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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla M16 Released 192

Posted by CmdrTaco from the snag-em-if-ya-got-the-bandwidth dept.
Mozilla M16 Builds are now up at the Mozilla FTP site. Check your local mirror first! This release supposedly has the switchable skins stuff in there. You can also read the release notes if you're interested in some details.
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Mozilla M16 Released More

Mozilla M16 Released

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  • And you think that the kernel developers, xfree developers, wine developers, mozilla developers etc... ad nauseum don't have jobs? The wonderful and free OS known as linux is available because of the combined efforts of a bunch of people around the world that helped to work on a lot of code before and after they go to work. There's a reason all this stuff's actually free. There's also many different ways to contribute to a project without having to code. So don't just complain when it's conveniently listed un /. If you have a gripe/bug report/feature request, submit it to bugzilla.

  • "Jeez, does another application framework piss you off that much?? Wow..."

    Speaking only for myself, it's not the application framework that pisses me off; it's the fact that my standards-compliant browser was sacrificed at the altar of an application framework that pisses me off.

    When did Gecko come out? Maybe a year ago? When was the code in Mozilla fully compliant with CSS2, HTML 4, the most current JS, etc? Months ago? Then why am I waiting for a cross-architecture meta-platform to display my GUI, and mail and news and IRC and God knows what else? If everything's so modular, why couldn't the modules that are useful for web browsing have been shoved in a few basic, proprietary GUIs for Mac, MS, and GTK, then shipped? (Preferrably with a hook to add a JVM.)

    The frustration for me is that the initial goal -- a fully standards-compliant browser -- is largely done (and could have been done earlier if Netscape developers hadn't been working on News, Mail, and every other non-web technology under the sun). What we're waiting for is the tweaking of a complex system that none of us, right at this moment, need.

    Yes, Mozilla is going to be cool. It may change the way computing works. Right now, computing on Linux works with a crappy web browser, and it could be working on the best web browser out there. Not the best mailer, or newsreader, or application platform -- just the best browser. And that would be good enough for me. If Microsoft released IE for Linux tomorrow, I'd use it, because, more than any other application, I need a modern browser now.

    phil

  • Are you sure you don't have older versions of Mozilla's shared libraries floating around in /usr lib or /usr/local/lib? I was having crazy problems back around M13 or M14, and I deleted all the libraries from /usr/lib with the same name as those in the Mozilla distribution, and suddenly it worked like a charm. It may be that you're using older shared libraries, because table rendering has been nearly flawless for me since then.

    It's true that I started having these problems arouns M13 or so. But this is a fresh install of M16, and it's still not working. I'm not sure what to make of it.
  • DOM2/3 + SVG + ECMAScript + CSS2 is probably enough to do everything you'd need to recreate most old video games, modulo sound.

    And, unlike Shockwave, it's all structured XML/text, so it's not a semantic black hole. (e.g. a search engine could conceivably extract useful information from it)
  • I have never seen it having trouble with a table page, and I challenge you to publish the URL of a valid table page which M16 has trouble with. I simply don't believe you can.

    I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:

    http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
    http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
    http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
    http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
    http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

    All of these places are extremely important to Mozilla, and I would think they would take extra care in getting these pages to render. But none of them work. Also interesting to note, since mozilla.org and mozillaZine.org aren't even valid HTML (w3.org, predicatably, is valid, but even it won't render at all).
  • "Not to mention that it employees the newest technology like XML, DOM and JS to create an interface that is so flexible, that it is written and interpreted at runtime... Mozilla is versatile enough to write any program within it"

    So? I employ proven, stable technologies like Python and Gtk+ to create an interface so flexible, that it is written and intepreted at runtime.

    Take your buzzwords and shove them. I don't need another goddam virtual operating system. I need a fast, lightweight, standards-compliant web browser! Mozilla does not deliver.

    Thank you.

  • Add to the bugs that the cursor dissapears, has a tremendous slowdown after only visiting a few pages, pops up annoying save password/login messages even after disabling the featrue.

    This is a fresh install on a machine no other mozilla or pr1 has been installed on.

    I would *NOT* recommend installing M16 as of today. M15 was better, and the Netscape PR1 is many times more stable.

  • Woody and potato work fine (Score:3)

    by blakestah ( 91866 ) <blakestah@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @07:36PM (#1001616) Homepage
    Well, woody and potato work just fine here. The basic instructions.

    1) Grab the tarball, and unpack it.
    2) You should see the package subdirectory from the directory in which you unpacked it.
    3) su
    4) rm -rf /usr/lib/mozilla
    5) cp package /usr/lib/mozilla
    6) cp /usr/lib/mozilla/run-moz* /usr/bin/mozilla
    7) edit /usr/bin/mozilla. Change to
    MOZ_DIST_BIN="/usr/lib/mozilla"
    MOZ_APPRUNNER_NAME="/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin "
    also, go to the end and comment out all the bogus
    environment variables (quite sloppy of them) that define
    SHLIB_PATH
    LIBPATH
    LIBRARY_PATH
    ADDON_PATH

    Leave LD_LIBRARY_PATH alone. You need that one.

    Then, exit to your user shell. For most things, it beats netscape. If you need java, you need netscape. If you need complicated animated gifs, use netscape. For security, use netscape. Everything else, mozilla (or w3m :) )

  • If you watched the "Code Rush" PBS documentary, you would know the correct pronunciation:

    Moe - zilla
  • >Signal 11 posted a comment with this very topic to the story about the latest release of Mandrake and got moderated up to +5 (Insightful)).

    You're just jealous because he got to it first!

