Mozilla M16 Up For Grabbing 182
Cioby writes: "No news on the homepage (yet), but on [the mozilla.org nightly builds page] M16 builds started to appear. Go Mozilla, GO! :)" True enough -- though M15 is the latest milestone listed, M16 has been available from the nightly builds for over a month. M16 rocks pretty well, too, though I haven't tried out its transparent gif feature yet. Hard to complain about a nightly release schedule ... [Updated 8:50GMT by timothy] (Sigh) -- Yes, that ought to say "transparent png," not gif. Guess I haven't tried that either.
Re:PNG rendered correctly? (Score:1)
Although the check mark here (The Netherlands) is used mostly as possitive (correct) the first thing I noticed was the red and green colors, not the shape.....
Jeroen
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
> you freak
:)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:1)
What is GPL about? Not free beer. I'd pay money for good, Free, libre GPL software.
M16 is not out! (Score:1)
For a simple timeline of the seamonkey project (the heart of mozilla) goto:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/mileston es/
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:1)
Yes, it means something... chiefly that MS is selectively supporting whichever Unix variants they want. It means that they could port the whole (imho stinking) glob of goop to, say, FreeBSD, and it would work just as "well."
Well, it's their choice in the end...
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WinNT support... (Score:1)
The ever-so-helpful Dr. Watson gleefully informs me that "An application has generated an error log" and takes my Mozilla away very very often. It does run really fast on NT, but goes away with the same speed.
Mozilla runs great on my Ultra 5 tho...
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
Netscape 6 PR1's CSS support blows Microsoft's away; in fact, it has the least number of bugs, and was claimed to have the best CSS support of all the browsers in an article right here on Slashdot. So, you're comment that IE's CSS is better than Netscape's "ever was" is just plain wrong.
Then, you make a big deal about how good OLE/ActiveX is...that's wonderful...and they run on how many platforms again? That's right, one. XPCOM might sound like a rehasing of COM, and maybe it is, but XPCOM runs on at least ten different platforms; that's what makes it a "big deal," and rather cool IMO.
Next on the block: components. IE has them. Mozilla has them. Mozilla's are better. Because I can guarantee you that Mozilla won't crash Gnome or KDE. Mozilla won't crash X. And Mozilla certainly won't crash Linux. IE's track record isn't so stellar.
You seem to be missing the point that people like you are the type of people that allow Microsoft to exist as a monopoly. "It just works better," you cry, and while in some messed up view of things, it might (Windows is more integrated, for instance), what will you say when there is nothing but Windows NT 2005, and you can't run any software but the software MS wants you to run?
I for one, don't want to know find that answer out experimentally.
No Solaris build (Score:2)
I'm rather disappointed that there isn't a Solaris nightly build any longer. Where I am [www.ens.fr] we have a network of PC's under Linux and Sparcstations under Solaris. To make Mozilla the default browser for all students we would need a Solaris build.
I discussed this on the netscape.public.mozilla.unix [mozilla.org] newsgroup, and it seems something broke the build automation process under Solaris and they didn't have time to look into it.
Speaking of which, I have never, ever, been able to build Mozilla myself, on any platform, to give something which looks even remotely like what they ship. Most of times it fails completely, and the reason for failure is not even systematic: it varies according to whether I made a CVS checkout or took a source tarball, it depends on whether I used "make" or "make all", on how I ran configure, and all sorts of things. Even typing make twice, with make clean in between does not give the same error twice. Mostly I get weird C++ errors which I don't understand because I only grok C (errors like "class fooBarMumbleBuz was instantiated with a virtual method frobnicateMeHarder whereas it only has non-virtual constructors", which really don't mean a thing). I also got a lot of unresolved symbols. Strange things.
Not even worth making a bug-report for, because nothing is systematic, every time I retry it's different.
Has anyone had more success?
Thanks for the Test Page, Dracos! (Score:1)
Nice!
timothy
Re:At least Lynx manages to render it correctly (Score:2)
[sml_conr.gif] [clr.gif]
[not_play.gif] Problems playing?
[dotline_grey.gif]
555
Kate Bush
[dead_info.gif] Hounds Of Love
6:13 rock MP3 128K Edit
[ ]
[sml_play.gif] Hounds Of Love
I wonder if it'll work on Quark
Re:IE is more than an HTML renderer (Score:1)
Absolutely correct on that last
I know that Mozilla doesn't have ActiveX support as you point out, but it is / can be used as the front end for some applications
And from what I read, Mozilla is more than an HTML renderer, too, isn't it? I thought one of the chief points about Mozilla was extensive componentization
Again, thanks for mentioning something I hadn't considered.
timothy
Re:Too slow (Score:1)
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
Re:Too slow (Score:1)
Bugzilla bug for crash on large tables (Score:1)
The delight of M16 (Score:2)
Yup. The pages load a wee bit slower than under NS for me, but they actually scroll more smoothly once there. Nicer UI (in my view) as well.
