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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 0.9.6 Released 623

bluephone writes: "Yessireebob. mozilla.org has released the 0.9.6 milestone. Here are Release Notes and a link of files on the FTP server. For milestones 0.9.7 and 0.9.8, the focus is on performace enhancingment, and stability of the Mail/News end of the suite. And boy, is it getting good..."
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Mozilla 0.9.6 Released

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  • by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @12:55AM (#2594480) Homepage
    Very nice release so far, mail/news seems to be "catching up" to the browser function.

    The tabbed browsing is almost up to galeon-level, though the speed is still slow, and its missing an (X) to close individual tabs. Use ctrl-w to close tabs in the meantime. This feature is quickly becoming my favorite.

    One thing that continually bugs me is the total lack of performance of the linux builds compared to the windows builds. On windows, moz is FAST, and getting faster, and I don't mean just the turbo-load stuff ... does anyone have a reasonable explanation on why the performance is so radically different between linux/win.

    From my daily usage, mozilla on windows is "done" as far as for what I need to do, on linux, it still has a long way to go.

    What is making mozilla slow on linux?

    go Mozilla!
    • One thing I've always been curious about is the effect of the compiler on performance. VC++ produces fairly quick code. How does GCC code compare?
      • One thing I've always been curious about is the effect of the compiler on performance. VC++ produces fairly quick code. How does GCC code compare?

        Generally speaking, compiler optimizations do not matter. For tight, number crunching loops, they might - but most desktop software spends its time in system libraries (when they do not wait for user input).

        To optimize, it does not help to call ten library functions slightly faster, the functions will still require the same time; what helps is a redesign where you bring down the need to call functions (for example by caching values). Turning on compiler optimizations will not help you with that, though.

        • Unfortunately, a lot of the work Mozilla does _is_ tight number-crunching loops of various sorts. What do you think layout is? It's a lot of recursive number-crunching. So yes, the compiler is making a large difference here. Going from -O to -O2 with gcc (the milestones use -O) leads to a 15% speed increase pretty much across the board for all operations (page loading, new window, etc)
    • I agree. In fact, on Windows, it sure feels like Mozilla is faster than the Netscape 4.x releases. (I have no hard data, but the feel is arguably the important part anyway.) On Solaris, Mozilla is A LOT slower than Netscape; in fact, the only reason I use it is because of the tabbed interface. On Mac OSX, Mozilla is also slower than Netscape, but it doesn't seem to be such a huge differential. Usually, I consider it a blessing that I spend the majority of my time on Solaris and OSX, but that's the one downside. :)

      But the good news is, we have nowhere to go but up.

    • by cabbey ( 8697 )
      hmm... perhaps it's something with your system? I duel boot between linux (suse 7.3 running 2.4.9 at the moment) and Windows (Win2K AS) on a dual PII 450 with 256Mb of RAM. Windows has a few hundred meg of swap defined (and uses it) Linux has 64Mb of swap defined and hardly ever touches it. I run the nightly windows builds and my own builds on linux (updated every few days on each) and for me the two are very nearly at parity... actually I'd say Linux is a bit more responsive than windows.

      The other posibility is that you are getting a mix of debug and production mixes? On linux my debug build is quite pokey, but the -O3 no debug, optimize it all builds absolutely FLY and keep getting better!

      Way to go Moz!
      • Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)

        by great throwdini ( 118430 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:27AM (#2594579)

        I duel boot between linux ... and Windows...

        Freudian slip?
      • Re:huh? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Yorrike ( 322502 )
        Mozilla is actually quite slow for me on my work PC (Athlon 700, 320MB RAM, Redhat 7.2), but my work PC is stuffed (nothing works properly on it).

        My home PC (Athlon 650, 512MB RAM Redhat 7.0), on the other hand, runs most things at a rapid pace. Mozilla, once loaded into memory, is lightning fast, though I'm starting to lean towards Galeon for my browsing needs at home and work. Mainly beacuse it can't be beaten for speed or configuration options. I really dig the RPMfind, Google, Freshmeat etc. search bar (talk about software at your finger tips).

    • by anthony_baxter ( 48233 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @02:00AM (#2594668)
      I find that building with mondo optimisation makes quite a difference to how fast mozilla "feels". I also turn off mail/news - I don't care, I don't need it :)

      From my .mozconfig:

      ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
      ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro"

      I don't know what build options are used for the milestone builds...

