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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 0.9 Out 448

Posted by CmdrTaco from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.
Malicose writes: "Mozilla 0.9 is out. Improvements include Automatic Proxy Configuration, Personal Security Manager 2.0 with improved performance and UI, and rewritten from scratch image rendering library." Someday this may very well be the best browser in the world. I write this in konqueror, and hope Moz 0.9 uses half the RAM and is twice as fast and convinces me to switch back.
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Mozilla 0.9 Out More

Mozilla 0.9 Out

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  • Re:Online banking? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07, 2001 @08:06PM (#239161)
    This is a well-known bug with Citibank's site.
    It is not a Mozilla problem.

    For details:
    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5707 4

  • In a related note, when are X509 Certs for signing/encrypting mail going to be used? This is something that I feel should be in before 1.0, and is the last thing that is keeping me using "Fucking Netscape 4 point X" (as it is known to the guys at work).
  • IE *really* doesn't handle memory properly. When I have moderator status I go to any /. discussion with > 100 or so comments (nested mode) and scroll a bit, and laugh as IE dies, and suddenly all my other programs start to die or give me the standard "out of memory" errors.

    Mozilla under windows doesn't have this problem :)

  • Copying software that is not licensed that way is theft.

    Nope. It's still just copyright infringement. It's an artificial legal construct to try to give some incentive for creators to continue to create stuff. Not to give them absolute ownership over what they create. They don't actually own the work that they create, they simply own a copyright over that work.

    If you want to argue that infringing on a copyright is immoral, I would agree. However, I would also insist that the copyright term extensions that have been bought by the copyright industry are also immoral (especially retroactive extensions as there is no possible way they could provide incentive to create works that have already been created). They don't have any compunctions about using their power to screw the public out of works that should have become public domain by now. I think that the public is starting to lose its compunctions about infringing on copyrights. What goes around comes around I guess.

  • Remember, the copyright laws allow the GPL to exist just as much as they allow proprietary software to exist.

    I'm well aware of this. I'm not against Copyright per se. I'm against the seemingly endless term extensions and further restrictions of our fair use rights. Roll the law back to something more reasonable (such as a term that is shorter thna a human lifespan, preferably much shorter), then get rid of the more onerous portions of the DMCA, and I'd be willing to support copyright. As it exists today, it does nothing but screw people.

  • You're also forgetting the "They should give up because IE is the best; why NS tries to compete with IE I'll never know, and Windows 2K never crashes for me" trolls.
  • It's free (libre and gratis) software.
    It's multi platform (something konq will never be (and should never be)).

    STOP COMPLAINING!

    I've only tried it on this linux box (amd 700, 128 megs) but it seems really fast. After clicking around a good bit, it's using some ram, but significantly less than X (according to top, which is known to lie without shame, particularly with memory).

    Try it. You'll like it. And if you don't, try konq, or better yet, help the developers make it (either one) better. Even if you just submit bug reports, it helps greatly.
  • Your RSS assersion isn't quite true either. Take oracle for example. Oracle maps a VERY large shared memory segment, to which all processes attach. If it's 20 megs, ALL oracle processes show up as 20 megs + internal process size. I've seen boxes with a gig of ram claiming that they had 3 gigs in RSS.

    There is some truth to what top/ps tells you WRT memory, but it is normally useless. So I just call it a lie, so the non-unix savvy will ignore it.

  • unscientific IE & Mozilla race (Score:4)

    by Odinson ( 4523 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:27AM (#239181) Homepage Journal
    I just did a little Mozilla IE race on WIN2k. Neither browser had visited the site before. With a 1/2 second lead (time to click and hit enter) IE was a second slower than Mozilla at rendering my.yahoo.com on a P3 256meg. Thats a total 1 and 1/2 second lead.

    Yea baby :)

  • I'll second this, Opera has become my primary Windows browser. I tried (and keep trying) Mozilla but the issues others keep ragging on kept me from adopting it. Opera does have its share of problems, including ones similar to IE with lots of dropdown listboxes on many open windows but overall it is more stable than IE (I still crash it, but not as often) and best of all, it remembers the websites you have open when it crashes. The key to getting used to Opera is in the prerferences, it will seem very strange freshly installed. But a few miniutes checking out various options will get you a browser that isn't very much different from IE or Netscape. Every Netscape 4.x user on windows owes it to themselves to spend some time with it, they just might find they have been missing out on something good.

    Chris Cothrun
    Curator of Chaos

  • MTBF (Score:2)

    by crisco ( 4669 )
    quote from page:

    MTBF For these builds is estimated at 2.168467 hours, based on 1976 reports and 4284.890000 hours of user testing from testers that have crashed and reported problems. (dev. builds tend to have low MTBF)

    Hey, thats pretty good, considering the status of the product and the fact that everyone complains about it so much. Those are cold hard numbers that shout "NO, It doesn't crash that often!"

