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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Branches For 1.0 RC1 506

Posted by timothy from the frustrate-your-modem dept.
At the end of last month, the Mozilla Project closed the tree for what will become Mozilla 1.0. Now jkeiser writes "Mozilla has branched for 1.0 RC1, which is the first last step to a final Mozilla 1.0! Mozilla has spent four long years getting the browser standards-compliant, fast and solid. Cross your fingers for a rockin' final release around the corner." Reader whovian points to the just-modified roadmap, too.
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Mozilla Branches For 1.0 RC1 More

Mozilla Branches For 1.0 RC1

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  • I must admit that i didn't think it would happen (Score:4, Insightful)

    by colmore ( 56499 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @01:52AM (#3314640) Journal
    When I first started playing around with Mozilla (mid-99) I figgured they would *never* have a usable product. The thing just plain didn't work.

    And while they are a bit behind schedule. 4 years for a 1.0 doesn't sound bad when you realize that this is a .0 that means something, as opposed to most commercial vendors (and a lot of OS projects) that usually wait until 3.x to begin getting things right.

    Good job guys.

    (posted on 0.99)

    • Re:I must admit that i didn't think it would happe (Score:5, Insightful)

      by idiotnot ( 302133 ) <sean@757.org> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:04AM (#3314680) Homepage Journal
      It has become a quite good app; the same could be said of many open-source products. I was thinking about this the other day....I'm in my fifth year of college, and I graduate next month. When I started, I couldn't do my work on Linux without either spending loads of $$ for ported commercial products, or constantly grinding my teeth. Two and a half years ago, I went pretty much linux all the time, using StarOffice as my suite. Still, I was stuck with Netscape 4.x as my browser. But now, I'm able to do all my work in a pure open-source environment (I'm not a CS major...I'm one of those social science types). It's a big change. Mozilla is a very good product. Congrats, and thanks folks.

      --typing this on Galeon, one of the many Mozilla kids.
      • Too bad that the Linux version has much lower priority than Windows. Some bugs I reported half of year (or even more) still show off - just becouse they're Linux specific. Some others, mostly all platform bugs, have been fixed in a few weeks or months.
    • I also remember having some serious problems in the early years, but the wait has been more than worth it. I have been using mozilla as my primary browser since about 0.9.2, and there have been little annoyances etc etc since but the thing has been stable, reliable and most of all the performance is now fantastic.

      There are so many nice things about mozilla that make it so much easier and enjoyable to use than any other browser ... probably the most significant thing for me is tabbed browsing man one window multiple web pages, where has this feature been, must admit it makes older versions of netscape and ie seem almost impossible to use.

      Another really sweet features of mozilla is UI pleasing to the eye and intuitive to boot, if you don't like it download an alternative theme, don't like any of these roll your own. I know, I know not a new idea but it has been done well.

      All in all a fantastic product. Much thanks and much respect to all involved in producing such a great product, and one thats free too :)

      • Tabs are only a different workspace containing your browser display, a window manager designed/configured to give a tab-style effect could be just the same. It`s a pity the more innovative window managers are often overlooked in favour of plain "straight sides and a title bar" window managers.

      • Re:I must admit that i didn't think it would happe (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bnonn ( 553709 ) <bnonny@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @05:42AM (#3315235) Journal
        The tabbed windows, I believe, were around in Opera before Mozilla. I use Mozilla for testing compatibility on my website (sometimes what looks good on Opera can look a bit wrong in other browsers) but I find that while it does have some really great features I'd love to see in Opera, it's missing a bit too that makes it inconvenient for me to use. One of the main things that I still haven't figured out (and I have looked) is how to go to the address bar using the keyboard. In Opera you hit F8. In IE you hit Alt-D. I'm sure Mozilla must have this really obvious feature or people would go insane, but I just can't seem to find it.

        The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes. I know this is a crap reason to not use a browser, but it's that F5, <pause>, white screen, page-draws-down that bugs me.

        There are, of course, other minor annoyances, like the rather slow loadup time (but I have my browser open nearly 24/7 anyway), but those two things are probably what I still find the worst. Oh yeah, and I'm sure Mozilla supports them, but there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences.

        Please note that I'm speaking purely from the point of view of someone who is using Opera, and before that IE. I find Opera's keyboard shortcuts and the ability to turn off Javascript, images etc with a single pulldown menu (F12) to be really great; I imagine you can do similar things in Mozilla, but they're not as easy to find in my experience.

        On the other hand, Mozilla has a fabulous preferences system that is much easier to use than Opera's. It has a prettier interface too, although Opera certainly isn't ugly. And while it doesn't have mouse-wheel window switching, it also doesn't keep focus on the old window tab because of it. Don't think I'm bashing Mozilla because I'm not. I imagine that if you were someone accustomed to Netscape, Mozilla would seem far better than Opera. Opera seems to try to be more like IE. If Opera wasn't around, I'd use Mozilla, and I'm pleased there's a really decent alternative to Opera--both because competition promotes innovation, and because if Opera ever goes under or their browser just goes to shit, I can switch to Mozilla. I'd like to make a completely redundant statement now, and say kudos to everyone involved with the Mozilla project. Awsome work guys; I may not use your browser, but I'm still behind you 100%.

