. Source code alone just doesn't cut it. Where are the models? Here, where I work there are information models, state transition diagrams, interface event documents, how can anybody be expected to dive into 19+ MB compressed of source code?

    Am I mistaken, or is there virtually no information available that would allow someone outside of the project to figure it out without brute force reading all of the code?
  • Got to be <= 256 colors because it's an animated GIF. You can drop in your own in place of it, if you want.
  • Open in new window is the major command i use. try it. you never have to go back to the slashdot forum, you can just keep it open and open new windows for each thread. big big time saver for those of us in slow connections.
  • No BeOS binary for us BeOS users :P
  • It's coming along *very* nicely.

    Beware IE.

    ...
  • dude...

    if oss is to compete with commercial software, it cant have this paternalistic streak. you've got to figure out how to make it work for the lazy ones without alienating them, because *lowers voice* there's a lot of lazy ones.
  • It seems that many testers would need some form of good feedback which would make them believe they weren't wasting their time. Like lists of feature that need testing and which have been tested and which have how many bug reports already filed on them, etc.

    There's not a complete and all-inclusive list to use as a guide to testing, but you might want to check out the Bugathon [mozilla.org] page, which offers some good guidance on areas where Mozilla testing is needed.

  • What's this about two thousand dollar compilers? Required? You must be kidding me. You need to fix your operating system first [debian.org], then worry about building Mozilla.

    --
  • Why is this flamebait? It seems pretty correct to me, and I'm running 2.3.15 24-7 on my home machine. Netscape is showing its age in a big way, Mozilla is far from catching up, IE5 works fine (dare I say that on /.?) KFM has some holes, but like cameldrv says, it's stable and going somewhere.

    So, where's the flamebait?

    Moderators, a post doesn't become flamebait or a troll just because you don't agree with it. If it's on-topic and contains valid opinions and/or information, try to hold back on the downmoderating.
  • "When a simple program (in the order of hello world) takes 20 minutes to compile and results in a 1meg binary with some of the poorest code ever known to man generated, you have to start doubting the quality of the compiler."

    Why bother with such uninformed BS? Have you ever even been *near* a copy of VC++? Our project is now at 4.6 Megabytes of source code... It only takes 5-10 minutes to rebuild from clean. We're very happy with the code it produces. Ever heard of "Minimal Rebuild"? "Incremental Linking"? Or are you too busy hacking your makefile by hand?

    As for "$2k+", you are way off. VC++6.0 Standard Edition (I can't imagine you would need more than this to build Mozilla) is about $110. Even if you buy the "Professional" version (better optimizer?), you're looking at not much more than $500. No, it's not free, but that's an argument for another day :)

    If Microsoft need to be bashed, then so be it. Unfortunately, mindless, uninformed rants such as yours will inevitably drown out the voices of reason.

    Andrew
  • Please don't bloat browsers by stupidly including an unnecessary DNS cache

    I think it needs a buffer anyway. Maybe just for this session say. It can throw away anything that's in their when you quit. Say a hash table that you prune at 128 entries. This should take up about 10-20 KB max of memory. The code really would be trivial. I can imagine you could do it in 50-150 lines of code (assuming you already have a hash class). And it would really be a boon for a lot of different people, and I don't think it would hurt anyone. And if it does, just make it a configurable cache like the memory cache for netscrape.
  • I think I know :) It's because on Linux you're supposed to use shared libraries to make your code smaller, but because the shared libraries change so often, it's unsafe to release a big monster like Mozilla and hope it will somehow get lucky enough to have used NO obsolete, changed, recently broken library functions. So it winds up having to be statically linked, or using its own custom-compiled libraries. WP8 is like this too, and Netscape.

    That sucks of course, but at least it means the program usually runs, and that doesn't suck. Getting it to work with real shared libraries is a kind of a final development phase thing and I really hope that it works out, because who need yet another bloated monster stomping its great big lizard feet all over their memory?
    --
  • So I guess that would make the other half qt apps...
  • (What happened? I didn't mean to post... Grumble.)