    Of course, thats unacceptable for a production release. Any talkback MTBF numbers available for Netscape 4.x? What are the goals for MTBF?

    Oh, and BTW, I do have serious reasons for asking, I'm working on a Kiosk style project where we're considering moving from a custom app to a browser based product and need to consider this kind of thing.

    Chris Cothrun
    Curator of Chaos

  • Part of the problem is that Mozilla chose to write a good amount of the browser in Javascript. Another part of the problem is that they basically implemented their own distributed component model from scratch, as well as their own widgets, instead of using platform libraries and widgets. I understand the decision to use custom widgets (especially for the HTML), but the custom distributed component model was quite silly. Mozilla is basically GNOME re-implemented running one application. Personally, I find running Mozilla embedded in Galeon to be much, much better. This way Galeon handles all of the non-HTML stuff through GNOME, while Mozilla just does the HTML rendering.
  • Well, they could have used CORBA, since it does exist everywhere. Or they could have done it the AbiWord way, and use each platform's own component model.
  • Why is it any more insecure to include the root CAs in Mozilla than to include the SSL code in the first place? Surely that is equally open to tampering?

    (Ie, not very, given that all changes to the code must be from known developers or reviewed by known developers.)

  • Meanwhile, on the Debian front... (Score:4)

    by John Whitley ( 6067 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @11:31PM (#239191) Homepage
    .... we still have Mozilla "Stone Knives and Bearskins" M18-3 as our most current package.

    It seems that the major roadblock is legal review of the crypto-in-main policy amendment [debian.org]. But of course, this proposal is 117 days old as of this writing... with no new news that I've been able to detect.

    Does anyone have a clue what the holdup is?

  • /etc/issue? (Score:4)

    by Vic ( 6867 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @06:21PM (#239194) Homepage

    Who's going to see that besides people logging in right at the console anyway? I'd be more worried about them stealing the machine than portscanning me. Even issue.net should never get displayed. I mean, what security-conscious person is running Telnet? ;-)

    -Vic

  • Congratulations! (Score:4)

    by miguel ( 7116 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @07:28PM (#239196) Homepage
    Well, I have been running the nightly builds of Mozilla for quite some time now, and I am very happy with the speed improvements that have been landed over the past few weeks.

    Mozilla stopped feeling slugish for me about two weeks ago, and ever since it has kept on improving. Great work everyone!

    miguel.
  • there is java support.

    Javascript support is pretty good too. Not everything is supported with javascript, but most is.

    It gets better by the day.

    -- Thrakkerzog

  • I started using Linux because I couldn't afford software (Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc.) for Windows (not to mention being sick of rebooting and curious about Unix). I was unwilling to use illegal copies of software as it is stealing and I have moral standards to live by.

    Believe it or not, many GNU/Linux/BSD users do not consider stealing "not that bad of a solution"...

  • Point.

    I should have said copyright violation. Abiding by copyrights is important if you want to use the GPL and don't want to be a hypocrite.

    Abiding by the law is also important. Consider Aristotle who drank the belladonna despite knowing he was innocent and being given plenty of opportunity to escape. He honored the decision of the Senate because he believed that without law there is no civilization and without civilization man is little more than an animal. Of course there is the counter argument that unjust laws should not be followed, but who decides what is just and what is unjust? That is what Congress is for. Congress is corrupt you say? Then we must work to improve it, because a better system has yet to be implemented.

  • Did I say Aristotle? Doh! I'm an idiot.

  • It's been ages since I read Plato... please excuse my ignorance.

  • Socrates, not Aristotle.

  • Re:lib pr0n (Score:3)

    by hexix ( 9514 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @05:54PM (#239211) Homepage
    Yeah, its called libpr0n, although then its called something else for the public, imglib2 or something?

    I think they should have just stuck with libpr0n for the public too, anyone who would find that distasteful probably wouldn't even know what pr0n refers to to get the joke anyways. They'd just think it was some computer mumbo-jumbo.
  • I'm using a ver that was built back in febuary... I have like 192 megs of ram, plus 30 megs of swap in use at the moment... and mozilla is only using at most 20% of memory... thats after its been up for two or three days, with atleast two windows at any given time.
  • ... is totally borked. None of the standard root CAs show up. Loading https://sourceforge.net results in mozilla whining because it doesn't recognize the root CA.

    ... and the dialog box is too small, resizing it doesn't refresh it the exposed portion, and without the Ok widget exposed, there's does not appear to be a way to close the dialog box.