I'd been shy about Mozilla for a while when it kept fouling up forms or leaving artifacts all over the screen, and I skipped M15 completely, but I got brave again (over dialup no less) and my 2-nights-ago build finally works with the slashdot backend;)
"Goodbye NS4, we hardly loved ye
You said it. Hard to believe the Mozilla project is only 2 years and change out of the gate. Compare that to the ueber-funded IE and the difference is pretty amazing.
I know many people like IE, but until they release a version for Linux I can't make all that great a comparison:) Still, from using it on borrowed computers, while IE seems blandly acceptable, I don't remember anything about it which makes me hanker for That Redmond Feeling. What am I missing?
Next stop, Konqueror
timothy
Right you are =) (Score:1)
Fixed it now, thanks for the pointer.
timothy
Re:What can IE do that Mozilla can't ? (Score:1)
Now, you bitch about Mozilla not supporting XSL, but which is better; waiting for a standard to be finalised or releasing before the standard is finalised and then finding out it's changed already? IE5 has that problem, although I note from the W3C XSL page that MS have released an update for its XSL implimentation. Now all they have to to is get namespaces working correctly.
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
Didn't COM evolve (indirectly) from OLE? Or am I on the
"It was developed to allow objects to be called remotely, and sortta, transparently"
Really transparently. I don't need to know anything about a remote {method|object|property} other than what it wants and what it returns. That's the whole point behind CORBA.
"...byut(sic) a majority of the the ideas for embedding, object exposing, persistance, monikers etc are all based on COM."
and
"...Microsoft should get a nod for COM since it's being copied left and right by the OSS community."
<MEANDERING THOUGHT>
Is it really being copied, per se? Or is it just generally a Good Idea(tm)? I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to expose API to whatever needs it?
Kinda like the standard C classes (stdio and the like (except that you don't have to #include them)) - it's simply a natural progression of good programming practice.
Do you have examples to show that OSS is outright copying COM? (Not a flame - I'm genuinely interested)
</MEANDERING THOUGHT>
Here's my [redrival.com] copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
I assume that's Mozilla crashing, which is very distinct from Linux crashing. And if you think IE is so great, just watch it autodetect proxy settings or crash in SUNWAMD.DLL. IE5's kernel integration results in the machine needing a reboot whenever it crashes. NS 4.70's bad crashes can usually be fixed by killing the leftover process with Ctrl-Alt-Del (unless it's the infamous ADVERT32.DLL infinite crash loop). Mozilla, OTOH, is not complete yet, and cannot be compared (sensibly) with the finished IE5.
-- LoonXTall
Re:User Profiles (Score:3)
Quite useful, actually, especially on a controlled environment where you can't create a new logon for development purposes.
Re:SAY MY NAME BITCH (Score:2)
The sad state of things at the moment is that multi-browser compliant code has to support the lowest common denominator (ie. NS4), so if you were doing that then you would not be able to use dotted anyway.
The sad state of things at the moment concerning multi-browser compliant code and designing to the lowest common denominator is the fact that it all could have been prevented by Microsoft. Had they felt the need to allow the internet to continue to be platform independent when they first began work on their original browser, they would have concentrated on developing html rendering as close as possible to that of the Netscape browser which, at the time, was used by the vast majority of people on the internet. Instead they spent no time ensuring consistency and all their time on monopolization strategies that have them in court right now. There have been a lot of non-standards complaint work on both sides since then, but in the begining I remember wondering, "why do all these pages look different in internet explorer".
Gifs? (Score:1)
Re:PNG test results on the box at work... (Score:1)
Re:IE is more than an HTML renderer (Score:1)
Well Tim, one of the wonderful things about IE, apart from it works well as an HTML browser is the power you have in it as a program shell in an Intranet environment.
My God! Read your own words man! This wonderful Intranet program shell is an Internet program shell too! Does it ring any bell?
Netscape and Mozilla are trying to do a god job at precisely what they are supposed to do: browse the web.
Re:M16 is a complete delight.. FOR ME TO POOP ON! (Score:1)
On Windows,it crashes everytime I use it, within at least 5-10 minutes.
Also the back button doesn't always work. For example, if you go to www.theregister.co.uk, and click on a news item, when you press the back button, it doesnt take you back tot he main theregister page, it takes you back to the previous site! Whah?? This happens on other sites as well.
So, I'm sorry, but IE5 it is guys!