        • Re:I must admit that i didn't think it would happe (Score:4, Informative)

          by jesser ( 77961 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @06:27AM (#3315353) Homepage Journal
          One of the main things that I still haven't figured out (and I have looked) is how to go to the address bar using the keyboard. In Opera you hit F8. In IE you hit Alt-D. I'm sure Mozilla must have this really obvious feature or people would go insane, but I just can't seem to find it.

          Ctrl+L. For other shortcuts see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jruderma/mozilla/keyboard-h elp/ [hmc.edu]

          The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes.

          What's wrong with incremental rendering? One thing that often annoys me when I use Opera is that it will download an entire 4MB page before displaying anything. Mozilla sometimes does that as well, but we consider it a bug (129640) when it does. Mozilla has an optimization that makes not display anything for the first 1.2 seconds of interpreting a page (unless it finishes in under 1.2 seconds), so once the first screenful of the page appears, you can usually read it while the rest of the page loads quietly.
        • jesser has covered keyboard access to the address bar. Thanks! I was wondering about that one myself.

          As for speed, the UI chrome can be a little sluggish on a slower machine, but I find the HTML renderer to be quite swift.

          rather slow loadup time

          I use QuickLaunch and find startup quite reasonable. You can turn it on under Preferences->Advanced, or during installation.

          there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences

          For now gesture navigation is an optional module that you need to install yourself by visiting the OptiMoz site [mozdev.org]. The installation is really painless, and you can configure or uninstall optimoz through the prefs panel. One caveat: the latest nightly builds seem to have changed some interfaces that OptiMoz uses, so the prefs are no longer visible, though I expect the OptiMoz project to have an updated release available soon.

          And while it doesn't have mouse-wheel window switching...

          ...it does however allow you to configure the mouse wheel with a modifier key to scroll pages at a time, line at a time, change text size or go back and forward through history.

          All the UI people are already screaming that Moz has too many prefs. I guess I wouldn't be hired for UI design since I like lots of configurability. I don't see a RFE bug in bugzilla to add switching windows using the mouse wheel, but you can search bugzilla yourself [mozilla.org] and if you're sure such an RFE doesn't exist, then add a bug [mozilla.org].

          Of course, RFE's are low on the totem pole right now...

          Christopher
    • This is why real companies don't release pre-1.0 products to the general public. Think how buggy your favorite piece of software is and imagine what people would think if they saw something before even the final codefreeze.

    • Re:I must admit that i didn't think it would happe (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      And while they are a bit behind schedule. 4 years for a 1.0 doesn't sound bad when you realize that this is a .0 that means something, as opposed to most commercial vendors (and a lot of OS projects) that usually wait until 3.x to begin getting things right.
      Bah, that's nothing! I mean, one rather popular OS I know of got up to about 98 until they decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch again because it wasn't any good. This one eventually got usable around 2000!
    • Didn't work? Of course it worked. It had Window95-level stability issues, and thats a desktop-owning product. Smells like "works well enough for the masses" to me.

      Now that Mozilla is at this milestone (I don't know if I can conceived of non 0.foo releases of this software, it just seems wrong somehow), how do you all think it compares with Konqueror, Galeon, Opera, etc? Does Mozilla have a chance to get (back?) on-top in the not-IE browser scuffle? (yes, scuffle... the war ended when Netscape challenged IE and got its head handed to it on a plate)

  • Where did 1.0 go? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mnordstr ( 472213 )
    The release schedule on mozilla.org shows a release of 1.0 RC1, but no 1.0. When is 1.0 scheduled to come out?
    • RC1 stands for Release Canditate 1. It's similar to a "beta" version, although much more mature than a beta would be.

      Hopefully the full 1.0 release is coming soon. :)
      • Almost right.

        A beta is released to find bugs it's not sugegsted that this is the final version.

        RC1 is exactly that. The developers are stating "We think the job is finished. This is the code we are going to release. Any problems/feedback?"

    • Re:Where did 1.0 go? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Tumbarumba ( 74816 )
      The 1.0 branch is long lived, but it has only just branched and has not stabilised yet. Nightly builds on this branch will be labeled with RC1 in the "About Mozilla" screen and user agent string. When drivers is happy that there are no major issues, and then the RC1 will disappear from the reporting string.

  • Simple Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Murdock037 ( 469526 ) <tristranthorn@NOspAM.hotmail.com> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @01:54AM (#3314648)
    It's a funny coincidence that this ended up as a story, as I was peering around the Mozilla website tonight trying to figure out an answer to one question:

    When now can we expect an official 1.0 release?

    I'm not a programmer in any way, so I don't know much of anything about development schedules or whatnot. And all the FAQs seemed to tiptoe around a definitive answer.

    Awfully convenient that this became a story; I didn't want to ask in any of the other stories' comment sections, 'cause I didn't want to be offtopic.
    • There's an article on Mozillazine explaining RC1 and its relation to 1.0 final which is due as soon as the developers are happy with the RC. The article even leaves room for an RC 2 if one is needed.

