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Mozilla The Internet

Update to the Mozilla Roadmap 233

Posted by CmdrTaco from the turn-right-at-the-fork-in-the-code dept.
LinuxNews.pl wrote in to note that the mozilla roadmap was recently updated to include major milestones in the not so distance future, including a target for a 1.0 release in Q2. I write these words in Mozilla. Now that there are 128bit encryption modules, all I want is more stability and more speed. Good luck guys!
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Update to the Mozilla Roadmap More

Update to the Mozilla Roadmap

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  • Ehmm., The entire purpose of the "embedded Mozilla" initiative is to reduce footprint...
  • I poked around a bit, and found bug #36283 [mozilla.org].

    --

  • the big reply button at the top of the comments should probably be your first port of call ;-)
  • Three-button mice work with Windows (grep for the symbol MBUTTON in the windows header files if you don't believe me).

    And they really are not very expensive.

  • before anyone jumps up & down, let me clarify my comment about the only browser that is x-platform - I lump netscape & mozilla as the same thing these days. I know its not accurate, but they smell & feel the same. cheers
  • FYI, this is resolved in the file COPYING.README from the Galeon distribution:
    Thanks a lot! I never noticed them stick that in (apparently in August 2000).
  • then that proves that open source is capable of writing a browser in four years.
    I dunno exactly how long it took to write Konqueror, but since KDE2 is a complete rewrite from KDE1, then Konqueror has been in development for a lot less time then Mozilla, and in my opinion is far more usable.

    Konqueror has nice, fast rendering, support for Netscape plugins, https using OpenSSL, Javascript support with the ability to disable window.open, fine-grained cookie management, the ability to fake a User Agent header if necessary, and so on and so on. To each their own, but I personally can't see any reason to use Mozilla over Konqueror.

  • Re:Comments (Score:5)

    by DLG ( 14172 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @08:43AM (#389306)
    Just a few notes. IE crashes on me in Win98. It always has. It displays things differently in Mac and Windows. It doesn't run in Linux or any other OS at all. If Microsoft was working to provide a standards based WWW browser on every platform it could, well I would say great. But to suggest that the IE saga has been somehow faster and more efficient than Mozilla, while offering the same quality of product, well you are wrong.

    IE was barely useable until version 4. The next version (6) will remove builtin java support.
    Furthermore the number of upgrades I have seen for IE during my time using Win98 is pretty regular. The fact that they are beta testing in a closed environment versus an open environment is not a benefit.

    One question I have for you is "Do you use Mozilla?" and "Have you ever had a bug report to them?" I have done both, and my experience has been that in most situations the organization of the Mozilla developers is quite sophisticated in closing out significant bugs. Whether Microsoft is similiarly efficient is impossible to know, since you can't watch and track bug reports made about IE.

    I do know that in all bugs I have made I have recieved direct responses from a developer, either confirming the bug, showing it is a duplicate of an earlier one, or asking for more info.

    The OPEN SOURCE development model is NOT merely a lengthy beta test anymore then Windows is. The fact is that mozilla has, as a nightly build functioned extremely well for me. There are times when I have to back out of an upgrade but I DO attempt to do nightly build installations. This is so that I can help out, giving bug reports, and further.

    Mozilla is targetted over a wide range of platforms. It is an ambituous project with goals that aren't entire equivalent to Microsoft's IE.

    That what was once a rough and slow performing webbrowser has become a fast rendering relatively well behaved app is a great thing. The fact that the Mozilla folks don't say "We are done" when they have it mostly done isn't a negative. Microsoft has consistently beta tested on their paying costumer... Look towards DOS 4.0 as one of the early examples of 'wait until the .1'...

  • Will complex pages designed for one look the same in the other?

    The whole point of open standards is that you shouldn't have to design pages for one particular browser. Assuming that Konqueror and Mozilla implement the standards correctly, then pages will look acceptable in either.

    It is only Microsoft who want you to code your content to a specific browser - Internet Explorer.

  • Even though that might be true, it has little if anything to do with this discussion. So now all a good Open Source project has to do is beat the equivalent Microsoft product in release quality? *That's* certainly a lofty goal.

    On a side note, I've tried out the last four Mozilla releases and I haven't really been happy with any of them. I'm certainly grateful for the effort and impressed with what the Mozilla team has done, but I'll take Konqueror's speed, responsiveness, and stability over Mozilla in a second and there'd have to be a lot of improvement between now and 1.0 for that to change...


  • Unfortunately, Galeon works only for English-speaking users. If your language happens to use character set other than Latin-1, you are out of luck. Galeon also doesn't have other nice features, e.g. cookie/image/form manager (or right-click in Mozilla and Galeon - see?)


    Try again. The only thing still missing form that list is the form manager. Try Galeon 0.10.1 (works just peachy with Mozilla 0.8).

  • Something definitely weird is going on with Mozilla memory usage... I'm running it on Win2000 (always the latest nightly), with 392MB RAM. Weird thing is if I switch to another app for half hour or so, or copy some files back and forth and then switch back to Mozilla, it takes _forever_. I mean, it would be pretty wierd for Windows to swap out a process when there's over 200MB free at any given time, but I can hear the disk grinding away for almost a minute before the window gets redrawn! It's really horrible. But for now I'm assuming it's either a regression bug (it didn't used to be that bad a while back) or some debugging code.
  • Currently using Mozilla .8 and quite happy. However, I do like galeon better.