    Sheesh, I pity the guy because he must just sit there all day with one hand doing 'refresh' all day on /. so he can look at his 500+ karma points and hope that someday it will compensate for some shortcoming in his shorts.
  • And now, the grammar nazi is going to enlighten and entertain the young slashdotters...

    From a Gojira Website [totalabstinence.com]
    The Gojira Dispatch
    The World of Abstinence is chock full o' knowledge mavens like our Gojira!
    From a Mojira Website [nifty.com]
    explanation in Engilish:
    This site's purpose is promotion of friendship between Japan and the other countries .I want to help friendship between Japanese and the others, and beside I want everyone to know Japanese language and Japanese culture. N.B
    * This is a private site.
    * I can't understand languages except Japanese and English.
    * This site prohibits entries and advirtisements about all of adult sites and business sites.
    (the grammar nazi could have a field day!)

    This is from a Mozira Website [bparchiv.hu]
    A színházak már a virágzó korszak elején ellenségesen fogadták a mozit. 1908-ban született az a fõkapitányi rendelet, mely szerint tilos mozira és kabaréra a színház szó használata, mert a közönséget megtévesztheti, bár ezt a gyakorlatban nem nagyon tartották be.
    What you've all been waiting for (and a damn fine site) [snafu.de]
    Visit these pages to know more about Mozilla's lifestyle:
    Mozilla, your pal [snafu.de]
    Mozilla, the scientist [snafu.de]
    Mozilla, the explorer [snafu.de]
    Finally here are The Hidden Features of Mozilla [home.cern.ch]
  • I agree! Konqueror is awesome. Check out http://www.konqueror.org. It is in beta, so its a little buggy. It does Java, AND it detects your netscape plugins and can use them as well (this feature doesnt work that well at this point). Also, Konqueror is the KDE2 file manager/universal viewer. I think everyone should watch out for it. KDE has great things planned for us.
  • You also have to remember that AOL is calling the shots now
    AOL is in charge of netscape not mozilla. Netscape 6 will be based on Mozilla, this is totaly different from Mozilla meanignt the exact same thing as Netscape.

  • My thoughts on the M16 (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First of all, it's not the self-cleaning rifle everyone promised it would be. Its gas-operated action has a propensity of blowing unburned powder into its internal workings, resulting in a number of failures. I understand that the original test gun was developed using a cleaner-burning powder in its 5.56mm cartridges and that the powder was switched at the last minute. This could account for it.

    The lack of a chrome-lined chamber sometimes makes extraction unreliable, especially with the above problem. Casings will be a lot less likely to stick if they'd just plate it. And of course there's no bolt assist to easily get around this problem.

    I am eagerly awaiting the M16A1.

  • Hello anonymous friend. The grammar nazi would like to point out that grammatically it is not redundant to refer to politically correct people as ignorant. I know many PC people who are not ignorant. Instead they are benighted, empty-headed, illiterate, know-nothing, rude, uneducated, ugly, incognizant, inconversant, oblivious, unacquainted, unaware, unfamiliar, uninformed, uninstructed, unknowing, unwitting, and in the dark.

    My friend the URI nazi is going to kick your butt, since that link doesn't point anywhere.

  • You know, I've been looking for the name of that Law. Thanks. =) (I assume we're talking about the rationality of discussion and analogies to Hitler.)

  • Definitely getting better... (Score:3)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @08:58PM (#1001625)
    ...but still nowhere near ready for prime time.

    The app itself is greatly improved. Windows no longer draw with all the speed and grace of a snail on barbiturates. The app doesn't feel quite as responsive as earlier milestones (and they have got to get that launch time down), but the overall feel is much better.

    The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.

    My other major complaint: no HTTPS support in MacOS yet. Come on, guys; it's in Windows and Linux, and even Netscape 6 beta 1 got it into their MacOS version (it was unstable as hell but at least it was there); why isn't it in the Mozilla builds? Honest question; the PSM for MacOS obviously exists so I don't understand why it's not put in when it seems to be for the builds on other platforms where it exists.

    Skin support is much nicer; it's even easier to get rid of the "modern" retro default. This is an absolute necessity, short of replacing the default skin entirely, so I'm glad to see it's landed. Ditto for full PNG support ("full" PNG support meaning everything, including alpha channels, which were missing until now).

    Rendering times, for those pages that worked right, was awesome. I can hardly wait for Fizzilla (the OSX port, using Carbon for the UI but raw BSD for the networking backend); this will truly rule. IE5 on OSX DP4 was respectable (at least for an early developer release, which it was), and OmniWeb was better still, but this has the potential to really clean up.
  • Try either ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/m ozilla-source.tar.gz

    But this the latest drop, most likly to be the source from an early tree build (which is extremly unstable right now) If you want the last M16 tree build from what I see it appears to be ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/2000-06- 14-08-M16/mozilla-source.tar.gz

    While this isn't exactly M16 (its what they had working at 8:00 am this morning, while it appears M16 was build sometime around 3 or 4 PM, so probably had a few very minor changes, trust me, while it seems mozilla progress is slow, the morning and the evening builds every day often can change significantly depending upon any bug fixes that might land throughout the day)

    BTW does anyone know where I can find some skins specifically made for M16 as the release doesn't contain extras.
  • Can someone PLEASE compile Mozilla for windoze withh all the debug info taken out? I've tried to compile it, but could never get to the end... I'd love to see how fast it is without any of the debug inof, as well as compiler optimizations turned up. If someone could do that, plz email me with a link. thankx
  • Gojira even. Mojira! Mojira Fire Breath! Aiiieee! Run, small people!

