Send Some Mo' Zilla 265
Michelle Head sends news of an interview with Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org, even as 10,000 readers submit news of Mozilla Milestone 4,734,018 , available now for your downloading and crashing pleasure. Now you can crash with java.
Re:Well, I've been using the nightlies for İİİ (Score:2)
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:2)
My bad, I should have said "Windows95isms," I was thinking 9x when I wrote that, it just didn't make it to my fingertips.
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:2)
Not quite right. All components need write access to the binary directory. Check out the bugzilla entry linked in one of other posts in this thread for more information. This is a real problem for folks who want to install Mozilla once for several users and want a secure system.
I've always been a big mozilla advocate, but I'm disappointed that this error wasn't flagged as a showstopper the moment it was discovered. How many other "Windowsisms" have made their way into the Linux build?
M18... coming along nicely (Score:2)
Nice work guys. If you can let me scroll before those long pages are entirely rendered, or at least just display the first screenfull statically, it'd make things even more slick.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Re:You are seriously mistaken (Score:2)
I will never have firsthand experience of the IE source code because it is closed-source: that's *the* *reason* that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. The comment is not baseless.
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Re:Humph... (Score:2)
Urrr, I've never had it do that, although I've made it lock up many times. Try changing your settings so that each instance runs in its own process space.
Menus are still broken with the X-mouse (Score:2)
Non-standard keys... (Score:2)
I whilst I'm ranting: (although the modern look is priddy) why does half the text run off the side of the controls?
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:2)
Really, good for them. It is about time that code reuse was actually practiced by a Linux project.
Of course, I actually like Gnome so I might be biased :).
Re:Non-standard keys... (Score:2)
Re:mozilla doesn't display some web pages (Score:2)
WriteBrowserSpecificJavaScript()
Now, it's just a hunch, but i bet it checks for NS3+, IE3+, and writes appropriate, compatible JavaScript. I bet it doesn't understand what to do when it sees "Netscape 6" or "M18". This really isn't the fault of Netscape or Mozilla, it looks to be the fault of the page designers.
Re:Monopolies Do It Better (Score:2)
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:2)
It actually requires gnome, libglade, and libxml. It won't run without a whole mess of gnome libraries. Not such a bad thing though, since it speeds development.
Mozilla stability? Not so bad.. (Score:2)
It's still a memory hog though, and doesn't always respond well. Sometimes it's really slow.
Re:Humph... (Score:2)
I've been running last night's build all day (and, of course, it isn't "integrated" into my system; I can swap it out for any other browser I want to) without a single problem. Everything works just great (I haven't used the e-mail or composition stuff; just browsing). My system is a Celron 400A with 128MB of RAM. Mozilla is quick and responsive. It uses about 10MB of RAM while running and about as much shared (it is a GTK app, complete with GTK themes; so my Mozilla looks like Aqua now).
I don't understand your complaints. Perhaps the Windows version is worse, but I doubt it. Internet Explorer is a cool product, but not one that I'd point to as any epitome of good design. You can crash your Windows system by highlighting a bunch of pictures (on my system it takes about 30), right-click on them and then click 'open'; as long as IE is your default picture viewer, which it does by default upon installation. IE doesn't tell you what it's doing on the status line, so you have no idea if it is hanging on a DNS query or simply loading from a slow site. IE has ugly buttons, which cannot be themed (apart from the lame Windows color "themes"). IE takes control of all "multimedia" mime-types every time you install it. IE's channel bar doesn't do one-tenth of what the new sidebar does under Netscape (try using the Google integration, it's very cool). IE hangs EXPLORE.EXE under Windows; so if it crashes it takes the entire desktop environment down with it (Start Menu and all); Mozilla does no such thing. IE waits too long to display pages; Mozilla will draw any page as soon as it can -- the picture sizes be damned. IE has special extensions developed by Microsoft for internet exploring; Mozilla is (ahem, *will* be) fully compliant. IE's ultimate goal is to get you to rent your software over Microsoft.NET -- Mozilla just wants to do what YOU want it to do.
I don't see any speed problems on my system. I haven't crashed it at all today (which is more than I can say for IE, half the time I use it). I don't understand your complaints.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
Re:Humph... (Score:2)
Re:mo betta (Score:2)
Steven E. Ehrbar
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:2)
Okay, skinnability was not an add-on feature. It's a side effect of using the browser engine to render the widget set, itself a side effect of deciding to make the front end platform-independent.
I mean, they could have added code and spent time to make it non-skinnable, but what would have been the point?
Steven E. Ehrbar
FreeBSD tar file here (Score:2)
I built and packaged M18 for FreeBSD. I used 4.1.1 to build it, but I ran it on 4.1 without a hitch too. I sent in my tar.gz file to mozilla, but until it shows up there you can get it from:
http://unixstuff.penguinpowered.com/files/mozil
M18 sure seems fast, I can't believe how much mozilla has progressed in the last few months! I've been using it and promoting it since around M8, and my friends are finally starting to listen to me..