    HOWEVER - latest galeon (0.10.1?) needs newer gnome betas.

    HOWEVER - newer gnome betas still not packaged for mandrake.

    Therefore, everything is ximian's fault. Their packagers have been VERY slow compared to when helix code was first made.

    Mike Roberto
    - GAIM: MicroBerto

  • What's happening is the same thing that happens to Java Swing apps. All the images (READ: skins) are swapped out to disk. As these skins are 90% of the memory usage, it takes just short of forever to bring them back out of swap. Unfortunately, there isn't too much that can be done about this as most modern OSes (save for Linux) use their swap preemptively so that memory will be available if some monster of a program suddenly hits memory.
  • A feature that I just found out about on Mozilla that I really like is that if someone posts a URL and you select it with the mouse, and middle click, it opens that URL in the current window so you don't have to copy and paste it into the URL text entry widget.


    He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
  • I'm confused. How can Mozilla be a sluggish performer? It's written in C++ isn't it? I thought only Java applications were slow.

    This .sig for rent

  • Once in a while, I'll boot into Windows to watch my legally-purchased DVDs on my legally-purchased DVD-ROM drive (unless Xine works, in which case...anyway...). I've used Mozilla 0.8 on Win95 OSR2, and Windows NT 4.0 sp-something. Runs like a dream. On the three platforms I've had a chance to run Mozilla 0.8 on, I have had one crash since release.

    One.

    Considering that Moz isn't using many native graphical hooks on any platform to draw widgets, but is drawing its own instead, I'd say it runs pretty good. Hell, I've found it's as fast as IE on the Win32 platforms I've used it on.

    Re-read that. Mozilla 0.8 is as fast as IE on Win32. In fact, it's been as fast since Mozilla 0.6. I now try to avoid IE whenever possible.
  • Really. I run Mozilla nightlies & milestones on Mandrake (Linux), Solaris 7 (Sparc), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X PB, and NT4, and I've never had it take out anything but itself (and those instances have been pretty rare, only when I get a particularly bad nightly build.)

    I have to deal with a ton of platforms on a regular basis, and the fact that Mozilla runs more-or-less the same on all of them is a real cool thing. It's been my primary browser on just about every platform for the last 3 months or so.

  • HINT: In Windows, you can hold down CTRL and left click a link and it will (most of the time) load up the link in a new window. I LOVE this feature seeing as I don't have a third button.

    BTW: Does anyone know of a Windows driver to emulate a third button?



    Later...
  • Right now Debian unstable still contains M18.

    The developer in charge of packaging Mozilla for Debian won't put 0.8 in unstable due to encryption issues, and doesn't want to put in into non-US due to perceived problems with the autobuild process. It looks like he may be stripping strong encryption from the Debian port.

    There does appear to be an effort to change his mind and get a strong SSL version in there somewhere.

  • Can I ask what might be a stupid question. If you download one of the nightly builds (I try the win32 regularly) what options are they compiled with?
    Thanks
  • > A war of disinformation

    Or, more likely, you created the so-called impostors and this little silly war, just to get a little more attention on you.

    Who could loose time impersonating you from _several_ different accounts ? It is just ridiculous, even Bruce Pernes don't have that much impostors.

    Cheers,

    --fred

  • wondering why people still don't simply use the right tool for the task at hand...

    Because I run Linux :-)

    Cheers,

    Tim
  • Moderators, please check User Info before modding up.
    --
    Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
  • This is a known bug in the Personal Security Manager. The workarounds are not to install as root (install as yourself in a test directory) or to make the Personal Security Manager directory world-writable (a major security problem, obviously). The PSM rewrite targeted for this spring should fix this problem.

  • What's with IE, Netscape and others? (Score:3)

    by mach-5 ( 73873 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:05AM (#389324) Homepage
    It is interesting how Mozilla is really the only browser that we hear any news about. I really haven't heard much from Netscape and IE recently. Are there going to be other interesting improvements in the browser realm in the not too distant future? I don't know, maybe I just live in a box and don't pay too much attention to these things.
  • > I remember that demo that fitted on a floppy disk.. what happened?

    That "demo" that fitted on a floppy is still there. It is called Gecko. It is simply the rendering engine inside Mozilla.

    Rob
  • How about adding:

    user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.76 (Windows; U; NT4.0; en-us)")

    to your prefs in Mozilla instead?

  • Er... except that IE has _worse_ CSS support. With the possible exception of Mac IE 5.5, which has very good CSS1 support.

  • Obligatory Galeon Reference (Score:5)

    by Outland Traveller ( 12138 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:06AM (#389333)
    I've been using mozilla as my primary browser for the past 4 months. The browsing speed is acceptable on my PII-400 linux box, but not exactly snappy. After reading the recent articles on KDE, I thought it might be time to check out the alternatives to straight mozilla.

    Konquerer is quite nice, but I generally prefer to stick with the gmome/gtk apps. I was pleasantly surprised that Galeon has come a LONG way since I last looked at it. In some areas it has even surpassed mozilla's functionality:

    - user interface to control pop ups & animations.
    - nicer, more integrated bookmark management
    - better support for external handlers, like ftp and page source viewers.
    - crash recovery picks up browsing where you left off.
    - something called tabbed mode that I haven't played around with yet.
    - the starting points of integration with nautilus.