    Hmmm... if Mozilla == Godzilla, does that make IE == Mecha-Godzilla?
    I submit my case-

    Only appeared after Godzilla pioneered the genre

    Godzilla's mortal enemy

    not as cool as the original, yet more efficient

    Impersonal and unfriendly

    Metallic and evil, constructed by life forms alien to us

    Laser eye beams... oh, wait.

  • http://www.mozillazine.org/chromezone

  • The installation screen (nice btw) lists under system requirements: RedHat 6.0 or above. Sure enough, I just tried installing on my Debian "Woody" system, and got a segmentation fault while it was copying files.

    Probably a glibc incompatability or somesuch (I'll investigate further), but this starts looking like corporate proprietary stuff already. Just a thought.

  • It's too bad, because during that 10 minutes it rocks.

    Yeah, that's about how fast it is for mee, too.

  • It's true that I started having these problems arouns M13 or so. But this is a fresh install of M16, and it's still not working. I'm not sure what to make of it.

    Look at the libraries in the mozilla/dist/bin or mozilla/package/dist directory (depending on whether or not you installed binary or source) Are there any libraries with the same name as any of them in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib? If so, delete them.

    You could also just try copying all the libs in that directory to /usr/lib, but that would leave a lot of cruft around. That's what I did, though :-)
    --
  • I haven't really been able to find many good/free IMAP mailers for use under Windows. There's Eudora (costs money), Outlook (need I say more?), Netscape Messenger (tends to do nasty things sometimes) and a few other commercial or lesser known products.

    This is getting OT, but what I'd really like would be a GUI mailer. Which can read maildir format nativly. Rather than having to be kludged to do POP3/IMAP to localhost. Even more useful if something can do this running under Windows (Maildir was designed to cope with NFS, SMB/CIFS should cause no problems.)
    However people running networks tend to be overlooked in favour of "dialups".
  • I'm using M16 on Win32 right now, and it's a painfully underpowered machine (P120, 48MB of RAM, running Win98) and it's running nicely (I was very surprised :-) It runs about as fast as IE5 on the same machine (but takes FUCKING FOREVER to load... oh well)

    I don't know what's wrong with yours but my preferences dialog works fine. When I get home I'll try the Linux version as well.
    --
  • Oooh, oooh... Godwin's Law. Discussion over.

    I find it amusing that this was the last post at thershold 1...

  • The US is all that matters. Really. You have to face that. The only reason I can see why you couldn't is if you're a foreigner. In which case you can go cry like you surely will.

    One obvious solution to a whole host of problems would be to partition the internet into "USA" and "rest of the world". With the former keeping the MPAA, Microsoft, DMCA, stuipd patents, etc. For compensation they'd have the entire IPv4 address space, minus whatever was needed by Canadian and Mexican gateways.
  • They're getting there.

    SSL is supported on Windows and Linux/Intel. Java is only supported on Windows currently, due to the fact that until recently, Windows was the only platform to have a JDK with an OJI plugin.

    Shockwave is an abomination that should be wiped off the face of the web.

    Have a nice day.

    Charles Miller
    --
  • Under Windows, is Mozilla:

    * Faster
    * More stable

    ... than IE 5 ?

    Of course not - it still has all the debugging code in there, and they haven't even STARTED optimization of the code yet. I would hate to see what IE5 was like before optimization.

    That said, on this machine (P120, 48MB RAM, Win98) Mozilla is almost as fast as IE5, but not as stable. It is in alpha, though. Don't be greedy :-) It'll be great soon enough.

    If so, I'll switch. I wish the coders would concentrate on the speed/stability issues before adding eye candy such as switchable skins.

    It's not just eye candy - Chrome allows full modification of the app. Somebody wrote a terminal emulator which supports URLs and other bizarre shit (XMLTerm, I don't have the URL here) which is simply Mozilla Chrome. Also, the speed and stability issues seem to COME from the Chrome stuff rather than the HTML rendering engine, which seems pretty complete.

    Sorry for the rant, I'm just sick of seeing people complain about why they're doing this or that rather than fixing the stability issues and speed - in a typical development cycle, optimization is usually part of the finishing touches. Once the program is relatively complete, you start profiling it and finding out where the majority of time is spent, and optimizing that section of code.
    --
  • When NS6 preview came out on here, hyping skins and all, half the posts were from ppl who wanted to turn them off. Well, lets see how much of it we can switch off here.

    Why are skins so hyped? After all, when we're browsing, we're looking at the site, and the skin your browser is wearing shouldn't be important. What, is the skin going to turn /. blue or something? If I wanted something flashy in my browser, I'd go look at banner ads.


    ---
  • When Linux depends on just one product for its survival then Linux is doomed. We need choice.

    Which is the way most business outside of software (or communist contries) works. When it comes to software we have the bizare idea that one supplier, one product, etc is a sensible (even desirable) situation.
  • I used to be a loyal netscape user, but I recently switched to IE. Mozilla/Netscape 6 has so much junk and clutter (AOL crap) that I can barely see the web pages it loads. While IE has some clutter, it does not have the annoying pane (that takes up a lot of room) that Netscape does

  • Wrong (Score:2)

    by Zico ( 14255 )

    Mail, news, Netmeeting, and Hotmail aren't parts of IE. That's why one of my servers has IE but none of those other things on it. Having a type of link registered to open up a separate program doesn't mean that they're integrated. In fact, for all of those, you can tell IE to use non-Microsoft programs to open them, just like I have IE set to open the current page in UltraEdit instead of FrontPage Express when I hit the "Edit web page" button. And you call the original poster "ignorant?"

    Also, just because Outlook Express uses IE's HTML rendering component, it doesn't mean that it's a part of IE anymore than Eudora or Quicken or HTML-Kit is a part of IE just because they, too, use the same rendering component.