    Mozilla *still* doesn't understand multipart/x-mixed-replace as a MIME type. This has been around in Netscape since... Well, before 3.

    And yes... I could try to find the problem and fix it, but enough other people have complained about this problem that I thought I'd be too late!
  • I don't like saying this at ALL, but if the Mozilla team only releases binaries for the current platforms they support in the future, they will have NO way of making it onto my system. I don't run Windows, I don't have a Mac, and I don't use glibc2.1. So why am I excluded? Come on, I thought it was supposed to work *better* than IE5, and if it is (I hate Windoze/IE btw) then why is it larger, more flickery, and just about as stable? I realize it's only M9, but that's supposed to be like a halfway point. When projects reach a halfway point, aren't they supposed to have either 1) some of the features that were promised (e.g., full XML capability, HTML-4.0 compliance, CSS support, speed, small size) or 2) all of the features, with lots of bugs?

    I notice that with Mozilla, at least, it's halfway between. It has some of the features, and lots of bugs, with no real reason for me to download. I can use Lynx, I can use Netscape (the piece of sh*t that it is) and I can use the KFM or the Konqueror (which is MUCH more unstable, but it is SO SWEET it's not even funny); and when Opera comes out, I swear I'm gonna bite the bullet, pay the fee (and no source!!) and use a browser which works with all the neat features I need/want from the Net. Mozilla was promising, but I don't even really like the UI. Ah well, maybe I'm anti-GTK; I don't know. I guess that's probably it. Although, if it supports full GTK themes, I might take a look.... some of the themes are DAMN cool and it would be almost acceptable. I don't like the GTK as far as stability goes (which is our key hand against the Windows crowd; take it away and what have we got? Lots of useless source code for instable programs....) but it can sure look like one sexy bitch. Interesting times, eh?
  • Stop lying !
    IE5 is much much more stable than any version of netscape ever was ( specially Unix versions)

    Try to be objective for once !!!
  • Go take a look at this old status update and see what the newsgroup post referenced has to say about reducing the symbol table size, which helps reduce binary size some.
  • Potato works great. I use my computer to get work done all the time. Stuff breaks every once in a while, but not that often. I've been using it for about 8 months, and the only times I had trouble were when the JDK was compiled against the wrong version of GLIBC, and when I upgraded something that broke StarOffice for about 2 weeks. Other then that, it's been great, and is a wonder to use :)
  • That's true.. my only bitch with IE is that constant security flaws (like REALLY REALLY serious ones!) and the fact that when it crashes (once every two weeks for me or whenever I try to access 'history') it's for no apparent reason.
  • I've always found that a combination of visual and text based html editing works best. I use DreamWeaver and TextPad at home, and flick between when they are best for a specific task - DreamWeaver having that great "edit in external editor" function.

    While I don't doubt or disrespect your html editing capabilities, I think that I could produce a graphically rich page (with image maps) faster with DreamWeaver + TextPad than you could with Vi(m)|(x)Emacs.

    Of course, dw + textpad will never come out for Linux :-(

    PS. Some people want graphically rich pages, especially in our Intranet, therefore I will produce those pages for them. Text only and Image rich pages each have their place.

  • If you don't like something, you really can fix it without having to wade through reams and reams of mediocre eighties code.

    Er, there's not really any of that "mediocre eighties code" left...
    Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org [berlin-consoritum.org]

  • [apprunner] crashes silently at the end of its startup spiel.

    No, just the first time you run it, you actually run the installation wizard, which exits when it is done. When you start apprunner the next time (and all subsequent times), it will start up the browser.


    Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org [berlin-consoritum.org]
  • I hope I don't sound too backwards here, but does the thing work with libc5 at all?

    My morning so far:

    • Grab M9, configure, build. Build fails with some weirdass C++ error message. Hypothesize gcc 2.7.2.3 problem.
    • Grab gcc 2.95. Configure, Build.
    • Build mozilla again. Build succeeds but program barfs on startup with some weirdass relocation message. Hypothesize libc5 problem.
    • Grab glibc-2.1.1. Configure. Configure doesn't recognize gcc 2.95. Hack configure script. Configure. Build.
    • Stop build. Grab binutils-2.9.1. Configure. Build. (Just to be on the safe side.)
    • Restart glibc-2.1.1 build. In progress...