    ... I'm going back to 20010417, the last build (AFAIK), where SSL over a socks5 proxy actually worked right...

    ---

  • ... except that root CAs were packaged with Mozilla at least as far back as 20010417.

    ---

  • Who said I didn't report the bug?

    They closed it as WORKSFORME. Of course, they didn't mention whether it WORKSFORME on their RPM build on RH 7.1, only that it WORKSFORME on their own tree.

    My experience with reporting Mozilla bugs was that it was a major waste of time. The only thing one can do is wait and hope that somehow it gets independently fixed.

    ---

  • http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79318

    Read it and weep.

    Finally someone with a brain came along, a few days later and reopened it and bumped it to severity=major.

    Browsing through the other referenced bugs I see that junruh's modus operandi is to pretty much close every bug as WORKSFORME right away, and then have someone else reopen it, after ripping him a new asshole.

    ---

  • Re:Mozilla bashing. (Score:3)

    by MSG ( 12810 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @05:45PM (#239224)
    (according to top, which is known to lie without shame, particularly with memory)

    I _do_ wish people would stop saying that. 'top' does NOT lie. Users just don't understand what it's telling them. Your misunderstanding doesn't constitute a lie. The "SIZE" column displays the total size of _everything_ the process is using, including memory on the card that the X server has mmap()'d. If you want to see how much of your system memory is used, use 'ps' and look at the RSS column.
  • I too have almost given up on mozilla as well. I am using konq, like the poster of this .. Although I have had to install kdesupport, kdelibs, kdebase, just to get it, I also got kde multimedia with that and some other kde tools (I'm running gnome as my desktop, windomaker as my window manager and I still use some kde apps). (this will probably get moded down to -1)

    I tried Opera and found that it did not handle plugins that well. I find konq to handle the plugins a little better. I still use Netscape 4 to visit Cnet and watch cnet tv, as mozzilla .8 didn't work at that site and neither did opera, or konq.

    I think that when mozilla reaches its 1.0 release it may be worth a second look at, but if they just rewrote the image rendering again, then doesn't it beg the question of how many bugs that introduced?

    I then look at the system requirements of mozilla and have to say that you are better off with opera, netscape 4.x even. konq is good, and would do fine with those requirements, but it is a little bit of a beast itself too.

    Oh and watch out when converting profiles from netscape to mozilla. When .8 did the conversion on mine it too the .netscape directory and grew it emensly, from 7Meg to almost 100 Meg. Why I don't know, but it did. Not sure if this is a bug or what, but I suspect that they are storing the data differently. Besides, why do I have to create a profile for a browser? yes there should be preferences, but not a profile when you start it up. That is really obnoxious. Maybe a prompt "would you like to create a profile" rather than forcing me to create a default profile.

    It would be so nice if you could just install just the browser, with NO references to anything else, no composer, no mail, just the browser, AND then configure the browser to use an external mail app, unlike netscape 4.

    Can you say.. scope creap / feature creap???

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Opera is available for Linux as well, I use it at work and it works very well.

  • http://www.kmeleon.org/
    Warning: This is a REALLY basic browser. But it exists.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • This was on my RedHat 6.2 box.

    Not only would it not read SSL pages for me (it just showed a blank page), it crashed on me while I was trying to poke around in the menus to see if there was a toggle to turn on SSL.

    PeterM

  • I don't know about 0.9 but nightly builds used to have this bug still two weeks ago. SSL through proxy didn't work at all. It's fixed in the nightly builds.

  • ...is the non-existance of a tabbed browsing feature/chrome. Look at http://www.netcaptor.com/ (browser I use on the winbox now, uses IE engine) for an example of that.
    It's just so much easier to have every new window be a tab...popups never annoy me, taskbar buttons don't get unmanagably small, and so on, and so forth.
    -Is- anyone working on something like this for Mozilla? I'd love to know.
  • I'm speaking with regards to my Win32 box; I'm already using mozilla on the Linux one
    (Why do I have a win32 box? Games. That is why that box exists, why it will continue to exist until WINE becomes perfect or a lot of games get ported (and old ones backported) to Linux; don't try to persude me to switch on that machine).
  • Yes, but will it make Julianne Fries?