    Just as you suggested, go look at Internet Options in IE and tell me which ones aren't related to web browsing (You don't think that you set Outlook Express or Netmeeting options from inside IE, do you?). Pretty damn few.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Speaking only for myself, it's not the application framework that pisses me off; it's the fact that my standards-compliant browser was sacrificed at the altar of an application framework that pisses me off.

    Chill, dude. It's easy enough for somebody to create a tiny little GTK wrapper around the Mozilla widget. There you go - lightweight, standards-compliant browser. That's actually one of my planned projects once Mozilla is relatively finished.
    --
  • So? I employ proven, stable technologies like Python and Gtk+ to create an interface so flexible, that it is written and intepreted at runtime.

    Seems a narrow point of view... If Python and Gtk+ suit your needs, then no one is shoving Mozilla down your throat. But what if you needed a cross platform framework? What if you had to (or wanted to) support Macintosh, i386 Linux, Windows, Irix, i386 Solaris (and those are just from the homepage) without so much as a recompile (assuming the rest of your code is written in a good cross-platform cross-compiler manner)?

    I need a fast
    Mozilla is faster and more responsive than Netscape 4.x (P3 450)

    lightweight
    Smaller download/footprint too.

    standards-compliant web browser!
    As standards-compliant as they come, along with MathML [mozilla.org] and scalable vector graphics [mozilla.org].

    Take your buzzwords and shove them.

    Jeez, does another application framework piss you off that much?? Wow...


    --
    "And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"

  • Mozilla... Mozirra... proper pronunciation? (Score:3)

    by ChiaBen ( 160517 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:03PM (#1001645) Homepage
    OK, a while back I was watching a Godzilla movie. I noticed that while I pronounce Godzilla "Godzilla", the actors pronounced it "Gozeera". I am wondering if there are any similar pronunciation conundrums with Mozilla?
  • How much of a speed improvement can we expect? I just took 5 mins for it to start up on a box with a 166MMX and 24mb of ram. And it took close to 3 mins to render a page off the local server. Will it be as fast if not faster on slower machines? Because at most it takes netscape 4.73 30 secs to start up and about 10 secs to load a complicated page and that's only if the machine is already lagged to hell.
  • ...but the US put a man on the moon in the time it taking for this thing to be finished.

    How about this for a slogan: Mozilla is the Daiktana of browsers?
  • "Shockwave is an abomination that should be wiped off the face of the web. "

    I do not mean to flame here but are you really being serious. I really hate the whole "plug-in" rendered content but so far shockwave has made some really entertaining sites.. If only it can become a "satandard" so that all brosers and OS{es,i,whatever} can implement it, then it would be perfect. I mean I understand the hatred of all thing commercial but we have to have the ability to admit when things work well, even when we don't agree with their philosophy. Or else we, as a community, have absolutely no credibility.
  • The Godzilla movies were also (badly) dubbed asian movies. Sounds like an asian accent to me ;)
  • > Every daily for the past 3 weeks, including last
    > night's, has crashed consistently within 10
    > minutes of running it for me.

    Have you tried trashing your profile? That can
    really help, I found.

    Cheers,
    M
  • Where is the source? Did they stop distributing source, or do I have to go to CVS?

    --Bob

  • View-> uncheck "Sidebar"

    There you go, no more annoying pane.
  • I think the correct spelling of the pronounciation is 'Cochira'. Try poking your head out of a blanket and saying it with rasp in your voice, you'll notice I'm right.
  • I just think it's a waste of time. Of all the reasons not to use Mozilla (painfully slow, not completely functional, ties to AOL) I don't think anyone has ever complained about the lack of skins. I think skins are a waste of time, a source of bloat, and not something that belongs on a browser anyways. I mean, I haven't even used any with winamp!

    Why don't they use their time to fix the bugs, excise the bloat, and optimize things, instead of adding useless features no one wants? I think 80% of people would prefer one well-thought-out interface instead of many buggy bloated customizable ones.

  • Mozilla may be slower than IE on Windows

    That is strange - both M15 and M16 (used to post this) are significantly faster than IE 5.01 on a PII 450MHZ 128MB RAM under NT... Could it be that clueless newbies are confusing the loading of cached copies by IE as "faster loading"?
  • Could you tell us what platform you are running on? While I can find pages which don't display properly in M16, these three have no problem under NT 4.0, SP5:

    http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
    http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
    http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)

    Or are you just trolling?
  • Every daily for the past 3 weeks, including last night's, has crashed consistently within 10 minutes of running it for me.

    Pretty much the same for me with 2.2.13 kernel. I guess the new features included a lot of bugs, which are noew going to be ironed out, or at least tried to. It's been getting a bit better during the last week or so, though.

  • Just make a browser that works and is fast guys.. leave the e-mail/chat/news/widget stuff for an addon or something.

    I would also add one that uses little memory.

    What about reviving the Mozilla Classic code base? At the time that Classic was mothballed (10/26/98 to be exact:), it was reliable, used comparatively little memory, and did some cool rendering tricks (the Mariner layout engine rendered text immediately, then images, resizing as it went--cool to watch).

    Most people will scoff at using a Motif GUI. But Lesstif is a solid implementation of Motif 1.2 these days, so much so that it's actually BINARY compatible with Motif. So you needn't buy a Motif library.

    Other people will say the code is crap. I've been working it for the past week, patching it to compile with current gcc, and I don't think that's accurate. The front end code is solid. And some of the iffy might be expendable. And like I said, it doesn't crash.