    And so it goes... . SNF .

    Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty

  • No, this is a crash, or, at least, a premature termination. It runs the installation wizard the first time through, then terminates. I was expecting that; I've seen that behaviour in older milestones. However, on the second and subsequent runs, it gets to the point in its startup process where it would normally open the browser window, and the program exits to the bash prompt without so much as a warning message. It never even opens any sort of X window. I went back and rmed my ~/.mozilla directory and let it go through the install process again, in case the old settings were confusing it somehow, with no luck.

    M8 did the same thing to me... I think I skipped M7 for other reasons. M6 was the last one I had where apprunner worked.

    That's the only serious bug I've run into with this version... I'm doing my browsing in the Mozilla viewer now, and it's working fine. And the form widgets work! (Can you tell I'm excited about that? ;) )
  • MICROS~1 could probably eliminate 3/4 of their stability issues if they could just learn this lesson, but it will never happen despite the fact that their quality is going down the toilet and disk space is as cheap as water (approaching 1 penny per megabyte).

    I work at a company that adamantly refuses to include any kind of versioning in the DLL's it releases for in-house development, and I have been linking everything statically for quite a while. I figure I've saved the company thousands of dollars just for not having to spend a lot of time diagnosing mismatched DLL's.

  • This stuff is reproduced from a newsgroup posting on one of the groups found on news.mozilla.org:
    M10 still exists as a target for features and specific fixes. ...There will be no 10 deliverable. M11 is our feature complete beta candidate. Once all M11 feature work is done, we are in the home stretch to get the bug list down and performance and stability up.
    The project is called `porkjet'; I suppose that means they're making pigs fly.

  • Exactly what is the licensing agreement on Mozilla? That dude with the javascript shiznat says he'd contribute it but apparently Mozilla aint GPL'd?
  • Scott-

    &lt martin&gt
    Stop drawing dinosaur pictures and get back to working on your thesis.
    &lt/martin&gt

    C;)

    -Felix
  • Unfortunately not all web developers have the choice. My current project requires me use to MS InterDev {shudder}.

    After checking that my hand 'coded' style sheet works under both IE and NS, I add it to my InterDev project. I then add a subclass - InterDev promptly screws up the style sheet (drops a trailing squiggly bracket) so that it doesn't work properly on Netscape. Of course, IE will still correctly parse the style sheet - apparently it is more 'forgiving'.

    To add insult to injury, it actually displays correctly formed source within the IDE - but doesn't save it as such.

    Let's not forget, having a standards compliant browser isn't going to be enough. Developers may want to support standards, but they might not have a choice as to whose. Market acceptance is what will win the day.
  • Face facts. IE is faster, has more features, and crashes less. Netscape is a piece of crap simply because Microsoft has spent more money on making IE a good product specifically to kill Netscape. Hate to say it folks, but that's what capitalism is all about. Microsoft made a better product and won with it. I don't have much faith in Mozilla ever catching up simply because Microsoft is comitted to having the best browser and AOL doesn't really care about the browser. Furthermore, the commitment to quality is not there at Netscape. They were raised on a culture of fast development without regard to bugs. Now they're developing slowly without regard to bugs. KFM may not have all the features of Netscape but at least it is somewhat stable and is going somewhere.
  • I'm just curious why won't bring up my website [pabulum.com] properly compared to Netscape 4.6. I'm presuming this is related to the dhtml. Remember, I'm a sysadmin not a designer so if this is obvious no flames please.
  • Looks like a FAQ, so had I bothered to read

    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/releas e-notes/m9.html#KNOWN_ISSUES

    I would have found out for myself. Ah well, roll on M11.
  • So, then the windows DLLs *are* position independent, no? Which brings us back to the first question -- why are the linux binaries larger, and do symbol tables have *anything* to do with it?