Cheers,
Ben
Re:Humph... *OT* (Score:2)
Yes, when you're a graphic design professional, they're called unemployment officers. This is why so many have just given up entirely and gone to using Flash instead, which of course the "tty at 2400 bps forever" crowd really hates. Not my market, but it gets really annoying filtering out their screechy emails.
Re:Humph... *OT* (Score:2)
Yeah, their "clear Internet strategy" reminds me of Stephen from Braveheart [imdb.com]:
"It's mine, I own it."
Jay (=
Question on Debian unstable and M17... (Score:2)
Was the Debian M17-3 package in unstable compiled without all of the uber-bloatish debugging stuff? Because it seems a lot more responsive than any of the tarballed binaries or RPMs I tried, of any milestone.
If it was compiled without debugging and with some optimization, I urge everyone who has access to a Debian box (or can use alien to convert the
Jay (=
um thanks but... (Score:2)
On a serious note. I do like it, if it were only a little more stable. I have noticed it is pretty fast. It does have alot of features that are working rather nicey. Themses are working and I have installed a few. The install is okay. i have had a few crashes, but I find I like it better than 4.x. I have had problems with yahoo mail though, but not sure why. Cookies I think. Looks pretty sweet I am looking forward to the released verison. Oh and it does have 128 bit encryption built in.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Re:Performance on Linux vs. Windows (Score:2)
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They've come a long way... (Score:2)
final as in (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:2)
> How does it know?
If you're going to go the non-standard route, you should use tags like <MakeThisPartExciting>, <AddSomeFluffHere>, <DontLetThemKnowThisIsAnAdvertismentUntilItsTooLa
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Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Re:In the "what's new" box... (Score:2)
Jesus, ignorance like this pisses me off. Mozilla is not developing a JVM. However, they still want java support. So they did what any clever software engineer would do, rather then reinventing the wheel allow third parties to plug in their own wheel. This means that if you download a nightly build, you won't find the jvm installer bundled (probably due to license issues). However, if you download the netscape prerelease you can (optionally) download Java as well.
Most people seem to be completely unaware that for the first time you can choose your own jvm rather than having to use whatever netscape chooses to include (and we all know what that is in netscape 4). This means that when the beta's for jdk 1.4 start to appear, you will be able to use it as a plugin in mozilla and it will run your applets. If netscape had been that clever five years ago, applets might have become a little more popular.
What irritates me about the win32 version. (Score:2)
But under both Mozilla and Netscape 6pr3 new windows are not maximized. This is just like IE and is in fact one of the reasons I avoid using IE in the first place. I'd really like to see this set back to the way that Netscape 4.x works, or at least have some kind of an option in the control panel to control this behaviour.
Speed wise the browswer does seem to be getting there. I suspect this is largely due to the removal do debugging aids in the code itself which slowed everything down but helped the developers see what the hell was going on.
I'm hoping that the final product will be compatible with pages optimized for IE. It has XML and CSS support of course, but what about all the funky javascript and DHTML stuff that IE has? It's time to "embrace and extend" Microsoft's stuff lest we be left behind.
Lee Reynolds
Re:Humph... (Score:2)
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
I actually have a stylesheet set up that eliminates underlining, and italicizes all links. If you're in *nix, you can place a stylesheet called userContent.css under
it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left,
Strangely, I recall this feature being in a few nightly builds during the M18 cycle, though I'm not sure if it was taken out or it doesn't work on all pages.
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Re:Humph... (Score:2)
Awright, then drop the following pair of lines into a file called userContent.css under
A:link {text-decoration: none}
A:visited {text-decoration: none}
If you're in Windows, I dunno where the userContent.css file goes - probably whatever dir the user prefs are stored in. Either way, it should go in a chrome directory.
If that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas. I only know about this because I always run new builds in a console for the first time, and they used to mention looking for the userContent.css file (among other names and files).
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it *must* work on a read-only NFS server. (Score:2)
I support a few thousand unix boxes that mount 99% of all their non-os programs read-only from NFS servers.
Nobody's going to be using mozilla here until this incredibly dumb oversight gets fixed.
And a minor request: Can you provide binaries with gtk/glib statically linked in so that there are not requirements for non-system libraries on the client-side? (maybe not a big deal for linux, but a hassle for other unix versions)
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:2)
notes. It just needs to write once (the first time
you run it) to the install directory. I installed
it using the installer to
Re:Slashdot != Freshmeat (Score:2)
Re:In the "what's new" box... (Score:2)
Re:Monopolies Do It Better (Score:2)
Re:They've come a long way... (Score:2)
As Mozilla-based browsers become more and more widely used, the pressure for Web developers to use real standards will increase. This is good news for all browser developers except Microsoft. But it certainly won't happen overnight.