    I'm pragmatic. I was willing to take a backseat and wait for Mozilla to finish. But without predicting the future it seems clear now that Mozilla at the very least won't be viable on older systems, especially old laptops that are difficult to upgrade. A browser is too important these days. Those folks deserve a browser that is still being developed, still having bugs fixed.

    What do you think people?

  • That's strange, because I'm running Mandrake 7.1 on an MMX200, 64mb RAM, 4gb HDD, all IDE machine, and it's very stable. Very slow, but I don't suppose Win2000 and IE 5.5 would be very fast on it, if they'd run at all :) Took about 30 seconds to bring up this posting form...about 40 seconds for /.'s site, and to start it up (/package/mozilla) ...well, hehe...eep....a few minutes at least. Anyways, it's not unstable. I've been running it since M14 and despite a few glitches, it's been stable. I convinced a co-worker to install it on his WinBox...he used it for a while and then told me it crashed when he opened multiple instances. I went to check his settings, and didn't find anything wrong with the Mozilla itself, I opened 20 windows and it never crashed. I think that IE lovers just make excuses about Mozilla crashing because the fact is that they don't want to change to something "They don't know." Or "That's not their preferred enviroment." Can't see why.
  • Don't be too oversensitive to symbolism. The context is important, not the symbols itself. I find it rather hard to find anything common with a browser and a form of goverment system...

  • > So you needn't buy a Motif library.
    Motif itself is (beer) free now on Open Source OSes. They hope to make it fully free/open later. See http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/ [opengroup.org]
  • If shockwave would just become scriptable, i'd be all over it. It's still nice for static content, though - fast downloads, exciting graphics, sounds,interactive.. It's really all html presentation should be :)
  • FYI, IE loads quickly because much of it is loaded upon the startup of windows. Microsoft cheated.
    nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
  • FYI, IE loads quickly because much of it is loaded upon the startup of windows. Microsoft cheated.

    Microsoft didn't cheat, it's used in Windows' interface, the same way that starting Konquerer (I assume) is fast in KDE2 if you have KFM running.
    --
  • Of course not - it still has all the debugging code in there, and they haven't even STARTED optimization of the code yet.
    Performance isn't something that you take care of at the last minute. It has to be planned. Sure, some last-minute optimization can speed things up a little bit, but in a large software system if don't plan for efficiency you end up with a fundmentally inefficient architecture, for which no amount of optimization will suffice.

    I strongly hope that Mozilla doesn't suffer from inherent architectural inefficiencies, and I certainly haven't studied the code myself to be able to assess that, but it shows most of the outward signs of it that I've seen in other large projects.

  • The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.

    I've been using M16 nightly builds as my browser of choice for some weeks now. I'm writing this with M16 final. It is, in my experience, more reliable and faster than any Netscape 4.x variant; it renders pages far better and has only very occasional problems. I have never seen it having trouble with a table page, and I challenge you to publish the URL of a valid table page which M16 has trouble with. I simply don't believe you can.

  • Anyone try getting the gnu installer version? I grabbed it, and put up with the slow-updating scroll bars, only to have it seg fault before it was finished setting up fully, couldn't make it run at all. rm -rf'd it, and am grabbing the plain tar'd deal now. have gtk 1.2.8, and also got gtk critical errors before seg fault. Anyone have a clue on this deal? in too deep with o2 and map sensors to look it up much myself now.

    bash: ispell: command not found
  • Does liveconnect work at all with mozilla? I haven't been able to find much information on the issue, and all the mozillas I've tried up to M16 don't work correctly with a liveconnect applet I've written.
  • Come on, people. I hear so much Mozilla bashing it's not even funny. Mozilla may be slower than IE on Windows, and it may make my machine use nothing but swap space for an hour, but if you don't like it, fix it. That's the beauty of open-souce (i.e., free) software.

    I assume you don't like it either. Please fix all the problems you listed then. I'm eagerly awaiting your fixes. I'll even be happy to pay you for Mozilla once it's decent.
  • I love everyone who takes the time to complain about mozilla's speed without bothering to understand how this project has progressed. Obviously M16 isnt even a public beta release so the usual 'your milage may vary' rules apply but please, before you start bitching, goto mozilla.org [mozilla.org] and learn about the agenda for the future. AFAIK mozilla isnt even feature complete yet (altho M16 is very near final feature base) and speed optimisation is not due to commence until well after the feature set has stabilised!!

    mozilla is a pretty special piece of software and the developers dont pretend it is bug free (hence the existance of bugzilla [mozilla.org]. Last i checked IE doesnt have such a public forum to air REAL grievances about bugs and performance. If you dont like it, contribute, mozilla is not netscape and you can influence its direction by getting involved.

  • Combo Box Location Bar (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Posting this from M16 (yeah, I know, should have given them time to mirror) and, so far (half hour or so), it looks beautiful (though there are some minor UI glitches -- cursor artifacts, etc.), feels quick and hasn't crashed. Importantly, they finally have the pull down combo box feature of the location bar working in Linux (though it is on the left hand side, as opposed to the right hand on most other browsers). Additionally, the Forward and Back arrows also have pull downs, so that one can jump to an arbitrary link in one's recent history.

    I have been downloading the new milestones since M13. M13 was unuseable, M14 barely useable, M15 useable full time, but with occasional annoyances. I am optimistic that M16 will be my primary browser (replacing Netscape 4.61) -- though M16 for Linux still does not have Java support (does anyone know the timeline for Java support under Mozilla for Linux?). The DOM and XML support in Mozilla is an especial improvement over their lack of support in NS 4.x.