    • by rmathew ( 3745 ) <rmathew@gmailCOUGAR.com minus cat> on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @02:37AM (#2594751) Homepage
      "JayPee" has made available Navigator-only optimised builds for Linux [mozillanews.org] that you might find useful.
    • Hello? I don't know what reality you're living in, but at least in my reality there IS such an 'X' to close a tabbed window, in the upper-right corner just below the "M"-logo.

      Has been there in 0.9.5 and stayed there in 0.9.6

      And I've tried this using both Modern and Classic layout. So I don't see what you're talking about...
  • much improved! (Score:3, Redundant)

    by wtmcgee ( 113309 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @12:55AM (#2594483) Homepage
    its looking really good - every release gets a lot more reliable, and has slowly taken over #2 from opera, and is now getting close to giving IE a run for its money. one thing i wish i knew how to do is make a nice solid, simple theme for moz though - i'm not too high on any of the themes i've seen so far.

    regardless - this is not the mozilla devolpers jobs - they're doing a great job with the browser! the performance fixes they are referring to are also much anticipated - speeding this bad boy up would shut up a ton of critics.
  • Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 1155 ( 538047 )
    Mozilla seems to really be coming along. As soon as it is streamlined more or less, it should run smoothly on most setups. Perhaps the most evident note on this suite though, is that it is still in the 0.*.* mode in developement. People are making decisions on it before it is fully developed, or before it hits the 1.0 mark.

    If you tried it a while back, wait until about 1.5.*, I am sure it will all work perfectly then. This build is a lot better than previous versions though. I would defitely recommend it for the end user who has a p2 300 or above.
    • Re:Mozilla (Score:2, Troll)

      by frleong ( 241095 )
      Yeah, by the time mozilla 1.5.* is out, IE should be in version 8 or .NET or whatever. Even Opera would be at least in version 7. At that time, I think no one will ever bother running Mozilla again.

      I mean, it is extremely slow, even on my PII-400 with 256MB of RAM. IE is ways faster in load time and crashes less (trust me, the first time I loaded the latest Mozilla Mail/News, I got a crash within 3 minutes). You may say that IE is preloaded, but what about Opera? I'm using Opera 6 beta from time to time and its browser loads at about the same speed of IE.

      • Re:Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)

        by Explo ( 132216 )

        I mean, it is extremely slow, even on my PII-400 with 256MB of RAM. IE is ways faster in load time and crashes less (trust me, the first time I loaded the latest Mozilla Mail/News, I got a crash within 3 minutes). You may say that IE is preloaded, but what about Opera? I'm using Opera 6 beta from time to time and its browser loads at about the same speed of IE.


        Pretty good crash performance; honestly, for me Mozilla crashes once in a few days. Even a year ago, it crashed just once or twice per day day for me. With the relative heaviness I agree though; It works pretty nicely with P3-550 & 256 MB of RAM or even better with my home machine (Thunderbird, more memory), but it's definitely a bit slow with my secondary machine, K6-2 400.



      • Mozillas codebase currently is IE 6.0 level in terms of features quality, and speed.

        It took Microsoft 6-7 years to get to this point, It took Mozilla 4 years.

        4 Years is pretty good.

        Opera is about 3 years behind Mozilla so dont even mention Opera. Opera isnt nearly as powerful, Opera is a light weight browser thats nothing special, its something anyone could have written up in a year or two.

        Mozilla on the other hand has alot more features and the only browser to compete with it feature for feature is IE, currently Mozilla supports more standards, has better security and is more stable than IE 6.0 making Mozilla more complete.

        When IE 7.0 releases, it will essentially be updated to be more secure, support more standards and basically be more like Mozilla.

        As far as Mozilla 2.0, Mozilla has the base done, the base what took 4 years, once the base is done all they have to do for 2.0 is add a few new features most likely to support new standards, optimize it for speed to make sure its faster than IE and Opera, fix bugs so it never crashes, and then allow Netscape and AOL to intergrate ICQ, AOLIM, Winamp and so on into it in a way that doesnt make it seem overwelming.

        Right now AOL isnt properly intergrated, but once it is, i see it being very useful, more useful than email for sure.

        And ICQ intergration would be good too.