    --

  • Konq (Score:4)

    by IceFox ( 18179 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @05:04PM (#239245) Homepage
    I must say that I agree with everyone who talks about how good konq has become. I used to use Netscape 4.x all the time. Then when my GlibC libs didn't want to work with netscape I was forced to used konq. Two weeks later when I had everything sorted out I found konq to be so much more then netscape had been. Faster loading, less memory, faster rendering. I couldn't see myself going back. One of the best parts is that because I run kde the entire enviorment has 1 theme. The browser looks and acts the same as the rest of my desktop. And libs that are used in konq are used in other applications making the total memory usage of my system less. That in itself is worth quite a bit (common ui accross my desktop). I have tried Mozzilla a number of times over the past year, but each time it was less then what I needed. Who knows if this is better then my current konq (kde 2.1.1) , but at this point I havn't found a page (for me personally) that my current konq can't handle and konq looks the same as everything else. When I try out mozzilla I am sure that it will load 30 extra mb of xml, ui, and the backend portable libraries. I know that these are good and all, but I don't really care for all that. All I want it a simple clean browser and so far konq does that for me. I will await the .9 reviews. (and take a look at it myself)

  • Opera 5.11 (Score:3)

    by Entropy_ah ( 19070 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @06:39PM (#239247) Homepage Journal
    I'll use nothing else nowadays. If the banner ad at the top dosent bother you, its the fastest browser out there, and quite standards compliant. They even have a native flash plug-in now.
    http://www.opera.com/
  • Browser for a WinDoze box?

    Opera. [opera.com]

    Fast, light, solid. Not free, but worth the bucks. A fine example of what Windows software ought to be. Cheap, good, AND fast.

    Yeah, yeah, call me a heretic for recommending something that ain't free, much less not berating her for not running Linux.... fsck it, I yearn for the old days when you had to know a few things to get on the 'net. But I'm not gonna be a sourpuss about it. If they figure out the Linux guys are helpful, just maybe we'll get a few converts. :)

  • For some reason, I always have to login twice. The first time nothing happens and the page just reloads, the second time I'm logged in properly. This is not a mozilla problem since I have this problem with any browser (I tried konq, opera, ie). Also it happens on any computer I tried (so it is not a connection issue either). My guess is that the login scripts are a bit messy (probably due to the use of perl), not in the last place beacause slashdot seems to be the only site where I have this problem.

  • Not sure what you mean by 'fixing the wheel scrolling', but if you can turn off the smooth scrolling bullshit in tools->internet options->advanced.

    I don't care all that much about IE's smooth scrolling. I like how you can use Control+wheel to scroll a page at a time in both Konqueror & Mozilla. (Netscape 4.x can be made to do this using imwheel.) If you try this in IE, it grows & shrinks the fonts (only the fonts that haven't been hard coded to a specific point size by moronic web coders & HTML editors. AUGH!!! USELESS!!!)

  • Re:Konq (Score:4)

    by MrClean ( 23413 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @06:22PM (#239259)
    Interesting the main reason you prefer kong is the main reasons Microsoft integerated IE into windows. Same look and feel; and better performance. May be they were right after all.

    I am not saying they are but it is an interesting observation.
    1. What sort of idiot has a couple of hundred messages in their inbox?
    2. With my inbox (351 messages) the new milestone seems pretty much as fast as it could be.
  • I was just going to ask that very question, if using talkback helped at all - I've been trying to use Talkback the whole time and have the .9 Talkback build installed now. It just caught a nasty bug dealing with a odd SSL certificate...

    One thing I was wondering though is if it made any difefrence adding in comments and URL's. I add them anyway figuring it might help, but wasn't sure people ever read them.

  • Please use talkback builds. (Score:5)

    by endico ( 29407 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @06:19PM (#239264) Homepage
    Please, please, please, use our talkback builds on Windows [mozilla.org], Macintosh [mozilla.org] and Linux [mozilla.org]. Using talkback builds gives us more crash data so common crash bugs can be quickly identified and fixed. Yes, people really do look at this stuff. This is an incredibly easy way to report bugs. You don't need a bugzilla account, you don't need to write coherent english sentences and for a change, filing DUPLICATES IS GOOD!

    Here's a sample crash analysis [mozilla.org] page. Watch out, this page is 2+ MB.

  • Re:What happens to Talkback bug reports? (Score:5)

    by endico ( 29407 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @08:40PM (#239265) Homepage
    >After for first two or three crashes, I stop
    >sending them because I fear my duplicate
    >Talkback bug reports are causing some Netscape
    >employee to curse my name.. "damn! it's that
    >same guy sending in a dozen bug reports for the
    >same silly crash!" :-)

    Heh. Not quite. The crash reports go to a database, not to people. If Mozilla crashes for you during normal everyday use, then you should report each crash. The most common crashes are the ones that tend to get the most attention so if you neglect to report all your crashes, then you're just making them look less common. I'm not sure exactly how the data is tabulated but it can't hurt to report each crash.

    On the other hand if you crash in the same place over and over to just spam talkback then yes, you'll be cursed at.
  • Javascript is supported more than just "pretty good". If you're talking about DOM support this statement makes a little more sense. Mozilla does not support all of the Communicator 4.x and IE proprietary DOM stuff. Layers implemented using the Comm. 4.x or IE methods will not work in Mozilla but Layers implemented using W3C standards should work, for example.