    No no no, Linux shared libraries use position independant code (PIC). This means it works wherever. Windows DLLs use position-dependant code. This means that if you get two DLLs that have the same base address (or overlap), one has to be automagically re-linked to use a different base address. The Linux way is less kludgy but the Windows way results in smaller libraries.

    However, the major issue for Mozilla seems to be that the C++ code is producing excessively large symbol tables with gcc. I haven't been following this closely, so I may have the details wrong, but it seems a way has been found to get around this. I think this is only a disk space and download-time issue, and doesn't impact run-time memory consumption.

    gcc doesn't produce very compact code at the best of times. Unfortunately, the gcc developers don't seem to consider this a priority.

  • that says a lot.. "What's the licensing agreement on french fries.." "oh.. that would be the french fries licensing agreement" .. care to say a few words about the licensing agreement.. like does it guareentee that all the contributions made to it will remain open source in future (or should we all contribute to AOL's web browser only to have them lock it up and say we can't look at it anymore in 2 years time?).
  • I don't know if it's my gtk theme or not (satinblack) but the menus don't show up properly, they just make painting errors and then if I click them again they show up. Weird. Anyone else experience this?
  • Laptop: Why the hell don't browsers cache DNS lookups? There's some kind of DNS locking going on that causes it to whiteout.

    Please don't bloat browsers by stupidly including an unnecessary DNS cache.

    At work I have a fast name server - no need.
    At home I have a slow connection to the ISP's nameserver - so I run my own caching nameserver there. This speeds up not only the browser, but everything else that need DNS as well. (Yes - plenty of other stuff use DNS) No need for an
    in-browser DNS cache.

    If they have to do it in order to support lame os'es for which no standalone nameserver software exist - at least make the DNS cache a separate product so it may be avoided completely.
  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    Source that you have can never be taken back, even under the NPL, and you (and should!) contribute your own code under the MPL instead, of which the NPL is a superset. (The MPL is basically ``you must make your changes available'', at its core. It and the NPL both use ``file boundary'' to delineate license domains, so you could combine an MPL-licensed file with a BSD-licensed one without difficulty.) There are a good annotation and FAQ hanging off of http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/. Most of the source in the tree is NPL, but most new files are MPL these days. Hope that helped.
  • I wonder when people will finally realize that with the huge amount of different library versions installed on Linux systems, it's pointless to distribute dynamically linked binaries, unless you're a developer building a package as part of a distribution. The correct way to build distribution-independent, nearly hassle-free binaries is to make them statically linked (but even that doesn't protect you from the braindead libc incompatibilities due to configuration files in different locations).
  • The question was what kinds of additional documentation are available to help an outside person get up to speed on how it works, and figure out where they can start pitching in. Getting source is not the problem, reading all of it is (however) untenable.

    Ben
  • IE5 is not bad, as long as you stay within certain bounds. If you start playing with it's six zillion COM interfaces you are looking for big trouble though.

    Personally on linux I use kfm, which is more like IE than anything else.

    For something as important as the WWW, you would think that a descent/stable browser would be a high priority for linux. Give me CSS, DHTML and JS, and I am a happy camper.
  • And the funny thing is that Explorer present marketshare is not a guess or a rant. It is a fact backed up by a good number of sources.

    I think that moderating down crude proselitism may be aceptable in some cases. But moderating down an on-topic post for stating a fact the moderator dislikes is a very serious issue.
  • Well, speaking from experience, DNS cache does signifigantly increase browsing, esp. on a high latency device like a modem. How do I use such a cache? It's not in the browser, which is bloated enough already, as has often been pointed out. Rather, I maintain a cache using bind.