    • Re:Simple Question (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rentar ( 168939 )
      When now can we expect an official 1.0 release?

      It seems to be, that it will be when it's ready and not an minute earlier. I think the mozilla guys take this release quite serious, 'cause they have to live with the API of this release for a pretty long time. In case you didn't realize: Mozilla 1.0 is targeted primarily on developers/embedders, although I'm pretty sure many end-users (especially from the /.-crowd) will use it, nonetheless.

      If you want to get some kind of countdown you could try to look into Bugzilla [mozilla.org] and search for bugs with the "mozilla1.0"-keyword and blocker severity (I could provide a link, but b.m.o will definitely have better things do do than serve the /.-crowd with requests, if you're really interested, just enter the query yourself, it's not that hard).

    • Re:Simple Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by AntiTuX ( 202333 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:35AM (#3314789) Homepage
      RC1 comes out tentatively this week (I'm on the build and release team).

  • It figures.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @01:58AM (#3314661)
    I was shocked when I heard their plans to go from 0.9.9 straight to 1.0. Such a bold numerical jump! Now I see what they had up their sleeve: RC-releases! I think to keep up the humor, they should have called it .9.9.9, with RC2 being .9.9.9.1 and so on. That way, it would really convey the sense that they're close to 1.0!

    Alternately, they could declare that 1.0 is an asymptotic limit for Mozilla, and no actual human coded Mozilla will ever reach it, though future versions will come closer.

    • Re:It figures.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bonzoesc ( 155812 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:03AM (#3314679) Homepage
      We see that with a lot of open-source software - as the version numbers get higher, they change by less, never reaching 1.0. Go look at all the .99s on sourceforge for many laughs.

    • Re:It figures.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:18AM (#3314727)
      I can predict the next few mozilla related headlines:

      Mozilla 1.0 About to Be Released - Developer spotted typing up the release announcement

      Final Mozilla 1.0 Tarballs being compiled - stdio.h will be included

      Mozilla 1.0 On Its Way - Electrons respresenting the 1.0 tarball have left the build server and are on their way to the ftp server. Expected to arrive soon.

      Mozilla 1.0 Released? -There is no announcement but some warez d00ds claim to have already downloaded it.

      1.0 will be here soon enough. How many stories about it do we need?

    • Re:It figures.... (Score:3, Funny)

      by DAV3 ( 85197 )
      Knuth did the asymptote thing with Tex and Metafont.

      Metafont is asymptoting to e (2.7182 at the moment)

      TeX is ampytoting to pi (3.14159)

  • Stable API (Score:2, Informative)

    by chefren ( 17219 )
    The most important feature in 1.0 is that the api will now be stable for the 1.0.x series. This means a lot to galeon & co. Nobody is saying that 1.0 will be perfect, but since mozilla is a good browser suite already, the 1.0.x series is liiking very promising.

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by Judecca ( 34485 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:01AM (#3314673) Homepage
    Now we can finally integrate it into the kernel!

    Then the Opera Vs Netscape trials start, and life begins anew.

  • One drawback of new roadmap (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jacobb ( 93907 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:04AM (#3314683) Homepage
    I use mozilla only, so I may be a bit biased. I love it. I have a Fat32 partition with my stuff (mail, bookmarks, etc.) and so can use Mozilla on linux, openbsd and windows without having to copy anything back and forth :-D

    Anyway, now that the tree has branched [mozilla.org] (which is really cool, by the way) the only drawback that I see is that I won't get my Mozilla fix every 5 weeks (5 weeks in Mozilla development-speak is more like 7 :o). Their release schedule [mozilla.org] has changed to 13 weeks.
    Well, hopefully it will be 13 chronological weeks rather than 13 mozilla release weeks, hehe.

    But anyway, once I've been weened off my Install-Newest-Version-of-Mozilla addiction, I guess I'll appreciate that all the serious bugs have been ironed out (i haven't noticed a single one since an early 0.9.x), it's so fscking customizable, and the performance is far better than anything except perhaps Opera. [I'm not even going to mention lynx - whoops. Damn]

    Hey, I said I was biased (^&

    • You can always get the nightly builds...
    • Okay, first of all, you are way too fucking jovial. I count 3 smilies and one "hehe" in a three paragraph post.

      Second of all, 5 weeks is not 7 weeks in mozilla development speak, because the releases have not been getting progressively later. Sure, if you count from one build's "ideal release" date to the next build's "actual release" date, you might come up with 7, but from one actual release to the next, 5 is accurate.

      Finally, the point of going to a longer build cycle is to make sure that each build is more stable, with more or less all the bugs ironed out. This is, in fact, a good thing. If you preferred the less stable, more frequent releases, there's always the nightlies.

    • Not exactly. You can get your fix every 4 weeks or so on the roadmap by using alphas and betas. The roadmap says (or at least used to say) that this was an attempt to match what was actually happening (0.9.3, 0.9.5, and 0.9.7 were all of lesser quality than their predecessors because major changes were being introduced.)