    All this, and it looks better, runs faster, and uses less memory than straight Mozilla. A win all around.

    Thank you free software.

    -OT
  • The most recent change to the roadmap was to push 0.9 out five more weeks and to call the next release after 0.8 "0.8.1" instead. This was done partly because many open bugs that require large changes to the code are nominated for being fixed by mozilla 0.9. The "if we're lucky" release date for 1.0 was also pushed back five weeks.
  • I think you're misunderstanding what they are calling "embedded". It's not for embedded devices. Embedded Mozilla are for projects like Galeon/skipstone/nautilus/whatever that use mozilla as a component inside their application, "embedded" in it.
  • or could it, perhaps, be a page in the Portugal domain? Just a guess.
  • I haven't really seen much development in the skins or chrome. This is one of the more interesting and *kewl* features as far as I'm concerned. I know it's tacky, but not only do I want a browser that functions really well, I also want one that looks damn cool.

    So where are all the chromes at? And don't point me to themes.org or the Netscape contest for themes. Those are mainly bad and I've grown bored of them.

  • Good choice of lines (Score:4)

    by plover ( 150551 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @05:49AM (#389347) Homepage Journal
    Did you notice that the "Vendor branches as required" lines are done in the same width as the "If we're unlucky" lines, not the "if we're lucky" lines?

    I assume this was done for AOL's 'benefit.'

    John

  • There is a nasty bug in Mozilla's handling of V4.x plugins:

    When Mozilla gets ready to load the plugin, it first tries to expressly load /usr/X11R4/lib/libXm.so.6 and /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (by full name and path, no less), and if the loads on these fail, it will silently fail to load the plug-in.

    On my systems, a) libXt doesn't depend on libXm (good thing, as I don't HAVE a libXm) and b) I don't have a libXt.so.6! So all my 4.x plugins wouldn't load.

    However, by adding a LD_PRELOAD=libXt.so before the actual invocation of mozilla-bin in run-mozilla.sh, it restored my plugins.

    This is a known bug, but they sure as hell don't go out of their way to make it WELL known. It took me months of digging to find it...

  • There is a legal issue; Galeon is GPLed and is hence currently incompatible with Mozilla, which is MPLed. But it needs Mozilla to compile so you can't link them and then distribute the result.

    However, Mozilla is being relicensed under (the GPL or the MPL at your choice) which should help Galeon. When it finally happens. (Not moaning, just I realise it can sometimes take time to make such things work).

  • this announcement seems to push 0.9 back a while, so I assume it pushes 1.0 back as well. This is probably due to the masses of bugs that have been reported against 0.8.

    In the long run, we get a better browser, but how long is the run?
  • No, it doesn't mean an additional testing phase, unless you expect all Mozilla development to stop once they reach 1.0, or are obsessed with the version number. It means that the testing phase that was previously meant to be for 1.0 now is 0.9.1. You'll get your fixes just as fast. It will just take one more step before the version number is 1.0.

  • Re:Strip it down, fer chrissakes (Score:5)

    by SquadBoy ( 167263 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:12AM (#389357) Homepage Journal
    So compile it without. Fairly easy to do. Takes 3 and half weeks but not hard at all to do so.
  • If your PHBs are worried about having a "supported tool" then IE 5 for Unix is not it.
    Look at the link you used, and check out the patches available for IE5/Solaris. There are at least a dozen known bugs which have been patched on Windows IE but not on either Unix version.

    Bugtraq discussed this a while back, and the conclusion was that "IE for Unix" is like "Netscape for Win3.1" - not something to bet on.

  • Re:Memory cache?! (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @08:01AM (#389367)
    >Currently, one of the most troubling bugs for me is that apparently memory cache isn't implemented for http!

    Hey, it's Mozilla. Even if you had a memory cache for HTTP, it all ends up being swapped to disk anyway when you run out of RAM, right? ;-)

  • I use it all the time for everything. Crashes every now and then (once every several days), but way less than NS 4.7x did.

    (I don't use it for mail, though, just web.)

    You *can* install it as root and then use it as a regular user; you just need to register components as root too.

    --

  • all I want is more stability and more speed. Good luck guys!
    I've been using 0.8 heavily since the day after release. I've only had one crash (vs. NS 4.75 crashing on me about a dozen times daily, and when it didn't crash it would leak memory until it was thrashing VM to death). The performance seems perfectly adequate on my Celeron 366 laptop.

    My only complaint isn't about Mozilla, it's about dumbasses that design their web site so that you can't view the content unless you're using a browser they "support". For instance, I went to one site that told me I had to upgrade to a browser that supported frames. This is moronic, they should have sent the content, and put the upgrade message in the "noframes" section.

    I guess I'll have to run a proxy to tell the servers that I'm running NS 4.something. Blech!