    Event if you don't go all the way and make bind run as a real name server, you can still do caching only DNS. Plus, it's really cool to have resolv.conf have this line:
    nameserver: 127.0.0.1

    I think every linux dist I've seen has bind, and there's a really easy howto on setting it up for caching.
  • VC++ may be the best product microsoft has done but that's not saying much. When a simple program (in the order of hello world) takes 20 minutes to compile and results in a 1meg binary with some of the poorest code ever known to man generated

    I happen to use visual c++ and it certainly doesn't take 20 minutes to compile. The project I'm working on right now is a few thousand lines and takes about 10 seconds to compile. The compiled executable is about 260K and this is a debugable version that is using rtti, exceptions, and a few other c++ features. gcc 2.7.2.1 produces a debug executable twice that size for a few 100 lines of c+++ that only uses the iostream library.(I realize gcc 2.7.2.1 is pretty bad about c++)

    Some of the IDE features such as giving the function prototype when you start typing in the function name and listing class or struct members are useful and handy. It's sort of like a tab completion for programming. But on the downside, it doesn't handle parathetical matching and indentation as well as emacs or xemacs does.

  • Hmm, I'm running RH6/alpha on a Personal workstation 433, and I got M8 to compile, and it's currently chugging away on M9. What distro/version are you using?

  • I think Mozilla is going to eat IE's lunch because:

    a) Because of the adherence to standards, many (most?) web designers will immediately start using it as their reference browser for laying out pages. Therefore, pages will look 'best when viewed with Mozilla', so naturally people will want to run it.

    b) One of the things holding back the growth of Linux has been the lack of a good web browser. Communicator 4.6 is a valiant effort, but does not compare to IE5 under NT. Communicator crashes *way* too much, and is behind the times when it comes to modern standards support. It is barely useable for me, and that's only because I know how to 'ps aux | grep netscape', 'kill ' and 'rm -f ~/.netscape/.lock' Imagine the average office schmuck doing that.

    Mozilla promises to be better in every way than IE5, which should propel the growth of both Linux and Mozilla.

    c) Because it is open source, the rendering engine is bound to end up embedded in just about everything... network appliances, Linux GUIs, etc. In addition to being open source, it's also much more lightweight than IE, making it attractive for these environments.

    Just my .02 - I could be wrong.

  • Yes - I was at one stage contributing actively to the Rhapsody/MacOS X Server port. I got out of that when Apple canned the x86 port of MacOS X Server - something that is still 100% boneheaded. My Rhapsody DR2 install no longer works, so basically Apple lost a developer FOREVER. Oh yeah, I was going through a bit of a down patch in my life, and I wasn't coding much. But I did have commit privs on the CVS tree for Mozilla/Rhapsody, so it is possible.

    If you have an itch, scratch it - download the source, get cvs in order and sync with the latest source.

    Even if you can't code, get the latest stuff, build it (it's not hard) and run it through its paces. If you're going to debug the lizard, you'll need mucho memory (on my 96 MB dual PPro, it just swapped...). But documenters, bug testers and more than just the occasional fix really help. High quality bug reports are worth their weight in gold.

    Maybe think about profiling. If memory or CPU usage is bugging you, compile with the profiler options turned on and figure out where the problem is, and fix it (or suggest a fix) based upon your research.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26, 1999 @08:10PM (#1723102)
    Those who can, do.

    Those not smart enough for that, test and submit bug reports.

    Those not smart enough for that, wait patiently while others work out the bugs.

    Those not smart enough for that, sit back on Slashdot and bitch about how the quality of pre-release software isn't good enough for them, make meaningless comments about momentum and market share, etc.

    Those not smart enough for that are dead, since they couldn't figure out how to breathe.
  • The models are up to the owner of each module to supply/document. This is the reason mozilla has modules and module owners - the module owner can present a view of his/her particular bailiwick in whatever manner seems clearest. Brute-force reading of the code would be counterproductive, as it goes against the workflow that the Mozilla team has tried so hard to establish.
  • Unfortunatly not (thus speaks the voice of experience). Taking my (home) RH 5.1 system to glibc2.1 required several other rpms (eg initscripts, pam(?) and a couple of others). It wasn't as smooth as I would have liked, but I got there in the end (without downloading all of RH 6.0:). Now that I have decently (for NZ) priced net access (250hrs/$30), I just might try doing an ftp install of 6.0 (I did this successfully for a sun box at work (I got my wrist slapped, but as they say about forgiveness and permission...)) using the net boot image (that was fun:), so I know what it takes.
  • I just found something not worth calling a bug, but it's quite annoying (something with scrolling *AGAIN*). I've already seen a *LOT* of those and every time I tried to submit a bug, but the bugzilla system is just so very not-userfriendly that every time I wanted to submit a bug, i gave up after some time; I don't think it's worth the time. They should really make bugzilla a lot more intuitive.
  • Netscape will release the official communicator 5.0 release with the "netscape" look to it, in addition to a "mozilla" release.