Re:How it CSS died is irrelevant - its dead (Score:2)
Every browser vendor is working hard on improving their CSS support.
If you want to style documents, what are the alternatives to using CSS? Today people use TABLEs, FONT tags and other presentational markup, but that's not nearly as powerful or easy to use as CSS. As the baseline level of CSS support in GUI browsers increases, designers will use it more and more. They'd be crazy not to.
The other alternative is XML+XSLT+XSL-FO. But this is far in the future and there are unresolved questions that so far make it a less than complete solution (e.g. how to support dynamic documents).
Re:Can we a "Ask the Mozilla team" interview? (Score:2)
2) Using Gecko to render the UI makes it basically impossible to use native widgets and native themes, and also made it easy to implement Mozilla themes. So that's what they did.
Using Gecko to render the UI is a good idea because it means Mozilla developers only have to write the UI once (in XUL). You can also do a lot of UI stuff in XUL that you can't easily do using all platform UI toolkits (e.g. custom icons in menus, dynamically extending dialog boxes).
Also, because Gecko supports CSS, Gecko widgets can naturally be styled using CSS, which is something Web developers really want. Even IE uses its own widget implementation instead of the Win32 widgets, for exactly this reason. Most platform widget sets don't come anywhere close to supporting this.
Some people do want support for native widgets and themes more than any of these other benefits. Mozilla developers are listening and are definitely interested in providing native widgets as an option; we have some ideas about how to do it.
Re:Mozilla in AOL = NOT HAPPENING (Score:2)
Microsoft wants to destroy AOL just as much as they want to destroy every other serious competitor. But they signed a deal with AOL where AOL keeps using IE (and hence keeps IE's market share up) in return for AOL having their client on the Win9x desktop. MS sees that as a win for now, but that could change anytime.
AOL could easily twist the arms of Macromedia and Real to keep their plugins up to date on Linux.
Re:Humph... (Score:2)
Like the other poster said, if you really want to configure the way Mozilla renders Web pages, go wild with user style sheets. Try something like this:
:link { text-decoration: none; }
User CSS really provides the ultimate customizable browsing experience.
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:2)
> Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me,
> regardless of whether I want it or not.
Unless you uncheck "Mailnews" when you install Mozilla.
Re:What? (Score:2)
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:2)
I tried too, but things fail in weird ways. You may not see it right away. For example, Access Wizards required write access to a few files in the office directory.
There's a Microsoft KB article about what needs write access on C: for Office 97. It's a disgrace...
q169387 [microsoft.com]
Office 2000 is a lot better. NT and NTFS came out a helluva long time ago (when, like 94ish?). It's a shame that several years later, Microsoft Apps still don't behave well in R/O environments (and now Mozilla gets to continue the tradition...)
Programmers, no matter what system they write for, should never ever assume they can scribble to files and directories in any place other than a defined temp directory,a user-defined directory, or some directory configured by the systems admin in some global preferences location.
The same kind of thing could be said for the Windows registry. Programs should never assume they can write to HKLM keys. Stuff in HKLM should be defined during install time or via system policies. Any user data and settings should be recorded to HKCU only...
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:2)
And this is NOT just a linux/unix issue. System Administrators of NT/W2K boxen also expect that programs don't write into the program directories...
This one is a real killer. Years of work and because of this, those of us that deploy desktops that number in the thousands (in my case) will decide it's not worth it and not bother... Too many risks, too many hassles...
Not any for me... (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
"Non HTML4 Strict documents will try to be rendered the way the author intended rather than according to the specification. "
How does it know?
Re:Well, I've been using the nightlies for İİİ (Score:2)
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Re:Well, I've been using the nightlies for İİİ (Score:2)
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Re:Well, I've been using the nightlies for İİİ (Score:2)
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Testing (Score:2)
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
because then it wouldn't _BE_ Mozilla (Score:2)
They have always been intended to be complete internet communication suites for the masses, which implies WWW, FTP, News, Email, IM, and the rest.
Of course you dont have to install everything if you dont want it, but it has still been designed with doing everything in mind.
THIS IS NOT A BAD THING...just not what you and a few others want.
A lot of people DO want this, which is exactly why they are making it that way.
If you want a speciallized application, why are you looking at Mozilla at all?
One more feature (Score:2)
Re:Well, I've been using the nightlies for İİİ (Score:2)
Still... Somehow I expected MS would be the first with that one.
Java? (Score:2)
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:2)
Cheers //Johan
Re:Sources? (Score:2)
export CVSROOT="
cvs login
cvs checkout mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla
make -f client.mk checkout
Re:Humph... (Score:2)
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Re:Humph... (Score:2)
Netscape = Shareware on the net, 40 bucks shrinkwrapped in stores when IE 3 hit the scene.
