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Mozilla M4 is Out 142

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-needs-to-compile dept.
Greg Johnson writes "Mozilla Milestone 4 is out. I highly recomend you go snag it at the Mozilla Ftp site. " mozilla.org does not yet have a description of what exactly is new-and-improved from M3, but what the heck.
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Mozilla M4 is Out More

Mozilla M4 is Out

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  • I'll bite. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Okay, I'm a sucker. 1) Javascript is cool. HTML needs if then else and function calls. Javascript does it. 2) Sometimes you need more, like actual running programs. Yes, Java's slow; it's still practical and the speed problems will become less of an issue with the ever increasing CPU speeds and higher bandwidtch connections to the net. Java's secure, understandable, portable and the damn closest thing to "C" I ever saw. How else can you instantaeously distribute runnable programs to the world in a secure manner. In sum: Java Rocks!

  • Read the release notes, please (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Following the 80/20 rule, my guess is that a lot of the complaining about M4 comes from the 21% who write 1000 lines of code/yr.

    As someone else has already said, milestone code is only slight above "Holy #$@! It actually compiled!" I think that parts of M4 need work (obviously), but overall it is a big step in the right direction.
  • gdk_imlib.so.1

    This library comes from Raster's Imlib. The latest version appears to be imlib-1.9.4.t ar.gz [gnome.org]

    SegFault

    "Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will
    not have, nor do they deserve, either one." - Thomas Jefferson
  • From the Mozilla "Issues" list:

    > "javascript:" is not working.

    > Vcards in mail are not fully functional and may cause failures when clicked.

    > Java is not yet implemented.

    Those all sound like features to me... can we keep them? :)

  • Neat! (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    The Win32 version is slow to work but quick to render. Only problem is, I can't configure Preferences so I can't get out my firewall.

    Love the interface. The the order of magnitude size difference from IE5.
  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    Here's my offer: if someone writes a Qt-based front end, I will _personally_ check it in, and make Qt binaries available on the FTP site for the subsequent milestone.

    The reasons for our switch to GTK from Motif have been discussed at length in the various mozilla newsgroups, so I'll not bore the literate by repeating them here, but you might find this interesting: virtually all of the current GTK front end was written by people outside Netscape (Stuart Parmenter, Chris Blizzard and others). There's no reason that people couldn't do the same thing with Qt.
  • Froze up totally on Slashdot. ;b I'm glad that the idea of platform parity is still being pushed hard.

    The browser situation here doesn't look too good to me. NS 4.5 is too big/slow/memory-hoggish, IE 4.5 isn't much but an excuse for MS to delay as long as possible on Mac 5.0, and the more ideological Mac users (like me) won't use it anyway.

    iCab still isn't really usable for everyday work--it renders as fast as Seamonkey does (when I can get SM to work), but everything else is way too slow, as if all the non-rendering parts had been done in RealBasic. (Scrolling is especially ugly.)

  • Tight! (Score:1)

    by jabbo ( 860 )
    It's ugly and it's slow (well duh, debugging symbols and no optimization) but this is the first build in approximately forever that has worked for me. I was going to use the New and Improved build process to make my own but, well, it just *worked*. GtkStep makes it dump core, though.

    Pretty cool... client side XSL would make this thing rule beyond all. Too bad I have no idea how to do that on the browser side.

  • Rather than polished software like Windows 98...
  • Reading through the list of "Known Issues" tells
    me it's still very very very beta. I'm anxiously
    awaiting for Mozilla to be closer to the
    Communicator functionality, such as mail/news
    client fully functional, menus and toolbars
    enabled.

    Suggestion:

    Someone in the Windows crowd (which
    doesn't include me anymore, thank God) should
    whip out InstallSheild Express and make a nice
    install package for the Windoze people -- they
    seem to having some trouble installing and running
    the Mozilla betas. Help take a big bite out of
    IE market share!

    ...although at least the Windows people have
    the Gecko-based NeoMagic browser to look forward
    to soon.
  • find . -type f | xargs file | grep 'not stripped' | awk -F: '{print $1'} | xargs strip
    --
    W.A.S.T.E.
  • It was "Javascript:" - not javascript. Try typing javascript: into the url box and you get a javascript console.

  • They've finally enabled expat as their XML parser, so it now dislays well formedness errors. Yippee. Finally a good XML development platform for Linux and Win32.

    I'm now just hoping someone will develop an XSL system for Mozilla. Seems doubtful though...