Yes you can (Score:1)
Sorry dude (Score:1)
IE5.0 indeed does just red taping.
Netscape just doesn't even render the borders.
I guess IE again, wins again.
(may i just say IE5.5's circle dots look much cooler than mozilla's cheapo square dots).
Re:Gifs? (Score:1)
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
Though that's not the reason I'm posting. It seems that if a troll is defined as anything that goes against the slashdot party line, you really have to define the line too..
Does it let people express pro-Microsoft opinions? or anti-linux opinions. It should, if they are well thought out, and not just "linux sux0rs".
A good post is still a good post, whether it's against the party line or not.
Re:Nice. (Score:1)
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PNG rendered correctly? (Score:2)
Mozilla agreed to it... (Score:1)
Link first sighted in NTK [ntk.net]
...transparent PNG support (Score:2)
Stéphane
Be fair (Score:1)
Though it's true that it is a bit slow, the latest builds are a hell of a lot faster than the older builds, and in only a few days use, I can honestly say that Mozilla rocks!
Mozilla/Links (Score:3)
Few more things...
Mozilla/static/x86/linux is like 7MB compiled/gzipped. I wish they would Bzip2 the bastards. I have not tried any auto-installer for any platform...
The emailer is becoming far more competent. I will enjoy supporting it. Multiple POP3 accounts, al crossplatform. (drool) Goodbye you fucking identities.
The HTML editor is tres-slick... I'm confident it will suck cock for the first netscape release, but oh well..
Keybindings are still a bitch for all platforms. Finicky, tempremental. Fuckit. FUCKIT. I hate that.
Mozilla has the most open development of any project I can think of. No months-of-silence, open CVS tree, open mailing lists, open development discussions, open documentation, public builds for platforms on the HOUR, decent license, open source bugtracker, open buglists, open discussion, GOBS of FTP power, great feedback methods, all is very very nice. Oh yeah, and a script on the homepage that shows EVERY code update made in the last day or so, plus exceptional code navigation tools, all on the web.
Mozilla/NS may never take over every desktop, but does it really need to? It's going to fill shitloads of niches that IE in all it's forms (yeah even pocket explorer which has GOT to be completely new code) is not going to fit into... Look at the netscape4/unix builds going into web appliances... Imagine what mozilla is going to accomplish in the next 10 years...
if nothing else netscape/AOL has opened up reams of competition, both from the Opera people, and people who will turn XPCOM/mozilla into a thousand different mutants...
***LINKS***
For a text-based browser that is similar to lynx and w3m but INCREDIBLY lightweight, complete, easy-to-use, and just all around makes you want to cry with joy, please look into the GPLed 'links'.
It is written in C, compiles anywhere, is way under a meg tarballed, and is the absolute most cruft-free thing I have ever used. Press 'g', go somewhere. It is nearly impossible to describe how fundamentally nice this program is.
It does frames exceedingly well, flies with tables, and is magic over a modem. The interface is (somehow) more pleasant than lynx's and it has pulldown menus hidden with ESC for other options.
It is the most underrated browser I have ever seen. The author is a god. My only complaint is that it fights with gpm for cut and paste.
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
Re:Why do you label different opinions trolls? (Score:1)
Well, he'd probably been followed up by about 5 people complaining how /. was nothing but a playground of brainless Linux zealots. Sound familiar?
The calmer people would probably respond "IE never was relevant, considering that there's no linux version."
He wouldn't be labelled a troll, true, but that is correct, taking into account the nature of /.
Were that line posted on comp.os.windows.advocacy, then it would be a troll, just like the posting a few levels up was a troll on /.
Re:Gifs? (Score:1)
Well, Netscape 4.x on Linux can, and will even render them in-page, with the Xanim netscape plugin [uni-erlangen.de] (included with Mandrake 7 as
I would guess that the Amiga [amiga.org] browsers (Voyager [vapor.com], IBrowse, AWeb) also could, through Amiga DataTypes.
Uhh... (Score:5)
Since nobody else has said so outright, I'll remind you all the actual milestone build of m16 is not yet out. These (as others *have* said) are the nightly builds along the path to m16. These have been available since before m15 was released.
When M16 actually does come out (and it should be within a few days), it'll be available at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m16/ [mozilla.org].
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I'm pretty sure this is a pre-release (Score:2)
If it doesnt say on the Mozilla release page, its probably not released.
Re:Newsworthy ? (Score:1)
--pug
Java support? (Score:1)
--
Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
If Mozilla were to use Win32 GCC... (Score:2)
BillWinUsr who probably has no compiler ready
If Mozilla were using GCC for Windows [mingw.org], this would be no problem. Bill could just double click make.bat and play some Minesweeper, Solitaire, or Vitamins [rose-hulman.edu] while GCC is compiling everything.