IE 3 was when IE really started to compete...
and IE was free. Netscape wasn't. IE was.
Remember that short time when Netscape said "screw this" and left the browser market?
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Scrolling fixed (Score:2)
Actually, not only does mozilla not bring you back to the same spot on a previous page, links to placeholders within the same page also don't work, as well as an annoying bug where mozilla will lose your place on a page if you minimize the window.
The scroll bug is fixed and in the current build tree - I filed a bug report about 10 days ago and it was fixed in the last couple. Whether it made it into M18 I don't know - I run the nightlies now.
As for the minimising bug - have you checked Bugzilla? See if someone has reported it? (I can't reproduce it with build 2000101109 on Linux). There is all this great bug reporting and tracing available at Bugzilla to allow you to see what problems are known about - make use of it, and help the Mozilla team get rid of things that annoy you the most.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Monopolies Do It Better (Score:2)
Doesn't make any since. (Score:2)
Re:Why isn't Java implemented on the Linux version (Score:2)
You know what they say...
It's better to be behind a moving car than in front of it.
[SmusH]
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:2)
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
On the galeon [sourceforge.net] web site i found the following text "It requires Gnome and MOZILLA M17.", now i see where you are coming from, and to tell the truth i agree with you, but i am just to lazy to do anything about it. (I bolded it to bring out the whole point of this ramble)
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Whine me up, whine me down (Score:2)
Sorry, that comment verges on flamebait. But so does your post. Please assume that people who disagree with you have some basic intelligence. It won't always be true, but you do want the benefit of the same assumption, don't you?
Now then, I've downloaded all the recent lizards. It is true that every Mozilla "milestone" has been slightly better than the previous one. But there have been eighteen milestone releases over a total of 33 months! And the product is still barely alpha quality. No, it's worse than that -- each milestone seems to have a fair number of regressions, many of which affect basic functionality. I don't suppose you've heard of Sisyphus?
They also seem to have started paring down features in an attempt to make the product manageable. Which would be fine -- if this didn't include very basic features, like LDAP support. People in large orgs will not use an email client that doesn't support LDAP!
As for bug reporting, this is an issue I know a little about. I was once (for my sins) the technical editor of a major corporate tech support site. This job required me to spend a lot of time reading bug reports. Now, if there's one thing that wastes everybody's time, it's a lot of duplicate reports for a single bug. In order to avoid dups, you have to track existing bugs on the product you're testing. People who don't have time to do this would not be helping anybody by filing a bug for every little crash and problem.
And these same people have every right to download the product, run it through its paces, and report to the world that the product ain't ready for prime time. That's not product bashing, that's a simple, honest reporting. You're free to argue that the lizard just needs a little more time. But as the project stretches on and on, that argument is looking pretty thin.
__________
Re:Get back under your rock .... (Score:2)
Name me one site in the top ten sites that make significant use of CSS.
Name three in the top fifty.
How it CSS died is irrelevant - its dead (Score:2)
You are seriously mistaken (Score:2)
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless. Once again, in the real world, the production IE code is far far ahead of anything out of the mozilla project in every way that is meaningful to common users.
No one is ever going to win the browser market with better CSS support, because 99% of the users out there have no use for CSS. Name one major website that makes effective use of it...face it, mozilla conforms to more dead standards than any other browser. Most users would have settled for functional javascript support.
*Sigh* (Score:2)
The previous Mozilla milestone I downloaded would freeze up at random points, mostly while viewing large pages, screw up images (actually inserting images from OTHER sites), etc. And, when I tried to use Netscape 6 Preview 3, I spent two hours downloading the damn thing over my sucky 33.6 connection, only to get an indecypherable error when I try to run it.
This reflects very badly on the open source community, and while it was a nice try, Mozilla and Netscape only have a few more nails to go in their collective coffin. Hopefully some other open source project will do better, or (*closed source shudder*) maybe Opera, which is shaping up nice.
*sigh*
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Re:Hooray for Java (Score:2)
Just because the builds don't include a java plugin doesn't mean java can't work at all... Actually, you can usually throw just about any netscape plugin into mozilla's plugin directory and it will work (under windows at least. I haven't tested this with other OSes). I've had success with java, flash 5, beatnik, and modplug. Each time I simply copied them over from netscape's plugin dir.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:2)
Look: Netscape has almost always had e-mail support. In fact lots of people (still) use it. Fairly large corporations have standardized on Netscape mail. I know of at least two people that use NS Messenger and browse the web with IE (even mailto: works properly with IE/Messenger, where it's still broken in Mozilla/any other MUA).
There is simply NO way that they could ship a product that is missing a huge amount of functionality thats been there since 1994. Real users (as opposed to you elite posuers) would rip them a huge new asshole. Get over with it.