  • If it locked up your box, its not Mozilla's problem.
  • A question for the /. masses: I'm wondering if there's any hope for browsing the web mouseless under X?
    I use Ion [students.tut.fi] as a window manager, and live for the most part in Emacs, but I'm still at a loss when dealing with the web.
    Navigator 4.mumble supports rudimentary keyboarding, but I can't select links in the body of a document. I built Mozilla out of an updated ports last night, and tabbing betwee links "sort of" works (their heuristic which chooses where to start is totally broken), but the browsing experience is so unpleasant that it's a move of last resort. Sadly, this is one more area where IE rules over the competition.
    I've tried w3 mode, but it's not really good enough. Lynx is of course a possibility, but much of the web is visual and I don't want to give that up just because my hands hurt.
    Any ideas?
    TIA,
    (jfb)
  • It's actually not that slow when running -- slightly worse than NS 4.7x in the worst case, and far better in the best case.

    However, the *startup* speed is what people see first. They get a bad initial impression, because it takes 4x as long as NS 4.7x to load. And of course, people think IE starts almost instantly because Microsoft thoughtfully preloads most of it at system boot time.

    --

  • Something else that users/testers can do that's quicker and easier than fixing or even reporting bugs is to vote for them [mozilla.org]. Bugzilla [mozilla.org] users get a fixed number of votes (eg 10 for the browser) to allocate as they wish among open bugs. This helps gives developers an additional priority metric -- the will of the users!

    This memory cache bug is (imho) worth voting for. Other worthwhile bugs: mozilla should not need write-access to binary directory [mozilla.org], url box doesn't update after a theme switch [mozilla.org], and best of all, XBL is killing babies and german tourists [mozilla.org].

    As a side note, voting for a bug will add you to the cc list for that bug. So be ready.

  • All I want is for it not to suck up 120 megs of ram while it's running!!!

    It doesn't. The top program provides an inaccurate picture of memory utilization, showing how much RAM each process has access to, not necessarily how much each process owns. For example, Mozilla's threads share memory, but top counts each one separately, inflating Mozilla's apparent memory footprint. If you see six 'mozilla' entries in top, count only the one that's using the most memory for a more accurate picture.

    Also, much of the memory that XFree86 is reported to be using is mapped from the video card and used to store pixmaps. (Too bad X11 can't scale pixmaps.)


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • Well, honestly, Mozilla seems to be the future of Netscape anyway, so its understandable that Navigator/Communicator has been eclipsed by it. Internet Explorer probably just doesn't have a lot going on currently, for whatever reasons, be they Microsoft's legal hassles, focus on the next version of Windows, or whatever. So, for the time being, Mozilla's moving along at a steady clip while everything else is more or less languishing in their current state. Which is kind of a weird reversal, actually....

  • Mozilla's speed (Score:5)

    by FTL ( 112112 ) <slashdot.neil@fraser@name> on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:16AM (#389388) Homepage
    Most people seem to agree that Mozilla's biggest technical problem is its speed (or lack thereof). Given that Mozilla's 1.0 release keeps slipping year by year, I wonder if the speed issue will be substantially resolved simply by the fact that once released most people will be running faster computers.

    I can just see the programmers saying "Yes, we can make this product twice as fast, it will just take us 18 months of work", then sitting back and playing Quake while Moore's law grinds on.
    --

  • then Konqueror has been in development for a lot less time then Mozilla, and in my opinion is far more usable.

    it really gets on my nerves seeing these posts! does no one realise that mozilla is so far ahead of ANY other browser in terms of the technology and design, it's not even funny. I'd like anyone to name a browser which has full standards compliance, which can build on every single major platform from one code base.
    mozilla is one of the best cross platform projects ever thought of, and deserves a lot more credit than it gets

  • Nope. He almost caught me, though. Me, I'd rather not overuse this principle... Keep it for special moments, like, say, a frontpage story!
  • The page loaded fine, thanks. Using Mozilla 0.8. Nice try, though.
  • when viewing an http or ftp page you have to hold down SHIFT and left click to get a new window. When viewing a local file you hold down CTRL and left click.

    And when you are in the options dialog you cannot minimize it. When it crashes you cant minimize it nor close the window. The task manager fails to kill it. You basically have to reboot, before you bsod- if lucky.

    I have to work with W2K all day, and if I could change one thing it'd be to add a window manager.

  • Currently, one of the most troubling bugs for me is that apparently memory cache isn't implemented for http!

    It's not implemented in Mozilla. It's implemented in your file system's disk cache capability. I can't speak for Windows, but Linux uses all RAM that's not used for apps for disk caching.


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.

  • Slightly Bored (Score:3)

    by MonkeyMagic ( 118319 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:22AM (#389414) Homepage
    I'm a supporter of the Mozilla project, I use it as my primary browser (on windows - on Linux it seems to be a bit of a dog). It rarely crashes and now renders (most smaller) pages very quickly.
    I'm glad they are taking their time to build a standards compliant cross-platform browser that will hopefully be easier to upgrade to future standards than the competition.

    But I'm REALLY bored of reading about it. I'm bored of constantly hearing trolls who obviously haven't even bothered to use it, let alone understand the technology, slagging it off. And I'm bored of people saying "all I need is a browser, not an email/composer/toaster" (hint, read the fucking install instructions).

    Please, Mozilla developers, hurry - not so that you don't lose more market share - just so I don't have to read

    from the dead-as-a-dodo dept.
    A reader writes: "Mozilla 1.0 has now been delayed by more bugs found in milestone 9.9999"


    DILBERT: But what about my poem?

  • Duh, I'm sure CmdrTaco used the Slashcode story editting page to input the story and not Composer.