  • XSL (Score:1)

    by DataDevil ( 1762 )
    XSL is indeed a styling language, but because XML is a way to show data instead of a way to make a page, XSL is a styling language which can change those datastructures.
    E.g.:
    If you have a piece of XML code, you could easily pull out the piece and use it in the part of your code.
    Also see www.xml.org for more
  • Unfortunately, there isn't a source release, so
    those of us running glibc2.1 won't be able to run
    this. M3 compiled pretty cleanly, so I'm hoping
    M4 won't be disappointing.

    I just wish M3 wasn't so damn slow. Is it possible
    to compile it without all the debugging code?
  • How do you launch the windows version? I'm at work right now, so I downloaded the windows version. But I see a lot of .exe 's and no readme files and most of the .exe 's I click on are dos programs that just kill themselves or guis that don't seem to do anything and/or crash.
    Joseph Elwell
  • Kill the web? You got that right. Time for the rally call:

    BACK TO GOPHER!!!

  • I'm running a current Debian 2.2 (potato) wich uses glibc2.1 and it works fine. Er, no, it's buggy and slow but it works.
  • Its a shame that Mozilla 5.0 final wont support
    (client side) WebDAV. IE5 does it today.
    With DAV we could view/modify our files without
    having to ftp them back and forth. Version control
    is also a plus.
    More info at www.webdav.org
  • "...I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter." --

    Who/where is the source of that quote? I love it!

    sPh
  • I'm usomng it to edit this comment. It's faster rendering ut when I press the spacebar
    it pops me to the BOTTOM of the page.. Wierd, it's also NOT word-wrapping! ARRRGH!
  • I HATE it when I'm typing blind!
  • Why? Because until recently, there hasn't been any browsers that properly supported CSS in any way shape or form. So what do you use to make things "look right" if you don't have CSS-1 at your disposal?

    Tables.

    So there's going to be a LOT of sites out there that don't use CSS and use tables- so you've got to get both working correctly or else you might as well have not bothered...

  • Despite what I've heard dozens of people say, Mozilla isn't slow because it has debugging info compiled in. My builds with -O3 are still slow.

  • Even with -O6 -mpentium and anything related to debugging removed, including your printfs, it's still slow.

    People are explaining away it's sluggishness because of that, and that's not the problem.

  • Most of the time, it's the netscape's event queing, that uses a mere Unix pipe, that is overflowing (and blocking)...
    Stanislav Meduna posted a workaround on the linux-kernel mailing list the 23rd of January, look for the "nspipepatch".

    It solved 95% of my problems (Communicator still "freezes" at times 'till I move the mouse, but it occurs much less often now; It still randomly crashes in java/javascript stuff, though).

  • debugging info != debugging code.

    There's a lot of printf()s there. Watch your
    console.

    --Dan

  • This release even has a messenger under Linux that works, and the browser works for hte most part!

    It's got some debug code in it so it's a little bit slower, but it's not that much slower than hte regular navigator, and it seems like it will be a much-needed improvement to Netscape.

    This certainly brings my hopes up a lot for what Mozilla will turn out to be!
  • I'm sure some enterprising person who knows more than I do will remove pop-up "functionality" to make a nicer browser. I don't think I've ever seen a window pop-up with any useful content, so that's a "feature" that can be removed without adversely affecting anything.
  • you mean like neoplanet which is coming out really soon
  • i'm getting tired of all these blokes who complain that this has bugs. Of course it has bugs-it's pre-beta for crying out loud! It's as if none of you "linux developers" never saw pre-beta code before. So instead of complaining and whining let's be a little bit more constructive here, ok? Mozilla is everyone's browser now
  • btw I'm not knocking off the _real_ linux developers-just the linux wannabes who think they are just because they were able to download compile and play around with M4 which is only meant for real developers.
  • Yeap.. http://neoplanet works better [neoplanet.com]
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
  • Couldn't have put it better myself!
    --
  • I can't get out either. Does anyone know how to configure it? I already tried manually editing the prefs file. Didn't work.
  • I'm amazed, except for small font disease, it actually works quite well. I'm not seeing any of the slowness others have mentioned, it's definitely faster than 4.5 and probably as fast, if not faster, than 3.0x.
  • Went to their page. Visualy, it looks great, but is there no Linux port?? =:(
  • yea i notied that too...does anyone know if gtkstep is any faster or slower than any other theme engine? i.e. the default one, redmond95, or are they all just based off the same thing?
  • Slow as molassas on my pII300(Win32). I really don't see it as "much faster"
    Did I miss something?
  • apprunner.exe :)

  • XSL (Score:1)

    by Freshman ( 9729 )
    I've heard very little about XSL.