Re:Bugzilla bug for crash on large tables (Score:2)
Then it froze after I switched desktops and came back...
Only 72 megs needed to render 2000+ entries.
(BTW - thanks to whoever listened to that URL - I'm back at number 1)
Test Page (Score:1)
I downloaded the win32 5/19 build this morning, and immediately set out to find a good test image. After a fruitless 10 minute search, I threw open PhotoShop and made one. The resulting image is in a test page at http://www.thedragonsforge.com/pngalph a.html [thedragonsforge.com]. Text on the page explains what the image is supposed to look like.
Dracos
"Integer: a number that represents any valid floating-point value"
Re:What can IE do that Mozilla can't ? (Score:1)
which is better; waiting for a standard to be finalised or releasing before the standard is finalised and then finding out it's changed already?
No contest.
Shipping when it's workable, not waiting for the standards to settle. This is Internet Time - I barely have enough hours in the day to drink my coffee, let alone wait for the W3C. You should see the amount of Real Cash Money I've earned writing IE5 XSL product that I wouldn't have earned if I'd been waiting around, or taking the moral high ground that because IE5 wasn't compatible, then I was going to do it all server-side with XT.
Client-side XML is a big enough benefit that whilst I may not sell my own soul to get it, I'll happily lease out that of some poor support minion in a few month's time.
M16 isn't out yet!!! (Score:2)
The M16 release is not out yet and won't be for several weeks at least! The builds you see on ftp.mozilla.org marked with M16 are nightly builds on the M16 development branch and not the final product. There is a whole bunch of bugs and stabilisation to be done before M16 will be released. It does no good to bitch and moan about the quality of M16 at the moment since nightly builds vary wildly in quality from day to day.
Re:User Profiles (Score:1)
Well, I have a set of dial in accounts from different providers, and all of them need their own set of proxy servers, POP3/SMTP to connect to. Profile support in this case would be pretty relevant. I hate to muck with the preference.js or log in and out of the system every time I use a different account.
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
As for Mozilla crash, sure it crashes. But try reading what I wrote. I said Mozilla won't crash anything other than Mozilla. It won't crash X. It won't crash Linux.
I've seen IE take down NT. Is being able to read that Word doc in IE so valuable to you now?
Nothing's changed (Score:2)
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:1)
Well, actually on the systems I've used it on (Win 95 and 98, not 2000 yet) the scrolling was clunkier than it is under Netscape on Linux -- sort of a lagtime that turned me off. And as I said, since I don't have an MS OS around to play with it under, I am looking at browsers that actually run on the computers I use. But yes, I found IE OK, nothing more or less, in my occasions to use it. Not that it's not fine, but as you go on to say
"It's people like you who've never really had to do much advanced HTML or XML, and sit there and go, hey netscape can render and so can IE...i'd rather use Netscape cause it's not microsoft."
Thanks for the needless vitriol, ok?! Sheesh
Cheers,
timothy
Re:Newsworthy ? (Score:1)
But don't say things like "Anything that's not microsoft...", as that makes you no better than the people that say creative things like CrApple and Steve "Blow" Jobs.
I'm not flaming anyone, but simply suggesting that you use a product based on its quality, and not its name.
Hacksworth
Re:SAY MY NAME BITCH (Score:1)
Netscape 4.7 - no border at all
Mozilla M14 - ugly square dots
IE5 - solid border, no dots
IE5.5 - nice-looking round dots
(If anyone can do this in M16 and reply if it differs from M14, that would be good)
W3C standard (which I looked up) does specify the dotted syntax.
The sad state of things at the moment is that multi-browser compliant code has to support the lowest common denominator (ie. NS4), so if you were doing that then you would not be able to use dotted anyway.
It will be good when NS4 support is generally viewed as no longer needed.
Re:Nice. (Score:2)
Search Bugzilla for "Junkbuster" and you'll find the name of the pref. you have to set.
Gerv
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:2)
I know that there are still weird things that happen to IE, though, that don't happen with Netscape. Co-workers have strange stability-related problems that probably have to do with the fundamental mis-design of Windows itself.
I'm using Konqueror most of the time now, anyway. Fast, simple and open source.
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Re:"Up for grabbing"? (Score:1)
I do not mind reading trolls that are as subtle, ingenious and entertaining as that one.
Newsworthy ? (Score:1)
Unfortunately, both IE and Netscape/Mozilla are turning into bloatware and as a Mac user I'm starting to look to other projects, such as iCab [www.icab.de]. How can I justify allocating 30MB of memory to one program ?