    Microsoft apologists (and I know there are relatively few in this audience) like to point out that the Internet makes MS's desktop OS monopoly irrelevant. But it is Mozilla (and other non-IE browsers, though Moz seems to be the only one likely to develop a mass-market presence) that stands in the way of complete MS dominance of the Internet via IE. Other than Linux itself and Apache, there probably is not a more crucial open source project out there. Accordingly, I would encourage people to be supportive of Mozilla, to try it out and learn what it has to offer and to spread the word.

    I really think Mozilla is a revolutionary product -- as many have said, more a development platform than a mere browser. In the next year or so, I believe that we will see a huge wave of Mozilla-ized products come out, especially in the XML arena.

    I have much appreciation for those who have made Mozilla possible -- I only wish I had the time and the skills to help out. Great work.

    jck2000

  • Just make a browser that works and is fast guys.. leave the e-mail/chat/news/widget stuff for an addon or something.

    It is, essentially. If you get the linux installer package, it gives you the option of installing only what you want. If you only want the browser, you can do that. You can even leave out Java....

    ---
  • Could it be that clueless newbies are confusing the loading of cached copies by IE as "faster loading"?

    What's the difference? Yes, to you and me there is one, but users care about how fast pages load, period. If IE has better caching technology, Mozilla should adopt it. And then improve on it. No sense standing by saying `well, it's really just as fast, you just don't notice.' Perception is sometimes more important than fact...

  • Let me guess: you run Linux, right? The 'top' utility (and many others) become greatly confused when an application uses threads (like Mozilla do). If the application uses 10MB and uses 14 threads, you get a calculated memory usage of 140MB.
  • It seems to crash pretty well on my webcam page too, but perhaps it's just the Windows version that doesn't like it. The URL is http://www.sethb.com/webcam.html [sethb.com] if anyone else wants to try it. :)

    Mozilla has come a long ways, I'm hoping that it'll get ported to the BeOS soon. The last milestone I've seen ported was 8.

    The three things I consider missing from the BeOS at this point are a good web browser (NetPositive is lacking in many areas), a decent IMAP client (all they have right now are some that will retrieve the mail via IMAP and dump it into your local mailbox), and multiple user support. Having Mozilla ported would solve two of those three.
    ---
  • I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
    http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
    http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
    http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
    http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
    http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)
    Screenshots:

    I honestly don't believe you've used it.

  • SSL, Shockwave, and Java?... If it replaces Communicator, how do you deal with these not being in Mozilla?

    GPL Flash[tm] Plugin 0.4.9 is released !!! [geocities.com]

    Worry the not. All in progress. GPL shockwave... much better than a closed proprietary, single-platform plugin, don't you think?
    --
  • Yeah, but M14 would have taken 15-20 seconds to crash. M16 is waaaayyy faster.

  • Mozilla on soap opera (Score:3)

    by suprax ( 2463 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @05:32PM (#1001721)
    My grandma had one some soap opera today(think it was all my children), and they had a computer scene with Mozilla and the Mozilla mail client open and being used. I couldn't believe it! Is this because Netscape has copyright issues or something? It was great!

    --
    Scott Miga
    suprax@linux.com

  • Feature set. (Score:5)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @06:21PM (#1001722) Homepage
    I hate to point out the obvious, but I've seen alot of posts here saying we've got a few milestones to go before the feature set is complete, and then speed optimizations begin.

    This does not make sense.

    IE has something like 70% of the browser market now, mainly because it just browses, nothing else.

    Mozilla Team: Please consider freezing the features right now. You already have the best rendering engine, prove it by making the necessary optimizations. Then we can all have a prominent UI based opensource app to point to as a success.

    "Stop eating your own dog food, and finish the damn browser."

    Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny

  • Amusing standards compliance related crash... (Score:3)

    by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @05:45PM (#1001723) Homepage
    OK, so the M16 release notes (did anybody else read these? ;-)) pointed out some of the, um, Things That Don't Work Yet with Mozilla.

    Under the heading about DOM issues, it pointed out that:

    DOM Level 0

    The JavaScript method handleEvent() is not implemented and wont be.

    "Gee, is that a deprecated method? I can't remember...hmm, let's check the standard!"

    So I surf on over to www.w3.org, [w3.org] click on the "DOM" topic, and BOOM

    Crashed the browser, froze the iMac (running 9.04) and made me realize that one way to claim standards compliance is to refuse to let users see the standards. :-)

    No, I have no clue why this bailed, but, if memory serves, this exact thing has happened to me before.

  • Didn't the entire old Netscape codebase get tossed about a year into the project? (Please correct me if I'm wrong on this; a really quick skim through mozilla.org during the writing of this didn't help much.) I'd say going from nothing to a fairly-usable browser in two years isn't a bad job, especially one that plans to compete with the "big boys".

    Unlike ION Storm, the Mozilla crew acknowledges the problems and debate over their decisions - the Mozilla at One [mozilla.org] article seems to cover the high and lowlights of Mozilla's then-young life.

    It still crashes more a bit than I'd like for daily use, and some useful features are missing. I've only been really trying it since late M13, but I've seen some definite progress in stability and features. It already renders pages more accurately than Netscape in Linux, so there's points in its favour right there:) I grabbed the last nightly build before M16 officially arrived; runs pretty fast compared to M13, though it still takes time to load.

    If I could program worth a lick, I'd contribute in a second.

    As it is, I'm happy.

  • Bye Bye Communicator (Score:3)

    by softsign ( 120322 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @05:47PM (#1001726)
    If you haven't downloaded this yet - do yourself a favour and get it instead of whoring yourself for karma complaining how sucky M14 was (months ago).

    IT WORKS!