        From there intergrate netscape into AOLs software suite.

        Now while Microsoft fixes all their bugs and security, Mozilla will be adding new features.

        If Mozilla developes at the pace it is right now, it will be about 2 -3 years ahead in development of Microsoft when 2.0 comes out.
      • Yeah, the turbo feature doesn't work so well since pretty much the update right after it first came out (9.3?, 4?) so it still loads slower than IE. It's nowhere near unacceptable though (I'm running a PII-400 with 128MB RAM, so I'm sure I'm getting speeds similar to yours).

        The thing that matters to me is that I get much much better page rendering performance out of Mozilla than I do out of IE. The Gecko engine is really shining these days, and I get much faster rendering times on just about any page with Moz. This is much more important to me than load times, and definitely makes that extra load time worth the wait.

        The Mail/News will get better, but last time I checked it was still under par. That seems to be the focus of the next few releases though, so don't count the module out. Remember, you won't have to configure it specially to be secure like you do for Outlook, which will be a real bonus (and time saver too, since we're on that subject).

        And as for crashes, I get about equal crashes in both browsers, depending on which computer I'm at. At the office, Mozilla is less stable. At home, IE is less stable. Mileage varies.

        In terms of future improvements, it'll be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to take the lead on improvements again, or if Mozilla will continue to blaze the trail, as it's been doing lately. I wouldn't be surprised if tabbed browsing appeared in IE, but who knows what'll come out of Mozilla. And the 3rd party stuff! Once the API settles (which is why v1.0 is such a big deal) there should be some cool mini apps built for Mozilla. I already use the PubMed one all the time, it's my favorite browser feature yet, and makes Mozilla my browser of choice at the office. Because of the nature of the whole free software community, and the relative triviality of these kinds of apps, you'll see a ton of great ones come out once the API is ready for it. Then we'll see the browser wars really kick up.
  • Spell Checker (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:03AM (#2594509)
    I've found every release better than the last, except for 0.95, which seemed to have gained a few more crashes. I'm excited to see how this one goes. Can anybody give me instructions on how to integrate the Netscape spell checker and change the language settings to en_GB? I tried following instructions for the spell checker before (installed the .xpi), but I couldn't figure out how to actually use it (were the UI bits removed?)

    Only comment so far on the latest build: it polls all of the news groups and servers in my Netscape profile when the news/mail client starts. This is bad as I have a load of crap in there, and a load that are only accessible from when I switch internet connections. I have to click cancel on a lot of dialogs before I can get going :(
    • Re:Spell Checker (Score:2, Informative)

      by yota ( 165006 )
      This is the Unofficial Mozilla Spell-checker FAQ: http://www.mozilla.org.uk/docs/spell-checker-faq.h tml it should address your concerns.
  • 9.6! (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:09AM (#2594525) Homepage Journal
    9.6 already... wow. Soon to be followed by:

    9.7 (two months)
    9.8 (six months)
    9.9 (one year)
    9.99 (two years)
    9.999 (five years)
    9.9999 (nine years)
    9.99999 (thirty-seven years)
    9.999999 (nine hundred and twenty-eight years)

    (No offense meant to the Mozilla team - the last time I poked at it, it looked like a nicely developing and nifty browser).

    --
    Evan

    • Now see, if they had just followed Knuth's example, they wouldn't have this "1.0 Stable Milestone" problem!

      So, Moz team, when will we see version 0.9.9.3.1415...?
  • Export (Score:3, Funny)

    by nexex ( 256614 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:11AM (#2594533) Homepage
    Interesting line from export restrictions,
    "This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas) ...". And we all know that those areas will be non-exsistant :)
    • Re:Export (Score:2, Funny)

      by matthayes ( 459103 )

      currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas)

      Which, given the Taleban's advocacy of the Internet, is a crying shame.

  • by gruntvald ( 22203 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:15AM (#2594541) Homepage Journal
    Though I haven't checked 6.0 yet. If the Mozilla team can straighten out some of the plug in problems (for example, it takes some voodoo before java actually works), or at least come up with a definitive install procedure, we'll be rockin'. The browser is solid, but I don't want to have to be asked what MIME type an m3u file (winamp playlist) is. Heck, I don't actually know! I'm so used to it being taken care of. This kind of "plays nice with others" is something we take for granted - even if it's fake in Bill Gates' case!
  • ...if they got rid of the pathetic crash error that happens whenever one uses the tab key to jump from one data field to the next?