Furthermore, Netscape Mail one of the only usable GUI mail clients on Unix, and yet all of you lamers are on a jihad to have it killed, presumably. And don't tell me about KMail or GOutlook or whatever, because it just ain't there yet.
But of course, you goobers don't need a GUI mail client because you are soooo happy with Pine or Mutt. Yeah that makes you superior... What? Pine was designed for drooling state school freshman internet newbies? Huh? What? Pine is just like a GUI client except without the mouse bindings? What? I can't heeaaar yooooou! All real UNIX gurus use 'mail'? What? Wha? Uhhh, doesn't matter because I use text mode and am soooo elite for doing so. Keep telling yourself that, and keep on trolling.
Re:Contradicting pieties. (Score:2)
On the other hand, the typical by-the-people-for-the-people open source project tend to have a more conservative focus. They don't feel embarassed in trying to reimplement something that's already been done. If you can do it better or provide the capabilities more openly, then that's reason enough. There are a lot of people who would have preferred a stable open source web browser which only had the capabilities of Navigator 4. Just because we're sick of dealing with buggy proprietary software on operating systems that are highly stable. But a company like Netscape wouldn't do that. Stability isn't enough of a selling point, you have to claim more features. And they wouldn't admit that navigator4 was unstable in the first place.
Re:BrowseX Vs. Mozilla (Score:2)
For the proxy challenged (as myself, also). I just went and puttied into my bsd server pingeded it and opened it up in lynx to make sure I wasn't tripping their proxy alarms for a good reason (If you don't trust blind links or IP's from
HTH
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Re:yummy (Score:2)
Final as in 1.0, or final as in "we give up"?
ForumZilla (was Re:Yes but) (Score:3)
ForumZilla is a XUL application that provides a Usenet newsreader-like interface to web discussion forums like Slashdot (although you can't read Slashdot with ForumZilla yet). Get more info at the ForumZilla web site:
http://www.forumzilla.com/ [forumzilla.com]Re:What irritates me about the win32 version. (Score:3)
Argh. We've finally reached a point where one can develop web pages that look good in both IE and Mozilla without spending 80% of our time on tweaking the HTML/CSS to comply with the different "interpretations" of HTML/CSS in those two browsers. And now you're actually suggesting of fighting this stupid time-wasting war again?!
There's only one way to go: embrace existing standards (like XHTML, CSS and the DOM) and don't extend them with proprietary solutions that work only on one single platform. Everything else is just a continuation of the nightmare that we have experienced in the past. If a standard needs an extension, this extension should be developed by more than one party -- proprietary solutions are a truely gruesome and bad thing.
Just my $.02.
Performance on Linux vs. Windows (Score:3)
One thing really disturbs me, however. The performance under Linux on a comparable machine is substantially worse than on Windows. I'm primarily refering to the responsiveness of the widgets. The menus are sluggish under Linux where they are blazingly fast at updating on Windows. Opening the sidebar is quick and speedy under Windows but under Linux it's slow and ugly.
I'm not posting this in order to bash anyone or the project in general. I'm wondering if anyone has some feedback on the reason for this. Has there not been as much work at improving performance on Linux as there has been for Windows? Will this improve in the future?
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Re:Humph... *OT* (Score:3)
There are professionals who can help you deal with the disappointment of not having total control over the experience of those who enter your site. In the long run, letting go of this need to dominate others will inprove your happiness and self-esteem.
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:3)
I don't think you a troll, but I do disagree with you. (Or rather, I see why Mozilla might disagree with you.)
And that is because, for Joe Consumer, the PC is an internet appliance. Mail, newsgroups, Web sites - that's the internet experience for most people, and thus the PC experience for many. Why confuse them with a pile of separate applications?
Many
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Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Re:Crash....? Wasn't this linux? (Score:3)
That doesn't surprise me, it just takes a certain amount of time to do proper field testing. Open source is not a silver bullet when it comes to software development. Software quality problems don't just go away when you GPL your source. So yes, as linux is maturing you are experiencing the same problems windows has experienced.
To get back to mozilla, everybody is complaining that it takes ages for mozilla to be released. However, I think less then two years (I'm counting from the moment they threw away the old netscape sourcecode) is very reasonable for such a complex product. The main competitor (microsoft) has only done minor bug fixing and minor feature additions to their product in the same time.
Re:Mozilla in AOL = NOT HAPPENING (Score:3)
First, if they sell a custom box running AOL on Linux, the profit is all AOL's.
Second, relying on IE and Windows creates a massive strategic weakness for AOL. Microsoft can and does try to direct users to Microsoft content rather than AOL/TW content. Furthermore, AOL is vulnerable to whatever new tricks may MS decide to roll into IE. Depending on your fiercest competitor (who wants you dead) for the most important chunk of your software, with no plan B, would just be suicidal.