Stability aside (I know these shouldn't be considered in milestone builds), the last milestone build I tried was visually appalling. The user interface didn't seem to conform to anything on earth (mind you, does Quicktime or Sherlock ?) and the speed seemed to have taken a nosedive, with the HD thrashing away. (I assume the debug info is still in there).
Someone has already made comments that more Mac coders could be done with on that particular build, but I'm not sure they'll get them. When Apple signed the deal with M$ to make IE the browser of choice, it was the nail in the coffin for any other browser, and I think it's starting to show. I don't like IE, but at the same time, I'm starting not to like Netscape either. It's gradually being assimilated into the AOL ways.... yuk.
Just my 2p. I'm not sure a milestone release is newsworthy - a beta maybe...
M.
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:2)
It's faster then Netscape, but still a heck of a lot slower then IE5. Yes mozilla is compnentized now, but IE has been for over 4 years, and noone here noticed it
Netscape suddently decide to clone COM and call it xpCOM and now we get preaches of how cool xpCOM is.
IE blandly acceptable? EXCUSE ME? How so? IE is superb, has superb standards support, is the fastest web browser out there, and is completely componentized.
You're so aboslutely deluded.
It's people like you who've never really had to do much advanced HTML or XML, and sit there and go, hey netscape can render <HTML></HTML> and so can IE...i'd rather use Netscape cause it's not microsoft.
geeeee...try something a bit more advanced there, like DHTML, XML, VML...
Re:Too slow (Score:1)
I look forward to them removing that code as the software is great aside from the speed. Anything to get the hell away from Nutscrape 4.5:)
Not to shabby. (Score:1)
Keep up the good work, guys
Dave
Sadly - it still fails the myplay.com test (Score:2)
Trying to display all my tracks basically means rendering a *huge* table - 1000+ rows with gifs and links on every one.
Netscape needs abotu 256megs of memory and takes 10 minutes to do it - this is one of the reasons I'm waiting for mozilla to be able to do it (IE handles it perfectly - shame on us).
Mozilla used to be able to do it. - but the latest build dies :-( Maybe it's just because I keep adding stuff to my collection and the test is getting harder - oh well.
I can imagine some people here saying that the myplay locker design is stupid because it renders everything in one big table (well - the default is only 15 items). But you have to keep in mind that the browser from the evil empire handles it perfectly well - so shouldn't we be able to do a bit better. Arrrgghhh it's so tempting to take a look at this code myself.... as if I have any spare time...
(Why don't you go listen to some of my stuff [myplay.com] while you're here - go on - you know that a slashdotter should be number 1. ;-)
Re:Mozilla/Links (Score:1)
Mozilla/static/x86/linux is like 7MB compiled/gzipped. I wish they would Bzip2 the bastards.
Not a huge difference, and since most people are used to gzip I don't think the difference in size is enough to make them use bzip2.
Re:Newsworthy ? (Score:1)
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Re:Too little, too late. (Score:1)
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Re:PNG rendered correctly? (Score:1)
Re:M40 *might* be useable (Score:1)
It wasn't that long ago that the Mozilla UI was a title bar and a menu.
I'd say they've done amazing things in a short amount of time. Considering how ambitious the project is (a "platform", not just a browser), they've done pretty well.
Re:No Solaris build (Score:2)
it's a pig but all I do is use this command "make -f client.mk" and it checks out the latest tree uses my specific arguments
"ac_add_options --enable-new-strings
ac_add_options --enable-optimize"
and it compiles if the tree is green.
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:1)
--
Best post I've seen yet (Score:1)
Re:Sorry dude (Score:2)
Re:SAY MY NAME BITCH (Score:2)
Every Released Version Of IE5.0: Does not make dots, as required by W3C CSS specifications.
Apology accepted.
Re:Uhh... (Score:2)
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:2)
Run on my DG/UX box. And my Sparc Linux box. And my x86 Linux box. If you're going to troll, at least come up with something that isn't so trivial to counter...
Re:What can IE do that Mozilla can't ? (Score:2)
CSS on Mozilla is actually getting quite good. Last I checked, it was like 99% compliant with CSS1. To give credit where credit is due, IE 5 for the Mac is apparently fully compliant (but IE 5.5 for Windows isn't...the irony.)
Anyway, the most recent table of client-side XML performance I've seen is this one on xml.com [xml.com], by Simon St. Laurent. In brief, Mozilla looks pretty good in this comparison. It's the only browser with XLink support of any kind, and handles a few other small things better than IE. Other than that, it's basically right up there. You mention XSL, but no browser has a standards-conforming XSLT at this point.
More interesting to see will be how well things shape up for CSS2 and DOM support, assuming DOM Level 2 ever gets unwedged. You mention SMIL, but I would have to argue that full CSS2 and W3C-compliant DOM are much more important.