    Actually, if he was using Mozilla, he did.

    Mozilla's text entry widget is implemented using the Composer component.

    Long-term plan is to write a special-purpose text entry widget that's a lot smaller and removes the depenency on Composer, but for now it works.

    Did you use your editor to input your comment and then ftp some HTML to slashdot? I didn't think so.

    Some browsers such as e.g. lynx can 'shell out' to the editor of your choice for editing text fields. Replace FTP with HTTP, and you've got it.

  • The project will be 3 years old, come April. Happy fucking anniversary -- there is almost nothing to show for it. The development tools, blah, blah, blah are great, but where's the browser?
    You mean the browser I'm using to post this reply? It's an open source project. It's been available to the public from the start. The just-before-Milestone-8 build I'm using is feature rich and relatively solid, as long as the sites I visit don't try any extravagant tricks with popup windows. (And if you think that's a problem, think back to NS4.x, when Geocities ad banners, using the layer tag Netscape recommended, would eventually leave the browser unresponsive, requiring the user to manually kill the process before they could resume browsing. Next to that, the occasional ill-behaved popup is nothing.)
    Several standards compliant browsers have been built during this project's existence.
    Several? I can only think of one: Opera. The others are either branches of Mozilla (NS6, Galeon), or are only standards-compliant when there isn't a pissing contest over the standard (NS4.x, MSIE).
    Most people prefer to use an alternate email client. Hardly anyone gives a flying rat's ass about XUL.
    So what about those who benefit from the built-in email and XUL? Dropping email and news would be a regression from NS4.x, and in my experience, dropping popular and/or useful features for the sake of expedience is a Bad Thing. An I don't give a damn about Qt. (That's a whole 'nother rant.) But that doesn't seem to be stopping development of KDE, nor should it.

    We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead

  • Re:Same old bloat (Score:3)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:47AM (#389422) Journal
    I was saying the same thing from M15 to 0.7. 0.8 blew me away, though. Once it's running, it's fast, sleek, usable, and actually _releases_ memory that it grabbed on startup. (go figure that one!)

    However, it behaves very differently on some friends' machines which by all rights, are nearly identical. I suspect that some of the remaining bugs are getting picked up on particular configurations and hardware, and it still sucks in those cases.

    But quite honestly, moz0.8 is the first time I've been at all excited by the Mozilla project in ages. I actually see it possibly becoming an excellent browser now, instead of a rambling experiment with no end.

  • Galeon *feels* helluvalot faster. And, light on features does mean something - more codes lead to more bugs. Worse if nobody finds the code useful (e.g. XUL at this moment).

    And to people who says "XUL will be a useful feature...and what if....do we have to reimplement it again?" - you must all be emacs fans. No thanks. I only want one OS on my computer at a time. By your philosophy, I guess you'll have to throw in a next-generation 3D terrain engine just for that extra "obsolecense-proof" security feel.

    By the way, is there a way Galeon can be run without installing Mozilla at all? If there's a clear separation between Mozilla and Gecko then it'd be great.
  • *Yawn* Call me when it's usable. Both 0.8 and a build from current CVS show gross stability problems. The OK button in the preferences stops working, it segfaults when I try to delete a folder from my bookmarks or sometimes when I close a window with another one running, etc. Sure, it has its good points, but I'll wait until it's more reliable.

    The bottom line is that there's a fast, stable and feature-filled browser for *nix platforms out there NOW, and its name isn't Mozilla.
  • IMHO, that's exactly what the GUI feels like even on my 2x933 PIII box: Java. Everything inside the page rendering box is sweet and fast but the GUI seems to have the most problems still. There are many graphic anomalies, windows that aren't the right size for their components or that won't close properly, ghosting while dragging, etc. 90% of this is really minor and didn't kept me from switching over from NS 4.x last week when 0.8 came out. As I said the rendering is much, much better than NS 4.x.

    What was preventing me before, and what is still very painful, is the lack of romaing access. Oh how I miss it! :(

    mh

  • Works fine with .8 on W2k too.

    The other 2 don't load (duh!) but don't crash it either.
  • Konqueror has nice, fast rendering

    Got it.

    support for Netscape plugins

    Reportedly works.

    https using OpenSSL

    PSM does the job.

    Javascript support with the ability to disable window.open

    Got both; check the 0.8 release notes, what's new, last item.

    fine-grained cookie management

    Seems to have it.

    To each their own, but I personally can't see any reason to use Mozilla over Konqueror.

    How about "I don't use KDE2" or "I don't have it installed"? Let's not forget "I don't run Linux/BSD, and I'd rather not use IE." Keep in mind, Mozilla's goal has been to be truly cross-OS, cross-architecture, while being a fully-fledged web browser (and development platform). I would think that would take longer than just writing a working browser for one or two OSes on one desktop. I've run both; Moz is almost as fast as Konq, and about the same size when you take into account the fact that Konqueror uses some kdeinit functions (try running it under GNOME to see what I mean).

    Konqueror's a great browser, but it's developers haven't had to deal with the same challenges the Mozilla crew has. You can't fairly compare the two unless that's taken into account.