      And, as someone else has pointed out, you can always get nightlies (or watch the build comments at Mozillazine.org and pick out a nice nightly every week or two).

      If that doesn't do it, build from the source. (It's pretty easy, actually.)

  • Hrm.... Beggars cant be choosers, I know. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:10AM (#3314705) Homepage


    I don't wanna come off like a whiner here, but Mozilla is not going to find much of an audience unless freetype support is _standard_ ... The days of craptastic font rendering in X are over. Its the #1 reason I switched to Konqueror after having used Mozilla for nearly 3 years--Smooth AA fonts, more control, better appearance. It just seems like Mozilla is not on the same page as everyone else.

    Cheers
    • I must say that I agree entirely, both with the sentiment that this is no occasion to whine about Mozilla's current shortcomings, but also with the observation that the fonts still look bad and don't need to.

      Is freetype support for *nix releases being planned by the AOL developers? If not, would it be hard for an independent OSS project to hack it together? I really do think this is important. Like the author of the parent post, I instinctively fire up Konqueror, and turn to Mozilla only when I find Konqueror can't render what I'm looking at (and this is becoming very rare). The only reason I do this is because the fonts look so much better.

    • Yeah, I know about this one, in fact I was investigating it a few days ago. My big problem is that fonts often appear too small. This seems to be because Windows and Linux interpret font sizes slightly differently, and pages designed to look good on IE/Windows use smaller font sizes than look good on Linux.

      I often find I have to ctrl-zoom the text a couple of times to make a web page readable. I'm not entirely sure how they intend to fix this, perhaps by bringing freetype in line with Windows rendering?

  • I can't use mozilla to develop web applications because view-source is broken...

    55583 [mozilla.org]

    oh wait... it's fixed.

    nevermind.

  • Hope 1.0 works (Score:2, Interesting)

    by magi ( 91730 )
    At least the last 0.9.9 RPM packages were rubbish; Mozilla threw Segmentation fault immediately at startup. Same both with my home comp (i586 with Mdk Linux) and my work laptop (i686 with RH 7.1), so this can't be just a random problem.

    Amazingly, the nightly build RPMs seem to work just fine.

    This is definitely not the first time this happens. I don't know who compiles Mozilla for packaging, but it's obviously not done very well. Problems this obvious (Segfault at startup) don't give a very fancy image of Mozilla.

    All packages should be tested at least somehow before distribution.

  • So close! (Score:3, Funny)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:20AM (#3314740)
    Arrgh! I can't stand the wait! We hit 0.9.9 [slashdot.org] and I thought, "GREAT! Next time I see Mozilla on /. it will be 1.0!!!!!!". Several Mozilla stories later I see this 1.0 story [slashdot.org]! Branch closed... Does that mean it's ready? No Moz! Now another 1.0 story with no Mozilla!!
    I want my browser! STOP TORTURING US!!!!!
    • I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser since the 0.9 series started and have been, for them most part, very happy.

      What are you waiting for? Just use 0.9.9 and be happy. It'll only get better from here.
      • I do, It rocks. I just keep thinking, If this still 0.9.x what the heck is 1.0 going to be like?

        • It rocks. I just keep thinking, If this still 0.9.x what the heck is 1.0 going to be like?

          Sheesh, can't you do the math? Subtracting the two suggests that 1.0 can not possibly be more than 10% better than 0.9.x! Since x is currently at 9, we're looking at a 1% improvement!

          Seriously, though, I'm composing this on 0.9.9 and I love it. Beats 4.7x all to pieces.

          In the cosmology of software development with the 3 coordinates of (features, performance, inverse_bugs), the first is wonderful, the second is wonderful and the third is less than what it was in 4.7x.

          I'm wondering if there might still be a performance boost to be seen in 1.0 as the more debug and error checking code is removed, if it is removed.

  • Disappointed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by olman ( 127310 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:24AM (#3314753)
    Ohh, And here I thought we have a RC1 available for download. Dang. Never mind, I didn't realize Mozilla is such big news that /. publishes even plans to have a beta build :-)

    I've been using Mozilla starting around .92 and moved toward the point I'm at right now, which is about 95% mozilla and rest for IE. Usually the culprit is some kind of fancy menu-system or dysfunctional scripting gimmick. The important thing is, however, that for majority of the sites Mozilla works just great!

    I'm just feeling a little odd about thinking it'd be a good thing to have AOL use Gecko so that we'd get standards-compliant web sites. Who'd have thought of it, AOL as a force for the white hats?
  • Release Candidates are just for final bugfixing before the actual release, correct? Like the freezing process in Debian. So they'll just be stabilizing the code until they think it's ready. This is exciting because it means the 1.0 release can't be more than a few weeks away. It's a big deal because most people don't think of a project as actualized until it hits 1.0, which, let's face, many open source projects don't. If commercial product versions are any measure, Mozilla could probably somewhere above 4 or 5. It's nice to know that the developers have such a high standard for quality that even though it's been an excellent browser for several months now, they just now think it's 1.0 quality. Just think of how much better it can and will get from here. Props to all the Moz developers for such great work. Keep it up!
    • Remember this - the Mozilla test builds are there to get bug feedback. So, what happens when Moz dies and talkback appears? Do you think simply clicking Send is enough? It's not. Here's what to do:

      When a crash is reported by Talkback, see if you can reproduce it. If you can, don't bother sending the repeat crash logs, there's no point. Instead, try to make a minimal test case, so you find the exact problem that causes the crash.