    Communicator 5 wont be much different from Mozilla 5, except that it will include copyrighted code that can't be included in the source such as RSA.

    You should be able to download both.

    -andrew
  • I could write a browser but I don't wanna.
  • As of the 19th, the engineers found a butt ugly nasty memory leak that grew at the rate of 3.6 megs an hour. As far as I can tell they haven't fixed this yet.

    Because the transition of M9 to M10 is a big one (finishing implementing all the features), there has been a whole slew of problems and "breakage" in the source tree.

    Real nasty stuff, but hey, it's the home stretch.
  • In your opinion. I use Navigator 4.61 on Solaris all day (there are some web based applications central to my work) and it is fast and stable.

    Both that version and the 4.08 standalone I use on my Windows 98 box at home give me no trouble at all.
  • So what about strip? Would that change things? At least the symbols generated for all the objects used inside should go away.
  • Ok.. now I've got some all out bitching to do.. Being the free software orientated coder that I am.. I decided I would like to contribute a little to the mozilla project.. so I figured I would download the source and have a bit of a hack around.. I figure that I'll download the windoze version.. that way I can work for long hours stealing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hborrowing functionality from IE and help develop something that can directly compete against it.. to my dismay, I discover that you need Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.2 or later.. This is a product of evil.. now I mean real evil.. this thing shouldn't be called a compiler.. like.. I'd rank VC++ in the same domain as sun's javac.. it just aint code.. someone threw up and out came this bloated mess that they called a compiler.. you get the point.. why, when we have something as simple and elegant as the cygnus win32 ports of egcs do you continue to use VC++ !?@ .. I assume that it is because no-one has bothered to try converting all this M$ crap into real C++.. that must be it.. And so we have a solution.. I will take the mozilla code and convert it away from this hidous microsoft obomination that it has become.. I will start right after I finish this pizza.. It wont be easy, but I'll get there................................
  • You should have learned this by now:
    You can't ignore OS updates and complain when your out of date components arn't supported in new software.

    If you are running somthing that can use glibc 2.1, you should upgrade.

  • Basically, it is because ELF shared libraries carry a complete symbol table in what is called "position independent code". What this means (as best I understand it and I am a bear of very little brain) is that each executable on a linux system uses the same copy of the share libraries.

    Windows shared libraries are not position independent. This makes them (dramatically) smaller, but also forces an instance of the library for each application that uses it.

    In other words, it's not a bug, it's a FEATURE! The libraries are bigger, but only so long as one and only one application is using it.

    Of course, I may have totally mangled that. Anyone who's not a bear of very little brain care to comment?

    Amphigory

    --

    Cease striving and know the I [jehovah] am God.

    -- Psalm 45:6
  • to the mozilla crew:
    what's up with only posting a linux bianary for RH6? that's really lame, now i have to wait and download 18 megs of source. Also, I would like some bzip2 zipps, my 28.8 modem works hard enough as it is, why don't we get the processor off rc5 and into some work for a change(I'm talking about my processor, as it's easier for the modem to download smaller bzips and have them take longer to uncompress)?
  • Those aren't GNOME libs -- they are just modern version of GTK!!!

    Upgrade -- Redhat 5.1 is what: 18 months old now?

  • This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. Had this been an actual posting, real content would have followed this announcement. This is only a test...



    --
  • Those libraries are parts of GTK+ 1.2 (except the C++ library) GTK+ is not a "Gnome library" any more than Qt is a "KDE library"

    The reason old builds worked and this one doesn't was because AS IT SAYS IN PLAIN ENGLISH this build is intended for glibc2.1 You presumably don't have glibc 2.1, or if you do, your GTK+ and C++ libraries aren't built against it. To try M9, get glibc2.1 and those libraries built for the new libc.