    --Asa

  • Re:Thank you! (Score:4)

    by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @09:41AM (#239271) Homepage
    Yes, please include URLs when relevant and if you know what actions caused the crash please include steps to reproduce in the comment box. When we get many talkback reports with the same stacktrace but none of the reports have steps to repro it can make fixing the crash more difficult. Thanks for your help in testing Mozilla and reporting problems.

    --Asa

    You keep an eye on frequent crasher bugs by querying Bugzilla keyword 'topcrash'.
  • Mozilla is getting really nice. I know it's come slow, but it's here, and think about where it was a year ago. The advancement is stunning. I've only been using it everyday for like 5 months now but gaah it's awesome.
  • I've just been playing with .9 a bit, and it appears that the Junkbuster proxy actually works with it! Woo hoo!
  • As much as I love Mozilla 0.8, I have personally encountered either what I'd call bugs or burrs that simply haven't been ground off yet. God I hope they get them fixed soon. Mozilla would be incredibly excellent if they could hone it done a bit. (Oh god no, not the Pentium 4 commercial with the bald smurfs. Noooo!!! It's on TV right now. :( ) I personally think the Mozilla folks, while they're doing a great job, they should spend time fixing the existing bugs and honing the product than adding more features. Please.... :)

    --

  • Some of the problem was rendering problems. Some had to do with plugins. Some had to do with cookies. Actually a lot of it had to do with cookies and userid/passwd history. It's a great product. It just needs a little honing to make it excellent. If I could program worth a damn, I'd offer to help. As it is, the best I can do for them is to test releases for them and report back.

    --

  • Are you building yourself? Or using the nightlys?
  • It runs on the operating systems people use... I need a browser that runs on Linux, Irix, and Solaris for my day-to-day browsing. I want one that also runs on Windows/Mac for those special occasions when I use them. What are my options exactly?

  • Re:debian (Score:2)

    by BZ ( 40346 )
    That remains to be seen, as the debian packages of 0.9 have not yet been created....

  • Re:mmmmK (Score:2)

    by BZ ( 40346 )
    Pretty well. For one thing it runs on the OSes I need a browser on....
  • You must have missed the "mail front-end performance rewrite landed _after_ 0.8.1" part of the release notes...

    On large mailboxes the front end is up to 20 times faster than the old one when scrolling and the like.

  • Er... What exactly is supposed to be fixed about the site?
  • Linux is fine with 32M of RAM... as a server. There is no way to comfortably run X in 32M of RAM and expect to run anything else and not swap. Such is life.
  • There is something to say about page designers whose sense of "how pages were meant to appear" is based on how IE renders those pages.....
  • There is no debugging code in the prebuilt binaries.

    That said, they were compiled with gcc 2.91 and -O1, and gcc 2.91 sucks. Moving to 2.95 just now made a significant performance difference.

  • There is also the issue of top's display of threads (really a kernel interface issue). It misleads a _lot_ of people.
  • The bug exists to convince citibank to fix their script. And a user-agent-spoofing panel is going to be in prefs in the near future most likely.
  • Right. :) The guy who wrote the site is the head of the standards-compliance group for Mozilla...
  • Huh? If I grab the soda the store does not have it anymore and can't sell it to anybody. that's stealing. If I go to the store and take picture of the soda, or videotape it or magically copy it and drink it then the store still has the same soda.
  • You, or possibly your machine, are on serious crack. 0.9 is way faster than 0.8.1 on Unix for most people.

    BTW 0.9.1 will be a LOT faster and smaller than 0.9. Some major pieces of work have already landed or are about to land:
    -- XPCDOM (slightly faster across the board, >2MB space saved on startup)
    -- "Paint throttling" (~10% speedup on page loads)
    -- HTTP rework (~10% page load speedup, sometimes more)
    -- gcc -O2 on Linux (~10% page load speedup)
  • But only in certain use cases. Such as: not using it. In Windows, just minimize Mozilla, and watch the RAM usage drop from, in my one experiment, 25MB to 5MB. Maximizing it brings it back up to 15MB.
    --
  • Indeed, check out libpr0n.com [libpr0n.com]
  • Despite the fact that the parent is a troll, I'd like to point out that I'll probably never use Mozilla's Mail/News function, because I don't want to wait for a browser to load just to read my mail.

    I hope Mozilla will have good external program support (mutt, tin, et al.).
    ------
    I'm an assembly guru ... What's a stack?

  • The Javascript and XML engines still load, which means I'm still waiting for a browser to start.
    ------
    I'm an assembly guru ... What's a stack?
  • I couldn't find any bugs in Bugzilla under your email address. Do you have the bug #?
  • "but does it slice and dice?"