      Now go into Bugzilla and file a bug with a brief description of the crash, and most importantly of all the talkback ID of the crash. You can find this out by running the talkback program that's in the components directory. Once you've added the talkback ID to the crash report, a Mozilla engineer will pull the stack trace from the Talkback DB and work will start.

      If you don't file in Bugzilla, chances are it won't be looked at! So file them!

      Finally, a quick word of warning: don't be surprised if the bug is marked as critical/futured. I've found several times now when I've crashed Mozilla it's because I've been doing some strange stuff with XML or the site contains some seriously twisted markup. Although crashes are always treated seriously, if it's not a situation the average user will ever encounter it will probably get futured.

      Happy hacking!

  • Multi Part Porn Messages (Score:5, Funny)

    by satanami69 ( 209636 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:33AM (#3314782) Homepage
    Their mail and newsgroups still do not download the multipart porno for the newsgroups. What's the point of having the a full browser if you can't download porno with it. Hopefully they'll have it solved by 1.0's release. I suppose you can use it with any newsgroup, but really, let's make sure we concentrate on it for the real reasons.

  • More Testers!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Screaming Lunatic ( 526975 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:36AM (#3314795) Homepage
    [rant]

    [plea for help]

    Now is the time to increase the testing effort. Everybody out there, please download the latest nightly build [mozilla.org]. Get out there and test and submit bugs to Bugzilla.

    You can poke fun as much as you want about the release timeline, but these Mozilla guys really work their asses off to get this product out to you at no charge. The least we can do as part of the open source community is help out by testing.

    [/plea for help]

    [/rant]

    PK

    P.S. Posted using April 9th Mozilla nightly build. A testament to how well it works and the stability of the nightly builds. I install a nightly build almost every morning and never had to revert back to using an older build because something major was broken. I always install the Linux tarballs, but of course YMMV for other platforms and installation methods. But I don't expect anything would be different for the Windoze and Mac builds.

    • Re:More Testers!!! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Kunta Kinte ( 323399 )
      I am not sending anymore bug reports to mozilla.

      Not that I don't appreciated this great product, but I am tired of sending bug reports and being ignored.

      I run nightlies, and before I use to run my own CVS builds that I built every 2 to 3 days. I even ran mozilla under gdb at *all* times. It was a bit slower but I did not mind, because I thought I was helping out.

      I would send in detailed bug reports with websites and stackstraces for crashers. I am reasonabley familiar with gdb.

      Then I realized that that a lot of the bugs were just be ignored. I had one crasher label simpley "can not reproduce". He could not reproduce it because after waiting a month or 2 to check the offending site out, the site had moved! But wait, I had included a full backstrace, but that did not seem to matter. I know the guys are busy, but still!

      After a few of those, I just said screw that. I'm not wasting my time.

      It's not only me. The most voted mozilla bug for months maybe years running is futured. The 'view source of dynamic pages' bug. One full time developer said 'it did not affect enough people'. Um, yeah that's why it has more votes then any other bug by far.
    • I swear I can't hit a link in the mozilla mail program without a 50% chance of total mozilla crash. I send my talkbacks - does that count as 'bug reporting'? Under 'what were you doing?' I put 'clicking a link'.
    • Mozilla is starting to run into an odd problem here. Back at 0.8, and even as late as 0.9.2, there were enough bug-fixes coming in for enough major bugs that it was well worth the time of the average well-clued user to run nightlies instead of releases. The nightlies would only be truely unstable for a week or two after a release (as the flood gates opened up), but then they would stabalize, and I found them very usable.

      Now, though, the 0.9.8 and 0.9.9 releases have been so stable that I haven't wanted to load a nightly. It hasn't been helped by the fact that Mozillazine used to do a great job of reviewing each set of nightlies, but they've been falling WAY behind for a while now.

      I've got work to do, and was really only a tester because being one got me a better browser than NS4. I wonder how many other folk are equally lazy...?

  • Interesting release tree (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:39AM (#3314806)
    It appears from the roadmap [mozilla.org] that they plan to fork development after 1.0 into two branches, one for further stabilizing 1.0 and one for adding features, leading to 1.1.

    The strange result is that 1.0.3 is scheduled to be released about a month after the final 1.1. Are they really planning something huge for the 1.1 branch that they don't trust themselves to re-merge the tree? I guess there is precedent for this, with Netscape 4.08 being released after the 4.5 releases were well on their way. Also, it seems that this is how Linux kernel releases work, with 2.2 still being maintained after the release of 2.4. Still, this is a new policy for Mozilla.