Third, AOL-TV. Mozilla lets AOL move in directions that Microsoft doesn't want to go, or more likely doesn't want AOL to go.
Re:Yes but (Score:3)
Re:What? (Score:3)
For most pages out there, applying standards-compliant rendering would produce a real mess.
Re:Humph... (Score:3)
IE doesn't have tons of debugging code. If you compile from source with the debugging stuff disabled and without mail/news, you get a 6 MB tarball. My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active, it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left, and... well, I forget what the other one was. I guess it wasn't that big a deal.
Re:Humph... (Score:3)
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
It doesn't. It never has. Neither in Windows nor Linux.
But I did remember the other "feature" that I dislike, and it turns out to be the one that annoys me the most.
Mozilla steals focus (well, steals the top of the desktop) every time it loads a page.
One of the main reasons I avoid Windows is because the apps are always stealing focus from what I'm trying to do. Apps should treat start up like what I'm doing can not be inturrupted or humankind will perish. They should never, ever, ever, EVER (ever) steal focus when they do something. Mozilla does it on every single page load. It's annoying. It could not be more annoying if it came with a plug-in that squirted water in your face on every page load. It could not be more annoying if it repeatedly poked you in the forehead. It could not be more annoying if it defaulted to bright pink background with flashing green text. It could not be more annoying.
Woah. I guess that was a rant.
Re:Humph... (Score:3)
Yes it was, but it was a rant after my own heart. I cannot tell you how annoying I find programs that claim focus to be. To use a real world analogy:
Programmers should try to relate program behavior back to the real world as much as possible (that's what I do!): if it would be rude to do it in the real world, it's rude to do it in my computer. That means interrupting me (focus stealing), spying on me, trying to fasten a radio tracking collar on me when I enter a store (needless cookies), or anything else.
Humph... (Score:3)
When I first heard of of Mozilla I was under the impression that it was trying to fix all of NS's mistakes (a big one being bloat) and to be open source. It seems to have missed the first goal by a large margin (I can get versions of IE 5 that are smaller than the windows version), but the second is still there. This begs and interesting question, are OSS projects always (or ever) better than their CSS counterparts? In this situation it seems to be that the answer is no, but in other cases (like web serving) it seems that the answer is yes. Any thoughts on this?
Mark Duell
Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:3)
I'd personally prefer less, to 'Mo'. While they've spent years making this, and it is a great program, I would rather have a BROWSER. Not a Browser/Mail/IM/Skinnable/Everything you want but the fabled sink. The only thing missing is a kernel. Joking, but on a serious side, why be a jack of all trades yet master at none? And on top of that, you need a "big honkin' machine" to run it!
If I wanted to do everything from one program, I'd just use emacs. But I like smaller programs that do their job well, back to the old unix philosophy of the toolchest of flixible tools.
For example, I still use pine to read mail. Why? Because I like it. It's fast, uses little resources, and I can use it through telnet or ssh. Now, I don't need a mail client, but if I use Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me, regardless of whether I want it or not. And I don't.
There are already many programs that do what the components of Mozilla do, from good ol pine for mail, to jaim for integrated instant messaging, to vi for HTML editing, and any of hundreds of other apps at friendly freshmeat.net.
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here [sourceforge.net].
When I do have days that I feel like running a monolithic program to browse, mail, and chat, I'll stick to xemacs. At least then I can still hack code. :)
Got it! (Score:3)
The modern theme looks like it comes from Aqua or TNG!
Hopefully it'll let me post this article properly! M17 had some problems posting to K5 and here, for me anyway...
I promise - Mozilla will TRASH IE (Score:3)
Micros~1 hasn't done anything "innovative" with a browser for years. Even Mac IE5.5, which has awesome standards support, is just a re-bloat^H^H^H^H^Hwrite of IE4 - it's what they should have released as IE4 in the first place.
Once Mozilla is released and stable (events which I hope will coincide) it's going to be much, much easier to modify and update for future standards support, look-and-feel, rebranding (AOL) than IE5. Mozilla is "front-loading" future work into this release, while Micros~2 is stuck making little patches and calling them new versions.
Imagine a web development shop landing a large Intranet contract. "Hey - how'd you like us to whip up a custom version of Mozilla for you? Not just a lame-ass IE 'rebrand' with a couple different icons, but a serious web application with support for your [insert buzzword here]?"
It's going to be a beautiful day, folks. Micros~3 has the technical resources to do something like that, but they never will. Geeks have run the web for a long time, and Mozilla's going to make it easier.
On a web development note, it's very nice to use a free (and Free) browser to check bugs in my pages, rather than the reverse (using my pages to check bugs in a free - not Free - browser).
Mozilla in AOL = NOT HAPPENING (Score:3)
AOL has no plans to adopt Netscape/Mozilla/Any other crappy browser the Open Source community uses as its primary browser. While this may happen for the Linux version of AOL its certainly not a planned feature in the windows versions of their client.