    Man, that bug makes me so angry. I'm using .95 right now, and had to restart Mozilla as well as restart the .96 download due to that bug.
  • These are the days (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sludge ( 1234 ) <slashdot@@@tossed...org> on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:17AM (#2594551) Homepage
    I'm going to miss these days. My favourite browser gets massive improvements every couple of months.

    Idea wishlist:

    • Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea
    • Plugin missing popup isn't so annoying (I refuse to install flash)
    • A clean looking theme that isn't netscape 4-ish
    • More usability based around the tab feature. That thing is wonderful!
    • A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

    I'm a very busy person who does some good for the community already in his free time, so don't ask me to implement these features. I just don't have the time.

    Perhaps this would be a good time to ask... does anyone know of a proxy that allows you to rewrite packets on the fly? I think the web's got to the point where I want to start overriding some HTML arbitrarily. I know regular expressions, so some sort of regex interpreter would be quite handy.

    • by ink ( 4325 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:33AM (#2594599) Homepage
      A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

      Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.

      • Ah, this is great news! I often hit the middle mouse button by accident on the page when I have crap in my buffer, and I used to get wierd errors about pages not being found. I never put 11 and 11 (binary) together.
    • by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 )
      * A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

      That would be nice, but Moz (and NS4) let you simply middle-click on the HTML display area and it'll go to the URL in your clipboard. Nice timesaver, except when your mouse spazzes and you end up hitting a link instead of empty space and pop up a new window instead :P

      I agree 100% with your other points... those are pretty much my main gripes too. About the $EDITOR thing, yes! Every place I *ever* have to enter text should understand vi keys if I want it that way. I already have tcsh and every decently configurable program I run using vi keys, there's no reason Mozilla and all GTK/Qt apps shouldn't be able to as well :P

      Oh well, the situation is better than it is on Windows; my vi-trained fingers have a tendancy to hit escape after typing a bunch of text, and in IE this resets the text area to the default value. Quite irritating.
      • I have the exact opposite problem... I try to middle-click on a link to open it in a new window and end up pasting whatever crap was in my clipboard...

        I also have the strange habit of constantly selecting and deselecting paragraphs as I browse, so usually an entire paragraph of random text gets pasted as a url.

        Doug
    • * A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

      Place the cursor to the begining of the URL bar and hit ctrl+k, this will delete everything after the cursor without copying it to the clipboard.

      • Or yet one more way: you can also do ctrl+l (gives focus to link bar and highlights the contents, but it's not copied to clipboard). Follow it up with ctrl+v to paste the clipboard contents.
      • Place the cursor to the begining of the URL bar and hit ctrl+k

        Or place the cursor *anywhere* in the URL bar, and use ctrl-U. My only complaint about this is that some fool chose to overload ctrl-U and make it the keyboard accelerator for view source, so if you haven't quite clicked in the URL bar, you don't get the result you expect... which leads me nicely onto my #1 wishlist for Mozilla: easily configurable key mappings. Yes, I know it can be done via the prefs file, but I've yet to see suitable documentation for it, and it would be much better served by having an option in Edit->Preferences.

    • Plugin missing popup isn't so annoying (I refuse to install flash)

      I've actually been thinking of making a fake plugin that could be trained to register for whatever you want, and all it ever does is render a grey rectangle. That would fix this problem for good.

      A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard.

      You mean like Konquerer's clear button? ;) /me too!

      Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

      ugh, isn't that just the most annoying thing? I've screamed at the computer more than once for that move, especially when I've already closed the window I had copied from.
      • On the clipboard issue, the way it should really be implemented is how it is laid out on OpenDesktop. The Cut/Copy/Paste functions use one clipboard, while the select/middle-click functions use another.

        The problem is that Mozilla and a lot of other programs (Opera comes to mind) don't do it this way.

        And perhaps the "standard" should be changed so that an initial click on a text field which results in selecting the entire field should not be considered a "copy" because it is usually a change of keyboard focus, not intended as selection.
    • A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.

      I'm working on this one, see bug 24651 [mozilla.org]

      I've got a patch which works on a nightly build from about a month ago, but 0.9.6 segfaults on this. I'll look into it ASAP.