    In any event, I uninstalled KDE2 long ago, so Mozilla it is...and I'm very happy with tha

  • *sigh* no one got the joke :/

    Don't worry - I think a fair number did. While the original posting was quietly amusing, the responses here are a complete howler ;-)

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Needed feature (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mozilla is close, so very close. However there is one thing that it's lacking, and that's a "Shop" button. Frankly I don't see how it can be considered a serious browser unless it has a "Shop" button. They better get cracking on implimenting this vital functionality.
  • Or skipstone [muhri.net], which is even more lightweight than Galeon. (No GNOME stuff; just GTK.)

    --

  • Re:Strip it down, fer chrissakes (Score:4)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:29AM (#389452)
    Are you stupid or something? If you don't want news. email etc., why did you bother installing them when the installer gave you the option not to?
  • I open tasks and see Navigator, Composer and Address Book on my linux install of Mozilla....

    I run the installer and actually choose to install only navigator. It is an option button and then I have to click next.

    Here's my suggestion. We add another phase to the installer to implement "Purist" mode. This will change the descriptions on the option buttons to

    • All the shit
    • No extra shit
    • Only the shit I want

      aka Don't bother me with details mode

      Seriously. Forget the tarballs and stick with the installer. You will be happier.

  • I have been using Mozilla for about 3 months as my main browser. It's pretty good, has some nice features and generally renders everything properly. The only minor exception to this is borders around tables, which it sometimes seems to chop off at the bottom.

    My only other grumble is psm, which quite regularly goes off on one, consuming all my memory and cpu time. Most annoying. But I live with these little problems becauses its still a thousand times better than Netscape 4.x.

    Hats off to everyone involved. Its getting better by the day.

  • While everyone continues to use software that is in it's 19th beta stage, buggy and unfinished, I can use a very stable commercial product (say, IE for example) that performs well

    Not if your computer doesn't have an x86 processor. In that case, you'd need an emulator plus a copy of Windows (USD $320 [microsoft.com]). Even if you are running on an x86, you need a virtualizer ($300 [vmware.com]) plus Windows. Isn't $600 a bit steep for a web browser? Might as well just pay for Opera [operasoftware.com].

    What's that rule in software development? Something like, adding more members to a project team makes the project later. Or to put it another way, too many cooks in the kitchen...

    Spoil the broth. See also The Mythical Man-Month [barnesandnoble.com].

    ...scooter my daisyheads [adcritic.com].
    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • The cache subsystem is being written to improve performance, stability and flexibility. Basically, the old cache sucked. Patience :-)

    Gerv
  • Think!
    Please try taking your own advice.

    Here, let me spell it out for you:

    1. Mozilla can cache things to disk.
    2. Linux employs a cache in memory of frequently-accessed disk pages.
    3. Therefore, when mozilla accesses its disk cache, it will often actually access the data from memory.

  • Rereading my reply, I see that I could have worded it somewhat better!

    I meant, of course, that I don't use IE (as you so helpfully suggested) because I don't run Windows :-)

    Cheers,

    Tim
  • I just have one tiny problem... I can visit secure sites only as root, on my machine! I dont know why this happens, but everytime I try to visit a secure site using my normal username, mozilla hangs. All my ns4 plugins work fine, except the realplayer launching. (I mention this because it might be related to the secure sites not working). I think its because mozilla is failing to launch psm (which is a seperate application) or /usr/bin/realplay. Has anyone else had this problem? I've been wrestling with it for months...


    --
  • Opera [opera.com]. It's adware, and closed source, so the purists won't go there. But it WORKS.

  • I tried Mozilla 0.8 a few days ago (the last milestone I tried was 0.6 IIRC), and was pleasantly suprised by how much it has improved. Didn't crash once in several hours of use, even when I fed it Java. It even liked my 4.x series plugins[1] (namely Flash, I haven't tested realplayer or acrobat yet), which is a very cool point 'cuz that means there are whole masses of plugins that people use/rely on that won't have to be recoded all in a hurry for the new version.

    So all in all: yay Mozilla! Thanks, coder dudes! :-)

    [1] easy to do: cp /path/to/4.x/plugins/* /path/to/mozilla/plugins/ worked for me (one other filesystem level oddity was that to get java to work I had to symlink the libjavaplugin_oji.so from ~4 levels deep under (/path/to/mozilla)/plugins/ back to plugins; seems odd that the installer wouldn't do this).


    --
    News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
  • - something called tabbed mode that I haven't played around with yet.

    I love browsing in Linux/Unix more than Windows for one reason: the middle mouse button for clicking on links. In case you don't know, the middle button will open a link in a new window, which allows for browsing in a more tree-like fashion, branching off in different directions. I realize you can do this in windows with a right-click and a left-click, but when you know you could do it in one middle-click, it's not the same. It takes too long.

    Now, what does this have to do with tabbed mode? Well, with tabbed mode turned on, when you middle click on a link, instead of opening in the link up in a new window, it gets opened up in a new tab in the current window. It works just like a notebook (well like a GtkNotebook, anyway). It's a bit faster than using new windows everytime, and much easier to work with, IMO.

    Skipstone [muhri.net] actually had this before Galeon and I assume this is where Galeon got the idea from. Tabbed mode is why I was using Skipstone, but now that Galeon has picked it up and added an easier way to close each tab, Galeon is my browser of choice.

    Here's a picture [muhri.net] of Skipstone in tabbed mode to give you an idea of what it looks like, in case you're curious. The tabs are right above the navigation icons.