    The acid test for me until now has been IMAP support - every single build I've tried has crashed trying to read my IMAP messages. That and deathly slow.

    I honestly think M16 is *gasp* _faster_ than Navigator. They've pulled out some of the bloat, the rough edges are starting to come off - menus work, highlighting works. This is really getting to be sweet.

    So jump on the bandwagon now folks... before the rest of the world discovers it and you have to turn to Opera to be cool again. =)

    PS: Anybody got any cool skins yet?

    --

  • Don't get me wrong, I'm using Mozilla now, and love it.. But why does it use 140mb on my machine's ram?
  • hmm, bug 34520 isn't a crasher..

    Perhaps not yet. :-)

    But I think the eliciting condition matches perfectly; on the same www.w3.org page, the link to XML Signatures is similarly deadly, but everything else that doesn't have the <?xml?&gt line at the top works fine. This bug turns out to have an interesting history, by the way...

    In any case, I was amused that anything as boring as a www.w3.org page could slay the lizard.

  • Why don't we give this a chance to mirror... (Score:3)

    by Signail11 ( 123143 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:07PM (#1001733)
    Just kidding of course (although I will note that Signal 11 posted a comment with this very topic to the story about the latest release of Mandrake and got moderated up to +5 (Insightful)). Anyway, not being a karma whore, I will be forced to confine myself to pertinent and ontopic postings. I downloaded M16 a couple of hours before the Slashdot story submission came through. It's *much* better than M14 (the last milestone that I've tried). As expected, the HTML rendering engine is fast and reasonably accurately displays most HTML documents, including the Slashdot home page. CSS support is a bit iffy around the edges, but this is well within acceptable limits (text styles are not always rendered consistently depending on window resizing details). The whole UI is a faster and more streamlined than in previous milestones, although I regret to say that it did crash 3 (three!) times the first time that I tried to start it up. A quick reboot later and it worked fine from there.
  • Contribute something then. There's tons of docs on mozilla.org outlining how you can help out.
  • I see a lot of comments that are probably going to be marked as "trolls" or "flamebait". What we need is a "they are just trash talking to keep people from slashdotting the server until they've got their's downloaded."
    --
    Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
  • This may sound alarmist, but Linux on the mass desktop depends on Mozilla.

    Mozilla will succeed - there's no question about that, in fact I'd go further and say that as a project, Mozilla has already succeeded. You can grab the code and prove that for yourself.

    You are correct in saying that Mozilla is key to Linux on the mass desktop, but it's just one of many, many key issues. *All* of which are are being addressed. Not that Linux is that shabby a desktop right now. It beats heck out of early Microsoft efforts - remember, people have been using desktop computers successfully since the Dos days. It's already better than Microsoft's best in many departments and it's actually easier to enumerate the places where it still needs to catch up. These are getting fewer every month. Early adopters can jump in *now* with confidence - even business shops and non-technical people.

    So don't panic. But don't relax either - the sooner Mozilla is out the sooner world domination will be achieved ;-)
    --
  • In any case, I was amused that anything as boring as a www.w3.org page could slay the lizard.

    And then I was pleasantly surprised to see the bug fixed in the June 15th nightly build. This one also seems to have better performance with type-in fields on forms (don't know why...). Things are definitely looking up.

  • Come on, people. I hear so much Mozilla bashing it's not even funny. Mozilla may be slower than IE on Windows, and it may make my machine use nothing but swap space for an hour, but if you don't like it, fix it. That's the beauty of open-souce (i.e., free) software.

    Mozilla will replace IE soon. It has almost all the features; however, it's still a developers' preview. Thus, it still has debugging code.

    Someone a while ago said something about using "strip" to decrease binary size and to increase speed. I'll see what happens.

    Good luck, especially to the Mozilla coders. In the meantime, help fix it, or submit bug reports. Or, use the light browser that comes with it.

    It's just another choice. You can choose not to use it.
  • The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.

    Are you sure you don't have older versions of Mozilla's shared libraries floating around in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib? I was having crazy problems back around M13 or M14, and I deleted all the libraries from /usr/lib with the same name as those in the Mozilla distribution, and suddenly it worked like a charm. It may be that you're using older shared libraries, because table rendering has been nearly flawless for me since then.
    --
  • This may sound alarmist, but Linux on the mass desktop depends on Mozilla. In today's general consumer office/home computer world, the browser is almost as (maybe more) important as (than) the the office suite. The Gateway/AOL/Transmeta deal will be an incredible flop if Mozilla can't deliver the goods--regardless of the hardware/OS. That would be a very high profile failure for the Linux world. I'm not really effected as I'm in a university setting where we play with esoterica all day. But the Joe Homebod, who's just heard of Linux last week, will turn is dull eyes back to M$ if Linux can't deliver with at least a decent browser. Call me paranoid, but without the office/home masses, Microsoft will have even more opportunity to genetically tinker with the Internet. BTW, we could use some decent font rendering, too.
  • You don't need to know how to program. Every day about 100 bugs are reported. You can help by checking them for duplicates. Another way of helping is to test the bugs reported on Windoze and Mac and see if they also affect your Linux Box. This will prevent the people who can "program worth a lick" from wasting time that could spent fixing bugs.