Re:One questions (Score:2)
took two and a half hours this morning for me
Heh. I love my Alpha
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Milestone Build Suggestion (Re:Too slow) (Score:2)
Granted, you lose any option to debug problems the user may have, but perhaps at least give them the chance to see mozilla's true potential.
(fwiw, I'm downloading source and building w/ and w/o debugging enabled just for laughs.. I'm thinking more along the lines of Joe MacUsr or BillWinUsr who probably has no compiler ready. That, and I'm getting sick of the ITS-TOO-SLOW whining)
Re:User Profiles (Score:2)
There are some things you might want to keep in different user profiles though. Perhaps you NFS mount your home directory and access a single account form multiple boxes. In that case, you might indeed want different font sizes depending on what monitor you're using. But again, that's unrelated to your email account and shouldn't really reside in a "user profile", but a "machine profile" or "location profile". You are the same user every time.
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Re:Sadly - it still fails the myplay.com test (Score:2)
I mean I'd presume they knew that...
Although, this is the first version for a long time that has actually crashed during that test.
Re:SAY MY NAME BITCH (Score:3)
I don't have a spec handy, and I don't remember whether it's width or margin that breaks it, but I do know I wanted to fucking strangle the IE developers after spending 4 hours tweaking my new homepage in IE and then having it break horribly in Opera, NS and Mozilla.
It turned me off to web design, and sent me back to text only, 1993 style pages until Mozilla is actually usable.
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:2)
COM has been around in one form or another since the 1990s, COM was designed as a binary standard for calling methods. It was an attempt to unify all the different method calling standards.
CORBA is generally an out of process technology. It was developed to allow objects to be called remotely, and sortta, transparently. DCOM which 'competes' (so to say) with CORBA came out about 6 years after the CORBA guys got together, but DCOM still doesn't really match CORBA, and I don't think Microsoft is interested in doing that either.
DCOM at the moment at least, is used primarily on Windows for small things such as Windows Management Instrumentation (for COM API exposing) in small areas, some business do use DCOM for distributed work, but I think Microsoft is spending much more time pushing SOAP as it is more appropriate for hteregenous enviroments - Microsoft is realising Windows won't dominiate everything.
Now, what COM is used for is a technology to expose APIs. Write a COM object that does something and instantly any language that works on Windows can access those APIs. No more worrying about importing C DLLs and converting between data types etc. COM also is the technology that allows embedding of visual objects (that's how many applications now use HTML thru Internet Explorer - ActiveX).
ANyway, COM and CORBA are very different....
CORBA may be used in OSS projects (such as Bonobo), byut a majority of the the ideas for embedding, object exposing, persistance, monikers etc are all based on COM. Essentially what they're doing is using CORBA as the bricks, and building a building out of it. The building just looks a lot like the building that Microsoft built using COM bricks...just not CORBA bricks.
BTW, I'm not sure how relevant your windows is younger than unix statement is, well obviously...VMS is older than Unix, and NT is based on VMS
What I was trying to get thru, is that Microsoft should get a nod for COM since it's being copied left and right by the OSS community.
Re:Sadly - it still fails the myplay.com test (Score:2)
I guess part of the problem is that they give you 3gb of disk space and some of the problems only occur after you've filled that up with a reasonable number of tracks - that can take a long time. (unless - like me you wrote a perl script to do it for you
There are some other problems with the site - mostly javascript, e.g. saving the state of a playlist doesn't work.
One victory for mozilla is the playlist editing screen which works much better than the either IE or Netscape - Congrats to the team on that one. Now if only I can save the state afterwards.....
I'm looking at bugzilla - have you any suggestions on how to do handle the main report?
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:2)
Good question. Here's your good answer: It can be uncoupled from windows, in fact, it never was coupled with windows. It's solaris build (I assume) won't be a half-win32 port built in to let the browser run. Windows is big, yes. But mac, UN*X, BeOS and friends aren't dead. Netscape 4.xx is dead, thou. imho, and anyone arguing that it *doesn't* need to be replaced needs mental help. Matter of fact, a dyed in wool MS friend of mine *likes* mozilla, so I know you're just a troll and most MS windows users are more polite than yourself.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, spend half the day in meetings instead of doing what I needed to do.
bash: ispell: command not found
What can IE do that Mozilla can't ? (Score:2)
Does Mozilla handle client-side XML yet ? And NO I don't mean the piss-poor CSS implementation that the earlier builds had.
I hate the Redmond behemoth as much as the next /.'er, but they've given me client-side XML in IE5, with an XSL that is weird, but usable. Until I get the same from Mozilla, I won't be switching my own desktop's browser. I'm even starting to not worry about writing IE-only code on public client sites (oh, the sweet temptation of this heresy, for which I shall certainly burn in the volcanic fires of monster island)
Lately, I have mainly been running IE 5.5 (with a SMIL). Mozilla is getting a long way behind.