      The patch essentially places a small button left of the location bar (much smaller than in the attached screenshot). This button needs some graphic designing, so if anybody can work the Gimp, please visit the bug and download the blank buttons.

    • * Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea

      Go figure. Who would have thought that Mozilla users would be asking for a feature that Lynx has had for years. :-)

      This is one of many reasons why I keep Lynx around: when I'm using a web interface to a bug-tracking system, and I want to, say, paste some code in to the "explanation" textarea before I close the report, I can just pop into my $EDITOR.

      I don't know of any other *nix browser which lets me do this (but I haven't looked very hard).

  • on every first page visit to a site it requests favicon.ico

    I wonder how long until all the stats programmers out there figure out why bookmarked visits spiked in December?
  • by aufbau ( 517042 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:32AM (#2594596) Homepage
    Pornzilla [netscape.com]'s goal is to turn Mozilla into a great porn browser. I started the project because I felt some important bugs were being neglected by Netscape engineers, even though they do a very good job with other bugs. (Are they not allowed to look at porn while at work?).

    The web site includes several modifications [netscape.com] to Mozilla that make it better suited for porn browsing and a list of bugs and feature requests [netscape.com] related to porn surfing. If you have any other bug numbers or ideas for modifications, please tell me.

    (Sorry for the duplicate message. I guess using "preview" before posting isn't a good idea when you've temporarily disabled cookies.)
    • Speaking as someone who masturbates frequently enough to have obtained an honorary doctorate in it, I'd like to mention why IE is the superior porn browser. Are you running Windows 2000? Okay, good. Open an Explorer window, go to the View menu, and select Thumbnails. Now, thumbnails will be dynamically generated for all images in your currently-viewed directory. I have a lot of porn saved on my disks -- over 1.5GB -- so even with my excellent directory structure (categorized by race, number of participants, and insertion types), it can take a while to locate that perfect images to bring yourself to orgasm with. Explorer/IE's "thumbnail" feature has revoltionized my masturbation experience, by allowing me to quickly analyze and navigate picture series -- with one hand. Explorer/IE will even show you the first frame of AVIs and MPEGs on the sidebar with the "preview" function!

      Now you can visually scan directories -- for that perfect Akira Fubuki cumshot, Anna Nicole Smith softcore clip, or nasty nekkid ebony hoe playing with vegetables -- simply by using the arrow keys, Return, and Backspace.

      In order to enjoy a comparable masturbation experience with Linux, you must use a combination of Electric Eyes (for thumbnail browsing) and Netscape (for image viewing). Oftentimes, you will even have to use both hands to get the process started -- very inconvenient. Add in the fact that UNIX-like systems don't function very well with widespread use of spaces in directory names, and you have all the makings of an extremely poor monkey spanking.

      Hey, let's get a MacOS user in on this. TRoLLaXoR, does MacOS provide easy thumbnail image navigation like Windows?

      • konqueror
      • Damned wanker. All salami-slapping, no brains.

        Nautilus is the best thing on Linux. It's all that windows wanted to make. I'm not sure if it thumbmails movies, but it sure thumbnails pictures.

        Linux is made by geeks. Geeks also look at porn and masturbate. Why would our technical solution be technically inferior to Microsofts?
      • In order to enjoy a comparable masturbation experience with Linux, you must use a combination of Electric Eyes (for thumbnail browsing) and Netscape (for image viewing). Oftentimes, you will even have to use both hands to get the process started -- very inconvenient. Add in the fact that UNIX-like systems don't function very well with widespread use of spaces in directory names, and you have all the makings of an extremely poor monkey spanking.

        Bah. Just use Nautilus -- it does everything that IE can do with the thumbnailing and whatnot, and it automagically scales those overhuge images down. Before I used nautilus, I'd end up with these huge images that I had to scale down. Not that the detail was bad sometimes, but I need to see every part of the picture to get off. In fact, I like to take advantage of the fact that my ReiserFS partition for pr0n supports many more characters in filename than an NTFS partition. Linux clearly is the superior pr0n OS.

    • not that funny actually, i use Mozzila on my XP box exlusivly for porn.. but it's not because i feel moz is well suited for it, but rather for privacy. I've found it way to hard to cover your tracks with IE. i mean think about it..

      Clear history: too suspecius, alt: set for 0 day, still keeps 1 day, arg..