  • It's your lucky day. The browser you're looking for can be found (link to IE).

    Some of us aren't as lucky. IE doesn't run on every computer being made today, especially more powerful workstations. (Support for Alpha and other non-Mac RISC machines was dropped back in the NT4 days.) See my previous comment #192 [slashdot.org] to see the real cost of running IE.

    "You mentioned ... cellular."
    "Tiddly-day [adcritic.com]."
    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.

  • VIRUS/TROYAN ALERT ! (Score:3)

    by f5426 ( 144654 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:32AM (#389481)
    Sure, we love to make fun of windows users mailing .EXE and .VBS around, but hell a perl script linked on slashdot front page ?

    Could a perl wizard tell us what exactly this linuxnews.pl do, as it looks a little cryptic to me ? Sure, it looks like perl, but...

    Cheers

    --fred

  • Memory cache?! (Score:4)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alexNO@SPAMspamcop.net> on Friday March 02, 2001 @07:04AM (#389482) Homepage
    Currently, one of the most troubling bugs for me is that apparently memory cache isn't implemented for http [mozilla.org]! Someone please tell me that I'm reading the bug report wrongly. Really, I'm in such disbelief about this "no memory cache", that I just can't comprehend how this could be the case. Maybe the bug report is describing that they just haven't yet implemented the new cache system or something, that perhaps there "old memory cache" is at least still in there?

    Of course, that's not to say that I don't like Mozilla. In fact, I make a point of downloading the nightly builds [mozilla.org] every day :)

    PS For those Mozilla enthusiasts in the audience, you may find the daily build comments [mozillazine.org] interesting. There, the page's author lists the various bugs that were fixed in the day's build.

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • Here's the thing... I love open source and all. I love what the Mozilla guys are doing. But looking at the timeline just shows me once again how hard it is for opensource projects to compete with commercial projects, especially on release dates.

    While everyone continues to use software that is in it's 19th beta stage, buggy and unfinished, I can use a very stable commercial product (say, IE for example) that performs well, does the job correctly and hardly ever crashes. And we have to wait until Q2 (if they're lucky, so really Q1 of next year) for a 1.0 release of Mozilla.

    The way I see it, open source projects are meant to be in infinite beta stages (or alpha, depending on the team members). They're never supposed to have a final release. :-) What's that rule in software development? Something like, adding more members to a project team makes the project later. Or to put it another way, too many cooks in the kitchen...

    In the open source world, we continue to espouse the benefit of many eyes looking at the code as contributing to a better product. But if those many eyes end up delaying the final product to eternity, what's the real benefit?

    --

  • The speed problems I see are primarily in the GUI which is XUL based. An XML/JavaScript based GUI like this is likely to only ever work well on high end systems. The Gecko rendering engine is not too much of a resource hog though in and of itself, and Galeon and Kmeleon et. al are really on par with IE for resource utilization, once you factor out the hidden resource utilization of the stuff stuck in system DLLs that are autoloaded at system startup.
  • You're forgetting about all those little GUI glitches. No show stoppers, but they do become annoying if you use Mozilla long enough. I think it is good they inserted an additional development cycle. This will allow them to address some of the more annoying bugs. That, and they need to speed up news and mail. As it is now it is not very useful.
  • please point me to the versions of this wonderful browser which work on my mac or on my windows machine.

    --Asa
  • the point here is mozilla made a big hype of opensourcing main browser code and is way behind schedule

    mozilla didn't make a big hype about much of anything. mozilla, defined as the people contributing thousands upon thousands of hours making Mozilla, have been too busy to hype anything. Netscape and the press made a big hype of opensourcing the Communicator 5 sourcecode. mozilla (remember, the people actually working on this project) made very little hype when they started scrapping large chunks of the Communicator code and building an new set of apps from the ground up. mozilla (remember, the dedicated contributors, paid and unpaid, who have been busting their butts to make something useful) didn't make a lot of hype when the first major commercial Distribution was releases. They were too busy trying to make it better. mozilla (those people fixing the bugs you reported) didn't make a big hype about anything.

    But they should have had a browser out (moz 1.0) and converted into that mozilla-os platform in ver 2.0.

    So you'd be thrilled if mozilla (those folks working to make a free and open source browser for you) had decided to drop support for everyone except win32 and had instead focused on building a simple win32 browser around the old Communicator codebase which neither supported the standards nor had any future (as a codebase) beyond 5.0. You think that it would have made better sense to have build a so-so win32 only Communicator 5 suite and and then a year or two later scrapped that codebase and start all over again on a 2.0 which was cross platform.

    I think that the piece of the puzzle that you're missing here is that the decision to scrap the old codebase and move over to this 'yet another crossplatform appdev platform' means that Mozilla can be built for mac, or linux, or BSD, or solaris, or win32, or hpux, or BeOS, or irix, or AIX, OpenVMS, OS/2, True64 and others. Sure, mozilla (those folks giving you a free and open source, standards supporting, fully featured internet application suite with support for DOM, CSS, HTML, mathML, SVG, bi-di, XSLT, SSL/TLS, simplified I18N and L10N, and a set of technologies that help you to build your own networked apps like forumzilla, xmlterm, protozilla, galeon, kmeleon, nautilus and others) could have scrapped the idea of making something really useful and focused on a win32 browser to compete with MS for the windows desktop (a futal effort in my opinion) completely throwing out the tradition of supporting linux and other non MS operating systems. mozilla (they're the good guys) could have done a lot of things differently but I suspect that folks would have criticized them for whatever the decisions were and I'm personally pretty happy with the results of the decisions as they were made.