    I think there's a RFE for slicing and dicing, but it does make chop suey in five different ways.

  • The things I've read said that currently the Mac port is the worst of the three main ones in terms of stability/performance (not a dis on Macs, but just the way Mozilla is). However, I'm suprised to hear its that bad.

    BTW, the interface is pretty much fixed. You can add and remove some of the buttons, but if you want real change get new themes. New themes are available thru the view, apply themes, get new themes menu (which takes you to x.themes.org's theme site). The Lopburi flat theme is great, if the guy ever gets around to removing the text labels from the buttons.
  • There should be a nice performance gain when they move to gcc 2.95.3 and start using -O2 to optimize as well.

    See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53486 [mozilla.org] for details.

    The only reason this hasn't happened yet is they didn't want to introduce potential compiler and optimization issues right before the .9 release.

  • Finally, there's no reason to keep using Netscape 4.7x

    Hopefully this means it's DNS problems have been fixed. A bug that at least existed 3 days ago was that certain web sites could not load because Mozilla couldn't resolve an IP from the name. While every other network application installed on my machine could.

  • Thank you - that is a very appropriate response to people who assume that Slashdot is a single entity with one opinion on everything.

    I am not PurpleBob of Borg. You will not be assimilated.
    --

  • Re:"Once 1.0 hits the net..." (Score:3)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:24AM (#239330)
    If you want a version of Mozilla which was rushed out the door, use Netscape 6.0. If you feel masochistic, that is.
    --
  • It's in the latest nightlies and will be in 0.9.1
    ---
  • I believe that the reason you feel the menus are are so slow on mozilla is not actually do to mozilla's design be rather how linux handles thread context switching.... try reading the thread around my post [slashdot.org] on it in a separate discussion. I noticed mozilla menus felt much better after this change.. just as fast if not faster than netscape.

    Ian
  • It has the following

    * slicing
    * dicing
    * an XML term you'll never use
    * a 100% cross platform XML GUI, which would be a cool development tool if there was any interest in the browser part of the equation, which still doesn't work

    However, it lacks the following features:

    * A responsive GUI. I don't care of its runs faster with a different timeslicing value, other apps are responsive without tuning my kernel.

    * The ability to save web pages intact. IE has this. Opera has this. Konq will hopefully get it soon.

    * Stability, in any nightly or milestone or beta build I have ever tried

    Wake up people. Mozilla is a text book case of how NOT to manage an Open Source project. Konq and Opera have a very bright future, as does gecko, sans all the XMS stuff that's been holding up the project forever.
  • I'm hoping my perpetual lack stable mozilla, across multiple machines, OSs, and stable / nighly / beta builds, is some bizzarre coincidence. I'd like to find out. Could you do the following:

    1. Click a menu item. Eg, 'Tasks'
    2. Hit the left arrow ten times

    Doe the web browser fail to provide any response whatsoever for you too?

    Mike
  • * You compare it to other browsers in your advocacy, so we have the right to respond

    * Open Source software should be held up to the same quality standards as closed source software. They way it can improve.

    * It replaced something that was being actively maintained and improved, and after 2 years has not seen a major release.

    * Netscape users pay for the browser with their eyeballs and the chance that the qality of the clients will make them pay for Netscape servers. Currently that is not the case.

    * AOL users (who pay for their browsers directly via sibscriptions) might end up having a modified version of this as their web browser. Their money pays Netscape engineers to work on Mozilla.

    Even if you just submit bug reports, it helps greatly.

    Basically ,evaluating Mozilla in a negative way (if this is how you truly feel) helps Open Source by eliminating wasted effort into what seems a black hole of `wouldn't it be cool if' technologies. It also allows OSS to avoid the pitfalls of this project - ie, trying to design pixel for pixel perfect XML based cross platform GUIs for *all* applications before the web browser that's at the center of the project has been finished.

    I'm posting this from Mozilla 0.9. There's no `up button' at the top of this entry form. I can't save this page and keep it intact. The file -> open dialog box displays my files as being in 1970,and takes three seconds to leave my screen when I click `cancel'.
  • he packagers WANT to change the directory layout - it provides additional support for them.

    Bullshit conspiracy theory. The distro's want to chaneg the directory stucture for logic and consistently - ie, to meet the File Heirarchy System (which is used on Linux and Open Source BSD Unix-like OS)s.

    Qmail might be great according to some people. Qmail might have source available. Like Windows in both respects. Neither conforms to the Open Soure Definition. The only distribution that includes Qmail packages is Debian, which applies a giant diff as a hack to get around the licensing issue.