      Clear Last day history: tedeius, and don't clear auto-complete address bar stuff

      and don't forget the cookies and browser cache.

      With mozilla i just load it up and close it down, no one knows i have it installed.

      What i want is a secret 'porn' button that i can press and IE won't record JACK nothing nada about whats going on.

      btw, to keep on topic, the last build of moz for windows wasn't that great. from the way i see it isn't just like netscape 4x, slow and clunky and i'll be dammed thats all fixed by 1.0.

      -Jon
  • Themes? (Score:2, Informative)

    by vandan ( 151516 )
    Can't comment yet as I'm just downloading now, but in the meantime: where have the themes gone? Whenever I try to download others, I'm met with a 'page not found' error. Is this because Mozilla is moving faster than the theme developers can handle? Is there actually more choice than 'classic' and 'modern'? Not that these aren't good themes anyway. I'm just wondering...
    Keep up the good work! (Oh and fix that bloody 'print selection' bug.)
    • Re:Themes? (Score:3, Informative)

      According to the nightly build comments for Nov 20, there is a new theme page. If you check out the MozillaZine build comments here [mozillazine.org], you'll see the mention and the bugzilla bug number...

      Note that I have not actually tried this myself... I'm just happy that other stuff is working as well as it is at this point with the nightly build from last thursday or so.

  • by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @01:46AM (#2594634) Journal
    Yes, I just completed installing a nightly build (from the "stock" 0.9.5 build) and reloaded slashdot to see the announcement. According to my reading of MozillaZine earlier I wasn't expecting 0.9.6 until later this week.

    But I'm curious as to why the connection to the ftp server was so solid and fast: is it a great example of load balancing ftp?, a sign that people are happy with pre-0.9.6 versions and aren't rushing to upgrade?, or is it (*gulp*) that people aren't interested in Mozilla anymore?

    I'm not anti-Mozilla at all. I'm using it for browsing, email, IRC, etc. There are things I like about Konqueror, but I depend on Mozilla. Even my biggest "Internet Explorer"-only client is asking about recasting IE-specific development in Moz-compatible terms. Its just that the server is so fast it doesn't feel like the days of M15 - M18 when I had to fight for a connection...

    As an aside: it's perplexing to observe MSFT dropping the ball on browser development. They've got the market wrapped up, but they don't seem to have capitalized on this lead (except the recent MSN fiasco). Or perhaps I'm not giving proper credit to Mozilla developers for pressing ahead with features and usefulness... With the licensing pain with MSFT and the maturation of Mozilla+{Gnome|KDE}+Linux it's getting more and more palpable to switch the enterprise away from the child-settlers.

  • for speed... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    for a quick and reasonable-on-mem-usage browser, please see skipstone. it uses the mozilla-embedded lib for page rendoring, and it doesn't come with all the html editor / mail / news crap.

    see ports/www/skipstone for FreeBSD users
  • by stefanlasiewski ( 63134 ) <slashdot AT stefanco DOT com> on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @02:29AM (#2594732) Homepage Journal
    Just upgraded to 0.96, and now I see that Slashdot articles with large number of responses crash mozila (I already sent in reports with that crash feedback thingy). This is Win98 , celeron 366 with 512M of ram.

    Only seems to happen on articles with a large number of responses (I'm a moderator and I'm trying to browse at -1 , but I can't).

    Constantly crashes on Geek Gift Ideas 2001 [slashdot.org] and Microsoft Would Settle For The Children [slashdot.org]

    I just uninstalled and reinstalled mozilla, and the crashes still happen.
  • Opera 6.0 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by popeyethesailor ( 325796 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @02:42AM (#2594759)
    This is not meant as a Troll. If you are a Windows user, checkout the latest beta [opera.com] from Opera, it rocks. Choice of Single/Multiple document interface,new skins, and mouse gestures too! Still retains fastest browser credits. Give it a try.
  • by Kraft ( 253059 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @03:03AM (#2594789) Homepage
    I have tried to go over to mozilla as part of my slow conversion from Win to Linux. Thought it might be a good place to start.

    When I installed Mozilla at 0.9.5 I was impressed. This app has come a loong way!