    If you don't have GTK+ 1.2 at all, I have no idea how you expected most new GUI stuff to run, seems like half of Freshmeat is GTK+ apps these days.

  • The suggestion to make object-oriented models for all of Mozilla was in a /. discussion a while ago and I took it upon myself to investigate the idea. Well, I did it, and I had to conclude that Mozilla is moving so fast that the models would be obsolete too quickly. I like the idea that the module owners would supply the models.

    Even in my own programming I find that when working on a new project, it's extremely difficult to model the code except with the code itself. Until the classes are written, the ideas exist only in my head and can't be easily translated to visual information. By the time the ideas are concrete enough to visualize, the classes are already written and there's not much reason to concretely document anything but the interfaces and the less obvious sections of code. I have a friend who says some people are "visual" learners and some are not; well, I suppose many coders think in a non-visual way. To them, the addition of a GUI to an IDE is only helpful if it means fewer keystrokes. :)

    Once Mozilla 1.0 is out, though, I think we'll start seeing a lot more OO models. Then it will be easier for all of us to tack on our own little mods.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    If you want to help the Mozilla project and are unable to or don't have the time to code, there's still a lot you can do that will be a great help and won't take up much time.

    1. You should read the Getting Started document:
    http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html
    This will give you some ideas in how you can help.

    2. The Gecko Bug a Thon is useful to help with:
    http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/bugathon.html

    3. The status page keeps you up to date with current progress:
    http://www.mozilla.org/status/

    4. And of course stuff also appears on the homepage!
    http://www.mozilla.org/
  • by chocolateboy ( 21431 ) <chocolateboy AT chocolatey DOT com> on Thursday August 26, 1999 @03:30PM (#1723163)

    It's not like I'm running on an Amiga or a Casio E-100 or a Palm Pilot or a Sinclair QL or a Dreamcast or a yawn... I mean, this is a red-hot-one-year-ago (remember how things were a year ago... a month ago... last week... kids today) laptop. i586. MMX. Quake II. WindowMaker. vi. Capisce? 1024x768 pixels of uncut attitude. Every Milestone I have to break it to my baby: the Man from Mozilla says 'No'.

    Laptop: Are you on crack? You're saying I have to put up with Netscape 4.07? That heinous piece of crap.

    Me: Hey, watch your language, laptop. Don't make me hafta open a can of Lynx on your ass.

    Laptop: Alright, alright. Couldn't you just download the source? Pretty please? Me: 20Mb on a 33.3k connection? Buddy, your F00F bug is showing.

    Laptop: But Navigator hates Java. The slightest applet brings it to its knees.

    Me: I know.

    Laptop: Why the hell don't browsers cache DNS lookups? There's some kind of DNS locking going on that causes it to whiteout. On DNS for chrissakes! You look at top and it's got like 96% of the memory.

    Me: I know.

    Laptop: Try reading Slashdot on that baby. Good luck. Back doesn't mean back on planet Netscape.

    Me: I know.

    Laptop: Don't get me started on Javascript. Or CSS. Bloat. Speed. Key Bindings.

    Me: I'm sure it will come. One day...

    Laptop: Yeah. That'd be a freakin Milestone.


  • $ ls -l apprunner
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 mattdm mattdm 58133 Aug 24 20:31 apprunner
    $ strip apprunner
    $ ls -l apprunner
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 mattdm mattdm 25384 Aug 27 08:30 apprunner

    $ ls -l viewer
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 mattdm mattdm 190161 Aug 24 20:31 viewer
    $ strip viewer
    $ ls -l viewer
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 mattdm mattdm 122068 Aug 27 08:30 viewer

    --

  • Someone was telling me they were putting Javascript support into lynx.. and I said "man.. that's futile.. you must be bored" and he was like "yer.. but it's almost working and it's REALLY REALLY slow.." so I said "why not contribute that to Mozzilla" and he was all like "yer.. I would.. but I'm not that bored". Next thing you know they'll have tables working correctly in lynx..

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

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