  • I have to ensure the user has a copy of djbdns installed just so that I can make use of a small part of the program.

    I'm not sure about that part, but you do have to make sure the user has installed DJBDNSd, in a way that is different than every other piece of software instlled on their system and which is in violation of the Linux Standards Base.

    But he who writes the software gets to choose the license,

    Agreed 100%

    DJB makes things as free as his own sense of what is right in software allows.

    Fine. The problem people have with Qmail is that many users claim that is Open Source, when it is not.
  • Ditto. This happens with *every* browser, on *every* platform, on *every* machine, until the cookie gets installed.

    Anyone else? Are any of the Slashcode guys aware of this?
  • If I was in bugzilla, this one would be labelled 'WORKSFORME'

    Basically, using 0.9 on a Athlon 900 w/ 128Mb, this takes an extraordinary amount of time, and doesn't respond at all if I tap the keys fast enough (ie, at my regular speed)until I stop. In the mentime, the mouse cursor sort of twiches as it, bizzarrely, changes my mouse cursor.

    If I hold it down, its much worse.
  • Dude, Edit->Preferences->Appearance->

    and I quote:
    When Mozilla starts up, open
    _ Navigator
    _ Composer
    X Mozilla Mail

    end quote.
    --
  • Konqueror rocks. Mozilla rocks. I use konqueror mainly for browsing local API documentation files, etc, because it's nice and lite. When I'm down for some serious browsing, though, when I want javascript to work (no, i'm not insane) or when I want complete (or closer to complete) CSS support, or when I just want the pages I view to layout (more) correctly, I use Mozilla. (For example, Mozilla works better on espn.com, with its complex layout)

    I still maintain that you can't really compare konqueror and mozilla because they have different goals and designs.

    I agree with the "same theme" thread, though. Themes are good, but it's a pane when every app wants you to go through it's own song & dance to install new themes, that almost always are original works and don't look like anything else on your desktop.

    Qt-based mozilla (which was announced a while ago, but I can't get to build) would alleviate some of the memory problems you mentioned, because if you're running kde, Qt is already loaded.


    --
  • Try Galeon for Linux - it's based off of mozilla and does tabbing.
  • The login thing with knoq si the only thing that stops me from using it 100% of the time right now. Doesn't only happen with ebay, slashdot k5 and a bunch of others mess up too. Can't figure it out for the life of me.

  • Re:slightly ontopic (Score:5)

    by Sax Maniac ( 88550 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @06:16PM (#239372) Homepage Journal
    Junkbuster [waldherr.org], among other programs, allow you to forge your headers. Why?

    Well, the biggest one is to prevent stupid sites from refusing to serve you just because you're not using browser X. They're almost always wrong. I'll take my chances, thank you, I don't need you playing Mommy.

    If you're paranoid, there are certain browser-specific bugs [digicrime.com] that a malicious website can take advantage of if they know your exact version. Better to keep them guessing. (You have cleaned out your /etc/issue file so it doesn't say exactly what version of what OS you're running... right?! If you do, you might as well as change it to "PORTSCAN ME NOW, WORLD!")

    And, it's always a good thing to throw some entropy into to some marketroid's demographics.

    Plus, I hope I give some admins a good laugh now and then. If you ever see this in your server logs, you'll know it's me:

    Mozilla/6.666 (Atari 2600)

    I like the images that this conjures.

  • I have a feeling we'll all be in for a real treat once 1.0 hits the net.

    Alright, alright. I have been looking forward for Mozilla 1.0 for a long time, wanting to get rid of Netscape Crashigator 4.x and finally have a weapon to shoot at MS Internet Integrator from my desktop.

    Too bad I've been waiting too long.

    Listen, I'm big into bashing IE, because I hate internet integration, hate the MS behemoth, and want some competition, just like most others here on the board (yes, we all love Linux, but the majority of us STILL use Windows on AT LEAST one desktop). But Mozilla is REALLY PUSHING its time frame here. Before any flame throwers come around telling me that I'm not patient enough, just try and think about it for a second...

    ...Slashdot just ran an article a couple articles back about a satire of a company who kept telling investors that it has a kick-ass piece of software that will take the market by storm. Only problem was that they were never able to produce their product. What happened to the company? It kicked the bucket.

    Now, granted, Mozilla has kept showing us its improvements, its great abilities, its scarce use of resources, its stablility, etc. But for crying out loud,

    PRODUCE THE PRODUCT!!!

    Although I'm sure the final product is going to be great,

    1) These three years of waiting have caused Microsoft to nearly win out 85% of the browsing market by now.