    However, I have a couple of hickups, which someone might be able to help me with

    - Load time Compared to IE, which takes 1-2 secs to load, Mozilla take around 8 secs to load. Not that much extra, but when my short term memory is 5 seconds, I most often choose to load IE, so I don't forget what I wanted to check out.
    - Shortcuts I don't know who fucked up the shortcuts, but I must use alt-d over 100 times a day in IE, the shortcut that brings you to the address bar. I had a (not too investigative) look at the Mozilla help, and couldn't find any info on shortcuts, which brings me to
    - Help You can't search the help! Hello.
    - Search My seconds favorite feature in any program is text search, and I have found the search in Mozilla to be buggy (forgetting last search word and settings, needing to 5 click before it starts, not finding text which is there)

    The most important to me is load time. I just don't see myself, only using Mozilla until load time is decreased. But hey, good luck to the dev team, I will hang in there.
    • I don't know who fucked up the shortcuts, but I must use alt-d over 100 times a day in IE, the shortcut that brings you to the address bar. I had a (not too investigative) look at the Mozilla help, and couldn't find any info on shortcuts

      Ctrl-L (for Location) is the keystroke you're looking for.


    • Use the turbo feature, Mozilla loads faster than IE.
    • .. if you are considering moving to Linux.. Galeon [sourceforge.net] is a good alternative.

      It uses the Mozilla-engine, so it renders excactly the same, and uses the mozilla-plugin-system etc.

      It takes care of a few things for Mozilla:
      • Load time - Load time on Galeon is for me at 3 seconds with all my plugins installed.
      • Look - it adds a GTK+-interface, which fits very nicely in with GNOME
      • Shortcuts - they are at least way better than Mozillas.
      • Search - more simple and standard search-dialog
  • Build Options (Score:4, Informative)

    by Simm0 ( 236060 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @05:22AM (#2595023) Homepage
    Here are a couple of build options that I frequently use in my .mozconfig when building mozilla to keep it running extreemely well also cutting alot of the cruft out.

    These build options are for all the people that are complaining about shoddy mozilla performance under linux and people that would like to have a look at some really new features.

    ac_add_options --with-extensions=all
    Enables such things as the Chatzilla IRC client and the dom inspector(which I think is extreemely neat for debugging and viewing dynamicly changing html object model) also contains some very experimental things such as xmlterm.

    ac_add_options --enable-mathml
    Very neat standard for displaying math of all types and sizes in xml.

    ac_add_options --enable-crypto
    Great option, about a year ago this option wasnt even possible due to netscape not realeasing it's code due to US laws afaik. Now everyone that want to compile the lizard can get ssl support built right into the browser.

    ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686"
    The main optimization part. This option has the biggest leaverage affect on the actual quickness of the browsre itself.

    ac_add_options --disable-tests
    Get rid of the unneccesary tests.

    ac_add_options --disable-debug
    We don't need any debuging symbols in th build if where not a developer do we.

    ac_add_options --disable-shared
    ac_add_options --enable-static
    A nice new enhancement of the moz build system which links all of the modules in statically, im experiencing a big speed increase and a decrease of startup times with this option probably because it doesnt need to read each individual shared object from the hard disk.
  • by weave ( 48069 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @07:03AM (#2595172) Journal
    IE 6 now tops Moz in the cookie/privacy area because you can set IE to prompt before each cookie and remember the accept or refuse action for later (as you can with Moz), but it also allows you to see the cookie contents to help you decide what to do with it as well.

    Opera and Konq also have this nice feature.

    I'm hoping Moz steps up to that plate soon....

  • by sh0rtie ( 455432 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2001 @09:29AM (#2595586)
    Sorry but after installing mozilla and doing some performance tests with dhtml [sourceforge.net], mozilla is about 70% slower than IE6 (p4 1g ram winXP) even in simple animations making practical dhtml worthless in it and flash seems more attractive by the day as this isnt dependant on a slow javascript and rendering engine, which would be a shame.

    Load time isnt even an issue as its so slow even when its loaded.

    Javascript to plugin communication still doesnt work out of the box (contrary to what the moz site says) at least ns4 supported it.

    standards support is meaningless as no-one supports them , making it more of an "ideal" than a standard.

    quote : "standards are great because there are so many to choose from"

    i don't think m$ has anything to fear from mozilla in its current state, at least not in this decade :p

Do you suffer painful illumination? -- Isaac Newton, "Optics"

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