    • Re:Interesting release tree (Score:4, Informative)

      by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @03:22AM (#3314912) Homepage
      The Mozilla 1.0 branch is planned as a long-lived stability branch with minimal or no new features. Folks looking for a stable and slower-moving codebase on which to build other applications should have an easier time tracking the 1.0 branch than the fast and furius trunk which will be taking features and other destabilizing changes on the road to Mozilla 2.0.

      --Asa

  • DHTML performance issues? (Score:4, Informative)

    by gusnz ( 455113 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @02:46AM (#3314820) Homepage
    First off, kudos to the Mozilla project team for getting this far... it's shaping up to be an excellent browser especially once you count the security track record of the opposition.

    One question I have as a DHTML web designer, is that will v1.0 fix the DHTML timing issues? The v0.98 changelog indicated that "DHTML performance has regressed", which I can verify is putting it lightly -- one of my animations that revealed a DIV via clipping worked fluidly in Moz 0.97 and hardly at all in Moz 0.99, which still hasn't patched it. Check out the "Popup Menu v5" script on my homepage on a slower computer if you want to see what I mean.

    A quick search of Bugzilla reveals some articles [mozilla.org] also mentioning this issue. Does anyone know what plans are afoot to improve this?

    I hope DHTML performance improves before this tree is used for another NS6 or AOL browser release, as otherwise it could render some of the more technically involved sites unviewable. If anyone's more involved in Bugzilla than I and knows the bug ID that most work is going into, please post a link to vote for it, otherwise try this one :).

    Apart from that, I'm finding new Mozilla releases to be strides above the versions this time last year. Hopefully once fully mature it'll be the cross-platform web page development environment of choice... that's one area in which IE can never beat it, with the huge differences between IE on Windows and Mac.

    More power to the lizard!

  • Qt? (Score:2)

    by glwtta ( 532858 )
    I've heard something about the possiblity to compile Mozilla to use Qt - anyone have experience with that? And if it does work, does that mean that if I switch to Mozilla, my browser will finally look as sweet as the rest of KDE (with Mosfet's Liquid engine)? Oh, Konqueror, just doesn't do it for me functionality wise.

  • Mozilla Bugged (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Trestop ( 571707 )
    Although it matured in to a very nice browser, with very good standard compliance, there are still many anoying bugs - the ones which I find most anoying, and especially anoying as I don't think they get the attention they require, are the BiDi bugs. for a standard compliance aiming browser, the Mozilla developers have sure neglected to pay attention to an important part of an important standard - Unicode.
    Now, I'm not saying that Mozilla does not do BiDi - it's just that the bugs in the BiDi implementation are so severe as to make Mozilla completly unsuable to anyone who reads and writes a complex script language. most notable are the "text selction" bugs which makes copying and pasting from pages that contain complex scripts impossible, and worse - the BiDi text input bug which causes Mozilla to spontaneusly crash when entering text in (for example) the text area boxes of weblogs.
    The most infuriating thing about this, is that the serious BiDi bugs resolution dates have been postponed to later and later milestones, and now, as those are marked nsBeta1 (meaning - fixes to be submitted before 1.0 released), the source tree still has no fixes in sight, and I'm starting to doubt if we will see Mozilla as a competing browser to IE on the 'end user's' desktop - even after 1.0.

    see bugs :
    95228 [mozilla.org]
    82352 [mozilla.org]
    125546 [mozilla.org]
    112101 [mozilla.org]
    75011 [mozilla.org]

  • Can someone please tell me how to get it to work over X. I can't believe they're calling it "solid" and "fast" when it doesn't even paint the display over eXceed. I get nothing but a black display area on any reasonably long page.

  • Mail & News still have a ways to go... :( (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cjsnell ( 5825 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @03:38AM (#3314941) Journal

    I'm stoked about 1.0. I think the browser is solid as hell.

    HOWEVER, the included Mail and Newsgroup app has a LONG way to go. There are many, many outstanding (and often show-stopping) bugs with the Mail reader.

    I have been testing it recently with the hopes of deploying it throughout our company as the standard mail client. The Windows version is horribly broken. It often hangs upon startup and you cannot print many messages without first double-clicking them and opening them up in their own windows, and printing from these. For kicks, I tried the test with several different builds (including 0.99rel) on several different computers. Same results all around. Our mail server runs Courier IMAP and works great with every other mail client I've used (Pine, Mac OS X Mail.app, SquirrelMail, Mulberry, Eudora, Netscape 4.x, etc., etc.)
    • you cannot print many messages without first double-clicking them and opening them up in their own windows, and printing from these.

      FYI (and I just double-checked this on .99), you can right-click inside the message and choose print to print the email. Not a perfect solution, but it is much more workable than opening every single email in its own window.

      Other than that, I honestly have not had too many problems with Mozilla Mail. Starting with .98, most of the major problems I was having ceased, and .99 fixed the ones that were bugging me in .98.

      You're right, it does have a long way to go, but the entire suite of apps is moving along very nicely, and I'll keep using it for as long as they keep releasing it.
  • just out of curiosity, what compielr do they use for the Win32 builds? I mean I would guess VC++ 6.0.