    --Asa

  • Given that Netscape 6.0 and beyond are tweaked and rebranded versions of Mozilla, by covering Mozilla development, Slashdot is covering the cutting edge of Netscape. Myself, I'm disappointed with Netscape 6.0, but based on the current Mozilla builds, I expect Netscape 6.1 to rock.

    Netscape was the first "mainstream" browser older Slashdotter will have used. Mozilla/Netscape is cross-platform, highly standards compliant, and free software to boot. The release of the Netscape 4.x code was a highlight in the early popularization of the Open Source movement. Taken together, it's not suprising Mozilla makes the Slashdot front page as often as it does.

  • This thing will NEVER be usable in a corporate environment (i.e.- TRUELY replace 4.7x) until it has LDAP support built in! Sure, it'll be great for home use, but w/out LDAP searches in the mail client, it'll still have to run NS 4.7x!)

    Trying to live an Open-protocol Life in a Closed-Protocol world (read Exchange)!

  • Q2 of what year? (Score:3)

    by OlympicSponsor ( 236309 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:00AM (#389503)
    Let me preface this by saying that I'm using Mozilla right now and have been for several months. I love the project and browser and mail client seem pretty nice.

    BUT. Q2? Q2?? Since today is 3/2, that means they'd have to have this "1.0" release out in less than 90 days. No. Frigging. Way.

    I run Mozilla on an admittedly low-end machine (P5-166). Netscape runs fine, but eventually hogs all my memory (or crashes, or whatever). But Mozilla is butt-slow at basic things like screen-refreshes and pulling up new windows. And the mail client--fuggedaboudit. For crying out loud, the IMAP DELETE command doesn't even work yet.

    I wish them all the good-will in the world...but let's be realistic here. Q2? That's gotta be a typo.
    --
    Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
  • If everyone uses Galeon, Skipstone [muhri.net], kmeleon [kmeleon.org], nanozilla [igelaus.com.au], etc., that's a complete success for the mozilla project.

    --

  • I have three machines running Windows (don't ask, it's the result of a semi-failed business): a P-200, a P3-500 and a P3-750. All have 128MB or more. The P3-500 suddenly developed window slowness with one of the updates and it can now take up to 35 seconds to open a new Mozilla window. The P-200 has never had such slowness.
  • Q2 means between April 1st and June 30th.
    --
  • C'mon, if Mozilla was a Microsoft product, Mozilla 1.0 would be version 4.0.

  • Do you really think that, among the other lies and half-truths in your post, that the W3C has specifications for graphics primitives like drawing a line?

    I assume you've never heard of SVG [w3.org], the W3C's "language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML."

    Sprint PCS Free & Clear [adcritic.com]: More nonsensical than Zero Wing!
    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • Not a flame or a troll... could someone please give a decent explanation of why the Mozilla GUI is so sluggish? (Particularly the menus) That seems to be the #1 complaint I always hear.

    I use Moz .8 at work on a Win/PII (500mhz) and at home on Linux/AMD (350mhz) and though the page rendering is acceptable, the GUI is irritatingly sluggish. There's also lots of wierd behavior with multiple browser window openings.

    Is it because of the XUL having to render the thing from the custom themes? How does it work?

    Also, what was the "Philosophy" behind using an XUL custom themeable GUI instead of native Win/Gtk/Mac widgets? Was is mainly for OS independant "internet appliances"? Or just a need to have "kewl skins" like WinAmp? Wouldn't it have been better at least for now to build it with Win/Gtk/Mac native widget versions and do the XUL/Theming stuff later on? Thanks.

  • how about footprint reduction? (Score:3)

    by sommerfeld ( 106049 ) on Friday March 02, 2001 @06:01AM (#389522)
    Having tried 0.6 and 0.7, moooozilla is clearly a memory hog; it clearly doesn't quite fit on a 64m machine. On those brief moments when the system gives it enough memory it seems to be adequately fast.

    The milestones mentioned "embedded" mozilla. I really can't see the (cost sensitive) embedded types springing for 128mb of memory for web-pads and what have you; they're much more likely to go elsewhere for a more svelte browser..

    if they really want to make the embedded market happy, they should have the developers use 32mb (or smaller) machines for a few months...

  • Uh, an additional step means an additional testing phase. Which means a longer wait overall... I just want it all, I want it now

    * is dragged away from keyboard by co-workers *
  • Both Mozilla and Konqueror are aggressively standards-compliant. Stick to the standards and your pages will work.

    This is important. In the battle for mindshare of Web developers and an open Web, it's not "IE vs Mozilla vs Konqueror vs Opera vs ...". It's "IE vs the rest". In fact, since MacIE is very standards-compliant too, it's actually "WinIE vs the rest".
  • I was only talking about the web brower bit; I haven't played much with the newsreader and mail client.

    I should also mention that Mozilla sure does want a lot of RAM, and that psm tends to go crazy. Other than that.... :)

    --

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