  • Mozilla is NOT a web browser... (Score:4)

    by mk2337 ( 159314 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @06:06PM (#1001764)
    Everyone seems to be looking at Mozilla as just another version of Netscape, but if you look at it that way, you really miss the point and potential impact of this project. The true importance is in the cross platform development that it makes possible at a high level. Not to mention that it employees the newest technology like XML, DOM and JS to create an interface that is so flexible, that it is written and interpreted at runtime. Oh and it is still fast! Skins are not the key to Mozilla, "Mozilla Total Conversions" are... as are "Chromes". Mozilla is versatile enough to write any program within it... I personally would like to see ICQ written with Mozilla. Check out the ChromeZone for projects that modify or use Mozilla as a development platform. [mozillazine.org] I am involved in a project that customizes the Mozilla UI and adds some features for power users.(not a skin, but a Chrome) You can look at it here: Wayfarer Chrome [nounname.com].
  • IE has something like 70% of the browser market now, mainly because it just browses, nothing else.

    If you've been following the trial, then you'd remember that IE is actually more than just a browser (it's also a shell/file-manager/etc.). If you've been following the trial, then you'd also realize that IE is in some tricky legal waters right now and is likely to be ripped out of Windows within a couple months.*** During all that confusion/whatever, Mozilla might just swoop in and pick up the pieces. In any event, they have a little longer to get things right the first time -- they've already been overhyped, and the last thing they want is to release a stable but incomplete browser and look all the more foolish for having taken so long to get there. You also have to remember that AOL is calling the shots now, and they don't particularly care that much about non-AOL users -- they have other plans.

    ***This, however, will not much affect MS's current installed user base. I haven't seen much analysis of that point.
  • If it replaces Communicator, how do you deal with these not being in Mozilla?
  • You can turn that off. I did. Admittedly the Net2Phone and other permanent "bookmarks" are irritating, as are certain other problems, which include-
    problems with bookmark modification (you can create new folders, but you can't put anything new in.

    much slower load time than IE- MS has a big advantage here. I continue to use Netscape 6 to support the demographic. The more people that use IE, the more webpages that will be Netscape/Mozilla unfriendly.

    And yes, I've submitted all these problems.
  • Every daily for the past 3 weeks, including last night's, has crashed consistently within 10 minutes of running it for me.

    I'm on Linux kernel 2.4.0-test1, though; that may or may not have anything to do with it.

    It's too bad, because during that 10 minutes it rocks.

    --

  • Lucky Number (Score:4)

    by nebby ( 11637 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:12PM (#1001775) Homepage
    Judging from the first couple posts, it seems that it might be safe to say that milestone 16 should be dubbed as the people are really pissed it's still a milestone milestone.

    Though I haven't downloaded 16 yet, M15 is slow as anything on my Linux box (Celeron 450/64MB RAM).. but maybe that's because of all the debugging crap. I'll try M16 sooner or later I guess.

    I agree with the guy who said they should tone it down a bit with the features. I switched to IE because it has a simple interface, its fast, and it works (I choose to ignore the gaping security holes :)) .. it seems to me that Mozilla is already beginning to suffer the ridiculous feature bloat and slowness that was the downfall of Communicator. It amazes me that Communicator has so much absolute _crap_ in it they took the time to code, yet the HTML renderer is way far from perfect. Deep enough tested tables take tens of seconds to render on a p500!

    Just make a browser that works and is fast guys.. leave the e-mail/chat/news/widget stuff for an addon or something.

  • And its something that a lot of Netscape Navigator users begged for when Communicator came out -- a stripped-down, browser-only package for the non-Emacs folk ;-).

    I'd love to have a version of Mozilla that just has a rendering engine to plug into my Windows apps ... but I'm afraid that will be a 15M DLL the way things are going ...
  • Haha actually I am interested if Mozilla will be on again or if it was a one-shot deal. But ever if I had anytime to tie my own shoes.. naw still wouldnt watch it :)

    --
    Scott Miga
    suprax@linux.com
  • After downloading the sucker, i am impressed with the amount of work done, but totally un-impressed with the lack of fixing features before adding all of this skin support.

    Still can't change most Preferences. Try and change something and click OK and nothing.

    Proxy code still wacky. Sometimes it proxy's using my settings, sometimes it doesn't.

    The document loading spiral thing is annoying as hell.. just do the ie progress bar or something. The spining thing often keeps spinning after a page load and can cause someone to go insane if they use mozilla to run an application under.

    Window redraws are still slow, but scrolling is faster then hell (P3 500, 256 meg ram, WinNT SP6a)

    The rendering/layout has been nice for while. But over all application stability is not impressive.

    Good work.. still alpha, i'll stop downloading until it atleast gets slapped Beta. The Netscape Beta 1 while bloated with addons is still much cleaner then the Mozilla biulds as far as being able to set options, use the proxy addresses, and general stability.

    How distinct are the two builds these days?

  • s/an early tree build/an early M17 tree build/

    :)
  • The comparsion makes no sense. Nazism was a system dedicated to hate and murder, while Communism was a system noble in intent that has merely been used from time to time to justify hate and murder. Thus Communism belongs with other systems such as Christianity, Islam, and the British and American empires. Should the crucifix, cresent, Union Jack, and Stars and Stripes also be dispensed with in your world?

    Since you seem to be an anti-Communist, you ought to be pleased that Mozilla's use of Communist icongraphy is used in a rather mocking way (much as crucifixes are used by some heavy metal bands). I doubt any actual Communists are pleased by seeing their symbols used in this way.

  • Gecko with other toolkits? (Score:3)

    by jetson123 ( 13128 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @07:20PM (#1001793)
    People have talked about breaking out the Gecko HTML engine (and maybe the Rhino JavaScript engine) and integrating them with other toolkits, like Tcl/Tk, FLTK, wxWindows, etc.

    Putting together Gecko/Rhino (both of which seem fairly mature and fast) with a mature, fast toolkit could result in a very small, light, and fast web browser for those of us who just want to browse.

    Unfortunately, none of those efforts seem to have matured enough yet even for an alpha release.

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