How do I know this? Could be that I've been beta testing AOL 6.0 for the last 6 months (for Windows and 5.0 for Macintosh) and they've done nothing but work to intergrate IE deeper and deeper into the client.
And yes even if AOL does integrate Netscrape/Mozilla into their client for Linux it won't make a damns worth of difference. This is simply due to the fact that AOL on Linux is a paradox in and of itself and can provide no reason at all for its existence. (Except perhaps to convince the Linux Zealots - AHEM CmdrTaco that Windows/IE is going to just suddenly disappear in a big puff of smoke one day and suddenly be replaced by Linux)
Another thing - why in god's name does it take TWO years to develop a browser? Just think about where we would be today if it took two years for IE to be created - wait.... ummm... hmmm... then we would all be forced to used Netscrape or maybe if everything took that long we would all still be using that crappy Linux 2.2 kernel (oh wait - we are!)
Seriously though - its time for the Mozilla team to kick it into high gear - even though I've already sworn off Linux for Windows 2k and Mac OS X - Linux requires a decent browser if its ever going to make any headway in the desktop arena. You guys can talk all day about how Linux kicks Windoze and Mac OS Xcrement's asses all day - but how many prebuilt, preinstalled Linux boxes have you seen that within 15 minutes of turning on the computer for the VERY FIRST time the average user can be surfing the web?
Also - I dont know how many of you (I would guess zero) have gotten inside looks at Windows 2001 (Codename: Whistler) but its finally going to mean the end of all this win9x instability you guys like to rave on about (I've got the latest development build of 2276). Yeah - they are combining the stability of win2k with the juicy little consumer features of Windows ME to create what the Linux Community will only refer to as in the coming years as "The AntiChrist". Theres some food for though for you guys....
Gamorck (darkgamorck@home.com)
"Flame at Will"
Re:BrowseX Vs. Mozilla (Score:3)
Good: the web is not about making some lame-assed and incompetent designer who doesn't have a clue about UI design make the web look how HE wants it. No, it's about ME. ME goddamn it. He doesn't make the pages for his benefit - he makes them for mine. So he can fuck off with his bullshit design intentions.
> in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Shows how much you know. Netscape 3 is *the best* browser and certainly the most useful one. Why? Easy for me to disable JavaScript (alt+o n alt+s enter - takes under 1 second) - IE takes twenty seconds while I scroll through the biggest pile of shit this side of the Windows source code repository; easy for me to disable images (just one key stroke); fast, and not bloated like v4 or v6; doesn't crash; easy to disable Java (or don't install it in the first place); tells me what it's doing when it's downloading (e.g., 36% of 27kb); nice mail reader; good ftp client. It also supports everything I need to do - cookies, JavaScript, file upload etc.
IE for me is worthless trash - FTP client always hangs the browser window; browser windows often hang for no reason; no file download status indicator; bloated and slow.
Same for Netscape 4; Netscape 6 is ok, but I want the classic skin by default, and I don't want the AOL shit (that's why I use Mozilla), I don't like the crashes, I want to be able to disable crap like JavaShit when appropriate without fucking around with slow loading preference menus, and most importantly:
I WANT A FUCKING STATUS INDICATOR.
[BTW, NN3 does do Flash and Java, but you don't get them bloated in by default; the only thing you don't get is fucking annoying DHTML, which is COMPLETELY USELESS (Java and Flash suck too, but sometimes content can't been seen without them.)]
Testing Mozilla... (Score:4)
Therefore, here is my advice to you: install Mozilla for Windows. No, no, don't install Windows, unless you already have it. Just make sure that you run Mozilla for Windows under Wine on Linux. THEN you get all your old bugs back, for free! Oh yeah, it still browses the web, but at least you have some real, obvious, fixable bugs. And then you get to help out the Wine project, too!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Why not 'Less'-zilla? (Score:4)
I have been using Galeon as my primary browser for the past week or so (before that I was using whatever mozilla that Debian's Woody includes), and I think that it is exactly what you are looking for.
It is basically the Gecko rendering engine wrapped in enough GTK+ so that it actually works as a browser. There's no HTML editor, nor is there a mail client, a news client, or an irc client. It's not skinnable, and it's even Gnome-ified so that it fits in well with your Gnome desktop (although it works fine without Gnome).
Basically it is pretty darn cool. I am quite impressed.
Re:BrowseX Vs. Mozilla (Score:4)
Be still my beating heart.
Just what I've always wanted - a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended, and the other half not work at all. Sure, having a browser written in tcl has some degree of geek-cool, but in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Charles Miller
--
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? : (Score:4)
Basically, any user who runs mozilla needs to be able to write to mozilla/psm/components/xpdi.dat Yes, it's a bad bug. And it looks like the mozilla guys are still arguing about whether it should be fixed!