Moderators! (Score:2)
Mozilla nightlies (Score:5)
Latest nightly builds [mozilla.org]
M16 builds have been appearing for ages. The nightly builds are named after the upcomming milestone, so when M15 comes out all nightlies are now called M16... Take a look at the directory structure... [mozilla.org]
On related stuff the new builds are getting quite a bit faster and now have stuff like autocomplete in them. There was a feature freeze not long ago so we should (hopefully) see builds becoming more stable.
Linux moz is looking good although some old favourites (such as the scrollbars coming free bug [mozilla.org]) are still there.
The mac builds are still lagging behind other platforms which is a shame. We really do need more mac helpers to stop it becoming a third rate platform (in terms of the quality of it's mozilla builds).
From the little testing I've done on Windoze those builds seem good too.
Plugs/Links:
Visit Mozillazine [mozillazine.org]! It has a build bar that informs you how good previous builds are.
Hang out in #mozillazine. If you've got irc (and you should because moz has one built in which can be launched from the prompt using mozilla -chat) use /server irc.mozilla.org then /join #mozillazine
Got spare time and a fast connection? Help Smoketest [mozilla.org] the daily builds.
New to mozilla? Take a look at NewZilla [gerbilbox.com]
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:3)
The first CORBA draft was published in 1991, so COM and CORBA seem to have been devloped at about the same time (I donno which came first, may have been COM, may have been CORBA).
VMS is sure as hell not older then Unix. VMS came out on the VAX, and not any prior CPU. The VAX was a late-70's CPU (October 1978 I think). If you look at DMR's Historical Perceptions about the VAX architecture [bell-labs.com] you will see some dates (and other intreresting VAX info). If you poke around the rest of his pages you'll see some dates for Unix that are much older. Like by almost ten years.
Unix is generally accepted to have been invented in 1969 (even with a 1970 begining of time value). I find this number easy to remember because I also was "invented" in 1969. That does make it a bit hard for me to remember the VAX rollout, but I figure DMR'll tell it stright.
You are right when you say CORBA is generally used for cross-process RPCs. Wrong when you tar it with the "sortta transparent" brush. If you either ignore the string issue (CORBA strings are not plain char*'s in C, and not C++ string objects in C++), or in C++ make a conversion operator from string (or char*) the calls are transparent. At least if you are willing to make sync RPC calls.
You can use it as a all-in-one-process calling convention, but it's generally not needed.
Re:Milestone Build Suggestion (Re:Too slow) (Score:2)
However, now that Mozilla is largely feature complete, the folks working in it are now going to turn their attention to optimising and removing the debug code. Expect Netscape 6 PR2 to be usable, but not particually fast, but PR3 (If there is a PR3) is likely to be quite a nippy little thing.
Nice. (Score:4)
One pretty major problem though, at least for me, is a stupid dialog box coming up evertyime I hit a page that I've blocked. I have certain domain's blocked (like ad.doubleclick.net, a dforce.imgis.com, etc) in
Re:SAY MY NAME BITCH (Score:2)
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
I've been karma-whoring on the slashdot, all the livelong day.
</TITLE>
<STYLE type="text/css">
P {border-style: dotted ; border-color: red}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This proves I am a fundamentally better person than you in every way. I hope parasites eat your colon and you die soon. Perhaps they'll look like the little red dots that are around this little sentiment. Unless you use IE, in which case you're going to be eaten alive by red tapeworms which will be shitting red string until you die.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Re:The delight of M16 (Score:2)
seriously, com is just a take off on corba - and corba's been around for quite a bit longer. and to the best of my knowledge corba is what kde uses.
and you're right - both kde and gnome are younger then ole/activex. by about five years. of course windows is younger then unix - by about 20 years.
Ah yes, the W2K stress test (Score:2)
This shows that someone at the OS division is serious about long-term stability. Forcing people to catch errors right away is a good quality control step. But in the meantime it means that a lot of things die on W2K, and in many of those cases the error really matters.
OTOH W2K changed a lot of other things, big chunks of it are a piece of cack, and all that. So this could just be yet another piece of W2K stupidity. But they should not conclude that until they check that they are not responsible...
Cheers,
Ben
PS I think it would be nice if there was a version of Linux that provided a stress-test for errors that should be handled. Constantly giving EAGAIN exceptions. handing back recently used memory, etc.
Re:Too little, too late. (Score:3)
Offer sufficient competition to MS to ensure that they bother to keep improving IE.