    The reason i ask is that i recently upgraded to Visual Studio .NET (quite nice i might add) and the new optimizing technologies in there are amazing. My NES emulator gained an extra 100 FPS just from a simple recompile with new compiler. Could Mozilla for Win32 gain even better performance if they compiled it with VS .NET C++ compiler?

  • more bugs? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by natmsincome.com ( 528791 ) <adinobro@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @04:18AM (#3315019) Homepage
    One of the things that really bugs me is when people look at the bug cound and say hay there were 21 000 bugs in X version but there are now 22 000 bugs in Y version so X version must be buggier than Y version.

    Generally most of the bugs in that were found in version Y were already in X but they weren't found. That is there aren't more bugs just more that are found.

    Another thing is have you read some of the bugs submitted?

    Check out these(5 new bugs picked at random):

    *Bugzilla Bug 78633 [console] photon port should not print to console for opt builds (maybe)

    *Bugzilla Bug 35419 solaris/gcc should use -shared instead of -G in configure.in DSO_LDOPTS

    *Bugzilla Bug 108476 Error with XML

    *Bugzilla Bug 56179 Broken mozilla.org links

    *Bugzilla Bug 9185 Gtk command-line args crash viewer

    It may just be me but none of these are show stopper bugs in my mind. The truth is if the bug database wasn't open then people would be talking about how much more stable the new mozilla is instead of how many more bugs it has.

    It a couple of people went through the 22 000 bugs and removed the redundant bugs and fixed the trival bugs that most people don't care about chancers are that after one or two months the bug cound would be down to something more like 3 000 bugs BUT mozilla would be almost exactly the same.
  • It's nice to have version N+0.0.1 of Mozilla finally reach the official 1.0.0.0.RC.1, but for me the big issue in the last couple of versions has been "What plugins work?". While I'm a strong believer in the "HTML is supposed to be a content distribution language, not a page layout language" sort of purism, many of the web pages I want to read aren't (:-), and often they'll include things like Flash, RealAudio, Quicktime, etc., and I'd especially like to be able to see the movie formats.

    But I've had real trouble installing the things successfully in Mozilla - plugin installers often "know" that they belong to Netscape, and don't seem to be visible to Mozilla, especially if I have both browsers installed on my Win98 machine. Which plug-ins are going to work? Will the Mozilla developers test the installation procedures? And how do you keep Internet Exploiter from stealing dominant-browser status?

  • The 'new' roadmap... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SmileyBen ( 56580 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @04:48AM (#3315068) Homepage
    That roadmap isn't actually new. Just look at the revision date, the last thing on the document. Mitchell Baker has indeed promised a new roadmap, but that aint it yet.

    The link's still good, though - that's where it'll be when it's done, but don't get confused because that's been there about three weeks now...

  • Mozilla was going to be the all to end all ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Sith Lord ( 111494 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @05:00AM (#3315101)
    I have been using Mozilla forever (well, since the alpha 9 release), and have been amazed by it's progress. I downloaded CVS snapshots regularly, and found more and more reason to love Mozilla.

    However, ever since 0.9.7, things didn't seem so peachy. The same Mozilla snaps that were brining me so much joy were crashing on a regular basis. Even the official releases were crashing. The little things that I thought were really cool, were deemed to be not so and disabled.

    My gripes with Mozilla, however, are now over, now that I've installed KDE 3.0. The new Konqueror is sheer brilliance, and Kmail is as full featured as Mozilla mail was. I am finally 100% satisfied with my desktop system.

    I tried to love Mozilla, and for the longest time I did ...
    • However, ever since 0.9.7, things didn't seem so peachy. The same Mozilla snaps that were brining me so much joy were crashing on a regular basis. Even the official releases were crashing.

      1. And you reported these crashes to bugzilla so they could be addressed, right?

      2. I have had VERY FEW crashes since 0.9.7. Perhaps there are installation problems on your machine?

      The little things that I thought were really cool, were deemed to be not so and disabled.

      Such as?? BTW, mozilla is open source, so it would be possible to have your own build with features you like added to it. Course, I'd wait until 1.0 is out and stable...

  • just goes to show... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dollargonzo ( 519030 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @05:46AM (#3315250) Homepage
    just goes to show how much dignity oss community has.to them, 1.0 actually means a good product, which is important, because it also means they are trying to just make their product better instead of stealing money from unbeknownst consumers.

    lets just hope this particular trait of oss remains and does not become corporate like competition.

    QED

  • Just like sex (Score:5, Funny)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @07:18AM (#3315500)
    Wow, I never thought I'd see the day!

    I remember when I first heard of Mozilla about 3 years ago - it was going to make the "browser war" non-existant becuase it was so much faster than Internet Explorer, and still had a lot of slimming down to do (oh, and it was already pretty small!) Never mind that at the time, it had hardly any features, was quite unstable, and such. It was a dream people had. It would be great!