Re:In the "what's new" box... (Score:4)
-Go to Blackdown's site [blackdown.org].
-Click on "OK" when the window pops up asking if you want to get the plugin (it's the standard plugin download dialog box).
-It will (should?) take you to a page where you can download the Java plugin.
If you want to do things the slightly harder way (like I did a week ago; I jumped the gun:), you can go to Blackdown [blackdown.org], click on Download [blackdown.org], pick a mirror, go into JDK-1.3.0/i386/rc1 and grab j2re-1.3.0-RC1-linux-i386.tar.bz2. Then you can install the Java runtime yourself; it includes the plugin.
Of course, if you just want to get to the tarball with no searching, you can just click her e [tux.org].
Have fun! I am!
-------------
Why does it need to write to the program dir? :( (Score:4)
Why? This is a big problem in the Windows world, and now this just perpetuates it.
It's a very bad idea to require this. It prevents secure multi-user access. For example, student computer labs that I am responsible for have NT Workstation installed with feeble attempts at tough ACLS to prevent deliberate or malicious damage to C: drive. So many programs require full access to the program drive. Worse, a lot (like office 97) require the ROOT directory to be writable and then there's NT itself which requires %systemroot% (basically /bin) to be writable.
I don't buy this "you can't secure a computer you have physical access to" routine. Maybe not 100%, but getting close to that sure saves a lot of support costs over leaving a lab machine wide open...
Well, I've been using the nightlies for İİİ (Score:4)
Why? Well, before I go into this, lemme tell you what I like about it :
a Must faster© At least on my machine, Mozilla resembles Netscape in speed© Not bad, considering that Mozilla is incredibly more sophisticated and featureful©
b Prettier© While I would prefer Mozilla to adopt my GTK+ theme, it probably won't be too long after 1©0 when someone releases a program to do just that© That said, I think the new "Modern" theme is nice©
c Stability© This is the first time I've ever been able to say this - Mozilla is at least as stable as my current Netscape distribution© 'nuff said©
Now, you're probably still wondering why I am disappointed with this Milestone© Well, use it for a while and you migt understand© If there's one thing every application - no matter how big or small - should keep in mind© The chances that it's the only application the user has open are next to nil© As such, they should take care not to throw themselves in front of the user every few minutes© Unfortunately, Mozilla has broken this rule - it will raise a window when pages have finished loading© Not all pages© And not consistently, either© What's worse is that under Linux, the raised windows arn't focused - they're just now sitting in front of whatever you were using© Now, you have to go over to the offensive Mozilla window and click on it to focus it, and then switch back to your old app© Now, when you're coding, you've just lost your train of thought, and you might never get it back©
Before I get flames about this, I'd like to say that, *YES* I could change my focus settings© But should I? Should I *have* to? Just because Mozilla wants me to? No, of course not© While many might not think at first glance that this is a show-stopping bug, it makes Mozilla extremely irritating to use©
Ah well, I've had my rant© : I've submitted a bug report : After all that has been said, I still have great respect for the Mozilla team and all their contributors© I wish them well© I wish them happiness and prosperity© I also wish they'd fix that bug ;
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Mozilla bashing again? (Score:5)
This is cool. Now we even have trolls submitting stories. How can I mark the story as -1 flamebait?
MSIE is not open source, bad Microsoft, bad bad..
Mozilla is open source, bugs, bugs, bad, bad
Sometimes I think that nothing is good enough for some people. You're damned if you don't release your source code and you're damned if you develop your software openly giving full access to CVS.
Mozilla bashers should really look deep in the mirror. www.mozilla.org [mozilla.org], www.mozillazine.org [mozillazine.org] and especially bugzilla.mozilla.org [mozilla.org] contain everything you need to know about Mozilla. You can find out why the tarballs are big (several skins, debugging code), why the memory footprint is big (not optimized yet) and what bugs are still to be fixed (a lot). If you're lazy, stop by at #mozilla on IRC and ask. You'll get a fast answer, I guarantee you.
People, understand your responsibility. Go find out before climbing on a soap box and starting to complain. All this complaining about Mozilla crashing will hurt it's reputation. And Mozilla or Netscape is not to be blamed for it. Mozilla has been pre-alpha, alpha or beta all the time. Any programmer knows that it's still far away from a rock solid Mozilla 1.0.
However, I do use Mozilla more than Netscape now. I love Mozilla's speed on NT and how it renders correctly pages that the old Netscape can't even dream about. That's very nice for a beta-version, isn't it? Let's see how the memory footprint and stability is in another six months or a year.
The bottom line still is that Mozilla looks good. It has got a lot faster lately. It's getting better and better every week and when it's ready, it will be fabulous. I just hope that this Mozilla bashing won't give it a bad rep so that people won't even try the final product.