    2) The latency has caused AOL to release "Netscape 6.0" with a beta version of Mozilla and Gecko which is a piece of crap and unstable with all the bogus utilities included in it. Yes, it means nothing to the geek community, but to the real world community (aka business and consumer), it makes Netscape (the name most are familiar with) look like a has-been, while Mozilla (the name no one is familiar with) is not known by anyone.

    3) Since this is "open-source" software, that means that there will be no promotion on the product whatsoever, meaning Microsoft will still have the competitive edge by far.

    Argue what you want, but the fact of the matter is that the team has taken way too much time striving for perfection. Even though this is open-source, its superiority alone will not take the web (heck, if the superior product always won, we would have never used 3.5" floppy disk drives and Rambus would never have survived this long). Time is an enemy, no matter what kind of software it is. This product needs to get out there now. It needed to get out there two years before now.

  • Online banking? (Score:3)

    by kalifa ( 143176 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @06:28PM (#239449)
    Very well, I'm glad to see that we now have three excellent libre software browsers (Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla), and that they are improving very quickly, but... for the moment I'm still forced to use Netscape 4.* to do online banking (I think it's 128-bit encryption, I'm at Citibank). Even with PSM, even with https support activated... don't ask me why, I'm not an expert at crypto, all I know is that the problem is here.

    So, can anyone tell me is this changes with Mozilla 0.9? If not, does anyone have an idea of when we will have a solution for this?

  • Re:Konq (Score:5)

    by DeeKayWon ( 155842 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @05:46PM (#239470)
    DeeK's law: 90% of all KDE users become rabid Konqueror evangelists. I should know. I used to be one. Konqueror is a damn good broswer, but I don't think it's a good thing to detract from Mozilla's impending thunder.

    I may use and love Konqueror, but I still cheer for the Mozilla people because they're just a teeny bit more ambitious; as in, Mozilla runs on Unix, Windows, Mac, BeOS, and others. I still use Netscape 4.7x under Windows because I still prefer its "feel" over IE (Dear Microsoft: Fix the ****ing mouse wheel scolling!!), but it's getting outdated quickly, and I'm going to need something better for Windows. Mozilla and its derivatives (like K-meleon [kmeleon.org]) are pretty much the only runners from the free software/open source community right now. I don't like the idea of Microsoft embracing and extending the web and convincing web designers that getting 90-95% of the potential market is good enough. We need a browser that runs on all platforms and is the most standards-compliant of all of them. That's why I can't help but cheer Mozilla on.

  • Didn't mention that... (Score:5)

    by grammar nazi ( 197303 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @04:58PM (#239513) Journal
    the new image rendering library was known as libpr0n to all of the developers.

  • Not True on Linux (Score:3)

    by mojo-raisin ( 223411 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @05:51PM (#239527)
    I just tried out the Linux version on my Glibc 2.2.3/Kernel 2.4.4 system, and the performance still does not hold a candle to Netscape 4.77.

    Navigating the menus still feels like a java app with large delays in action.Opening new windows and bringing up preferences is still slow.

    Until I get *instantaneous* response like NS 4.77, I will never switch to mozilla.
  • ...Besides Netscape/Mozilla?
    I should switch. I'm running explorer pretty much by default, and it won't even let me moderate! All my dropdown boxes blur together, the windows begin to freeze, and the little girl's head begins to spin. (this also happens when I get too many form elements in *total* windows. Sigh.)

  • What has Changed & How to get Involved (Score:5)

    by tk422 ( 446096 ) on Monday May 07, 2001 @05:22PM (#239592)
    The 0.9 branch is known as the performance branch (though more performance stuff is still being checked in) and to that end a lot of stuff has been rewritten for speed: For example, Mail/News now uses Outliner which has at least doubled the speed which I use to have using Mozilla Mail/News. Then there's PSM 2.0 which was totally rewritten from the ground up so that SSL pages are now blazzingly fast. ImageLib (LibPr0n) also was completely rewritten so that it renders images 2x as fast as it did before. This is not to say that this is the end of the performance fixes. In addition to the ones mentioned above, the latest nightlies have a very big speed increase loading pages (which was checked in right after 0.9 branched). In addition were working on getting the startup time down, with among other things the ability on (Winblows computers) to load Mozilla at Startup just as you would IE. bug 76004, (I know some people won't like this idea but some will, and you will have a choice) If you want to help out you can join the channel #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. We need Linux coders to help optimize the speed on Linux so that its just as fast as on Windows, were getting there but were still a bit behind. A while ago I stopped b*tching about Mozilla and its slowness and decided to get involved and I have found you can make a lot of difference if you do. Even if you can't devote lots of time to it, even filing bugs, helping sort and duplicate bugs or creating testcases for those bugs is sorely needed. If you have any questions feel free to email me or check out Mozillazine [mozillazine.org].

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