    Now, the moment is almost upon us, and Mozilla is almost out in the wild. Several years ago I was quite excited, but now? Well, I'm happy, of course, but what's the big deal? It's nothing all that fantastic, other than that it's a competing (open source) product for IE. If it fit on a floppy and file my taxes (damn those taxes!), though - that's another story. :)

    I s'pose it's like sex - everyone says how great it is, and every teenage boy wants it. But then, when it's finally obtained or obtainable, it's just kind of, "Eh, it was ok, but not what I thought."

  • Mozilla speed observations (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I use 3 browsers on a daily basis: Mozilla 0.99, Netscape 4.72 and IE 6.0. When displaying very large html pages (500K) Mozilla waits until it has read all the information until it displays it, whereas Netscape and IE will render it to screen as it becomes available. The net effect is that you can starting reading the text much sooner in non-Mozilla browsers. Admittedly, Netscape is by far the worst browser when dealing with tables whose elements are of unknown size. IE is faster than the other two browsers in almost all areas.

    Is the incremental rendering of uncomplex but large HTML pages with next to no formatting impossible to do in Mozilla's current framework?

  • Why open the trunk now (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vondo ( 303621 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @08:01AM (#3315657)
    From the announcement "The trunk is now open to 1.1 alpha work, on the road to 2.0!" I don't think this is quite the time to open the trunk, but rather the time, as is done with the linux kernel, to get everyone even more focused on the final product.

    Keeping the trunk closed says "No, you can't checkin your uber-widget yet, go find something to do on 1.0 for a while first."

    Obviously, a closure like this can't last too long, maybe until RC1 or RC2 is released. However, mozilla has recently benifited enormously from what seems to be a real focus on the important things in the puch towards 1.0. A few more weeks of this could really make a tangible improvement in the final product.

  • 4 years, 2 browsers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by n-baxley ( 103975 ) <nate&baxleys,org> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @08:18AM (#3315723) Homepage Journal
    Really, there have been two browsers developed in 4 years. The intial project used the NS4 code as a starting point and eventually abandonded it as unusable. So, if you take out that initial time, you're probably looking at closer to 2 or 2.5 years. Really not bad when writing a product from scratch.
  • I'm a big mozilla fan, but to be forking for 1.0 and still have no splash screen [mozilla.org] or icons [mozilla.org]? And this stuff isn't even themeable, so the usual suspects [xulplanet.com] can't help us.

    This is the kind of stuff closed-source people are laughing at. Why can't the Moz team get this together??

  • Bitch, bitch, moan... oh look! 1.0! Yay Mozilla! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gryphon ( 28880 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @09:34AM (#3316210)
    I have been galled, if not suprised, to observe the pattern of most comments regarding the Mozilla project over the years at Slashdot.

    In the early days, it was:

    "My GOD, this will NEVER be a usable product! Blah! Mozilla bites!"

    This attitude has prevailed (morphing to nitpicking) even with the most recent 0.9.x releases:

    "My GOD, Mozilla doesn't cook my bacon and eggs, and make my bed in the morning! Blah! Mozilla bites!"

    Now with 1.0 days away, we finally see many more encouraging messages:

    "Way to go Mozilla! We were with you all along! Hooray for the glories of Open Source and Free Software!"

    I guess I'm being a bit cynical, but it's a good thing that most of the Mozilla developers probably ignored /. over the years anyway. It's not like, say, abot 80% of comments were completely unconstructive, nooo....

  • My list of showstopper bugs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Cunctator ( 15267 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @10:12AM (#3316569) Homepage
    Mozilla has been my browser of choice for a while now, but it still has some serious bugs. So consider this criticism based in love. It's also encouraging that all these bugs have a real chance of being fixed. Even I could theoretically fix them.

    There is a huge bug with bookmarks:

    51683 [mozilla.org]: Unable to have 2 differently named bookmarks for the same url.

    This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.

    Another, less serious bookmark bug:
    85469 [mozilla.org]: Bookmark select/cut/paste operation is sensitive to order of selection

    This is a major meta-bug:
    73812 [mozilla.org]: Browser doesn't fit with Mac OS X UI Specs

    Anyone who uses a Mac uses it because of the user interface--having a program that doesn't comply with the guidelines is extraordinarily frustrating. But they're definitely getting closer.

    128658 [mozilla.org]: Typing in textarea really slow

    Large textareas overwhelm Mozilla. This makes editing in WP [wikipedia.com], for example, very frustrating. Totally unacceptable.

    However, it's great watching bugs get steadily fixed. So vote for the above bugs, get them fixed, submit patches, hooray. The rendering engine really is marvelous.
    • There is a huge bug with bookmarks:

      51683 [mozilla.org]: Unable to have 2 differently named bookmarks for the same url.

      Perhaps this bug is not deemed to be 'serious' since the point of having bookmarks is diminished when you store more than one pointing at the same place, right? Why would you do that?

    • Re:My list of showstopper bugs (OT) (Score:5, Funny)

      by big.ears ( 136789 ) on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @01:24PM (#3318215) Homepage
      This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.
      I was stunned and amazed when I read this sentence. I had to read it twice before I believed it! Someone actually spelled "ridiculous" correctly on slashdot! Its gotten so that it doesn't even look correct anymore. Nice work!

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