Too slow (Score:2)
I hope they tighten the code up some so it may be usable on low end machines as it has a FANTASTIC amount of promise. The programmers kick ass!
User Profiles (Score:4)
As far as I can tell, the user profile stuff is redundant and confusing - allowing Alice to have Alice, Bob and Chris users configured in her ~alice/.mozilla/ directory, as well as having separate ~bob/.mozilla/ and ~chris/.mozlla/ users on the system...
I mean, why not just make the preferences user-specific ?
Re:Why do you label different opinions trolls? (Score:2)
We weren't doing that. We were calling someone who was posting a "different opinion" embedded in falmes and flamebait a troll, and rightfully so.
PNG test results on the box at work... (Score:2)
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder
Re:Mozilla nightlies (Score:2)
I played around with sullivan skin and that was pretty encouraging, yet it still seemed to have a way to go yet. (yes, I understand this is pre-release software... not complaining, just making observations).
But this is impressive. The rendering is damn fast and almost all of the features I want to use on a daily basis seem to be implemented and fairly well polished at this point. The sidebar really caught me by surprise. I have a customized 'my yahoo!' start page with headlines, stocks and tv listings set up - and mozilla cleanly imported all my preferences into the sidebar without my even knowing! Hell, now I almost don't even need the startpage, just put a link to the webmail in ther personal toolbar and I'd have everything I use from yahoo without ever loading the page.
I'm impressed. Mozilla is shaping up extremely well, IMO! (hell, even the proxy username and password get sved correctly between sessions now! Woohoo, byebye Internet Exploder!)
Re:Sadly - it still fails the myplay.com test (Score:2)
And remove all those Britney Spears tracks before send in the report
a 2.5 meg web page..... lovely...
Re:PNG rendered correctly? (Score:4)
Re:"Up for grabbing"? (Score:2)
Timothy assumes that since M16 is available, it must be ok to download it and do whatever you want with it.
And he's prefectly correct to assume so because of the nature of the Mozilla project, which he and everyone here knows about.
Everyone and their brother assumes that since mp3's are up on Napster, they're available for everyone as a God-given right, and anyone who tries to take that away is a filthy communist, etc. If somebody runs a w4r3z site, it's completely legit to download software from it (it was posted, right, so it must be ok!),
That's idiotic. No-one in their right mind, and hardly anyone here on /. really thinks that way. Heck, I how stupid would one have to be to associate "communism" with an attempt to protect a copyright, given that that's the exact opposite of communistic ideals?
M16 is a complete delight.. FOR ME TO POOP ON! (Score:5)
Experiences with Win32/x86/133/40/unloaded:
Fast on a 133/40 box... no shit... I spent an hour or two testing my CSS pages and it didn't crash once... The flakiness from generating new browser windows is almost gone...
The sidebar is ACTUALLY cool.. check out cnn.com with NS6PR1 to see how cool questionless/seamless sidebar/install can be.. This ISN'T like those shitty IE4/5 toolbar conquests from noname companies... It just slips in, giving actually cool information and shit...
The UI has calmed down lots... it is clean, rather functional, and what's best, can be COMPLETELY OVERHAULED to be faster/better/simpler/more-complex, ANYTHING...
Mozilla isn't just a lets-clone-netscape thing anymore, it's a big collection of XPCOMponents that you can use to create apps... Mozilla is just one of them..
The default mozilla/netscape skin is still pretty damn slow but managable on my win32/x86/100/40 you will see mozilla FLY when the lighter-weight skins are made... I have used them and they just feel so much lighter...
Experiences with linux 2.2/x86/90mhz/32MB
this machine is used for like three different services and at the time had 6 people using it, plus three people using X apps all over the network...
It was SLOW. FUCKING SLOW.
It took forever to unpack.. It took forever to load.. it took FOREVER for anything to happen...
Then i realized it was running almost entirely in swap, and still hadn't crashed.. that was cool..
The machine was RIDICULOUSLY burded at the time, so i can forgive it...
Experiences on linux 2.2/x86/400/128
Ridiculously fast. Ridiculously good. First time user startup in under 15 seconds... from there on out, starts up in 3 seconds... if mostly cached in memory starts up in under a second...
Crashes are becoming significantly more difficult to find... it is now more pleasant to use than NS4 for me... less UI niggles... FASTER. Good.
Goodbye netscape 4... FUCK IT.... Mozilla is going to be so radically more modifiable and fluid and extensible and NICE... oh wait, it already IS.
Goodbye NS4, we hardly loved ye...
P.S.: crystal-note-perfect CSS is an utter joy... my heart leaps...
from coworker: "where are your graphics stored?" (referring to complex CSS1 box with lots of color-tricks on no-graphic page)