    What are the benefits to including it?
  • ..but are still rooting for Netscape:

    Download M4 and the other builds. You have a chance to really impact a product by running it, and submitting bugs. Try and make it crash, it's fun :)

    The whole point of these Milestones packaged with the FullCircle software in them is to get people to give some general feedback on it. It's essential to the development of the product.

    Or you CAN just sit back and wait, doing nothing - Bill Gates will be smiling down on you.

  • ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m4
  • It's not all that awful, but it still has alot of the problems that Navigator has. Well, that and it's not especially stable on Linux or Windows (haven't tried Macintosh).

    Overall, while M4 is not a very fantastic release, it does show that the Mozilla project is still promising despite what some people may say in light of recent political problems. I say, three cheers for Mozilla, may you one day be quicker and more stable than MSIE!

  • The mozilla as you call it or the Gecko engine is a complete rewrite. The mozilla classic was discarded months ago. This isn't even alpha so get over it.

  • M4= Milestone 4 of the Mozilla project. It means a semi-major update of the project, usually includes new features, is more stable, etc.

    To quote a friend of mine, "it's just more better." =)
  • when are they finally going to fix things? I mean... it seems to be they're dragging their ass (so to speak) and not fixing anything... the tables still SUCK hardcore, the UI still needs a LOT of touching up, and all it seems to me that they are doing is trying to get all the "features" of HTML into it (and the table stuff really pisses me off still)

    now some of you will probably flame the crap out of me but why are they pounding so hard at new code and features when they should be fixing whats already there? load up slashdot on it - you'll see that the tables are nowhere near right for the titles... i loaded up www.loackergnome.com and it didn't even show me half of the page cause the tables couldnt load right.

    if i were working there i beat the crap out of someone so that they'd fix what is the MOST important feature of HTML... without tables the web would look like crap (or everyone would make their pages as client-side image maps just so they'd look right)

    8Complex
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • What do you mean Lynx doesn't have progressive rendering? Do you mean loading a page as it's being downloaded? This was actually added in lynx2.8.1. Check it out. It's _very_ nice.
  • And it is awfully buggy when IZtry to type in forms...
  • Trying all manner of possibilities, I (still) can't seem to get it running through a proxy (necessary on this @#$!@ ISP).

    (tried preferences.js, prefs.js, prefs50.js in various directories with no joy-joy feelings)

    Wake me when it can. Then I'll be happy. (I suspect it's the same static initializer problem, but hey, do I _look_ like a C expert?)

  • My bad.

    I forgot one combination.

    From the working Netscape installation, I copied the preferences.js file to the package directory (i.e. the directory where the apprunner/viewer executables are in.

    Now, why didn't I try that first? Well... sleep deprivation perhaps, or that I let someone else's hint ruin a logical jump. :\
  • 1) Launch apprunner.exe
    2) Read the release notes

    Apprunner will launch the GUI and continue running in the background as a DOS box. Check out all the unresolved references as their logged :)
  • Not really a fork. Right now, all they're using is Gecko, the rendering engine, and a COM wrapper within their custom UI.

    NeoPlant [neoplanet.com]

    "Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."

  • Actually, it's a more complex style sheet language, based on DSSSL. (I think I have the right number of S's in that!) The goal is to have both CSS and XSL available. CSS for simple formatting (since it's easier to use) and XSL for complex formatting of XML documents.

    "Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
  • Here are some interesting notes on what's included/bugs/etc...

    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/releas e-notes/m4.html
  • Hi.
    Does the word "development" mean anything to you? Guess not. Gee, development, do you think it has bugs?

    Don't even talk about the UI, because it's not even beta yet. You complain because it dosen't behave right on a complex page like slashdot, I'm amazed it runs slashdot at all (technically slashdot is a table abusive page, one day it should be done with CSS)

    So yes, you're a Halfwit. Stop whining and contribute if you want to see improvments. I personally think the people who worked on this are code.demigods for getting a cross platform app like this working.

    Oh, and as a note. You don't use tables for formatting, that is an old hack. Use CSS1, almost all browsers have support enough to do most of your formatting in it.

  • Im running it fine on a 120 laptop, is a tad slow though, I'm not complaining. Cool, they changed the little netscape thingie to a lizard...:)

  • Release notes here (Score:4)

    by baby fishface ( 14578 ) on Thursday April 15, 1999 @04:35PM (#1931166) Homepage
    Release notes [mozilla.org]
  • If you have ever used or seen someone using Neoplanet you would realise that it is nothing more than an advertising tool. Animated ads constantly flashing in the peripheral and you have to use their start page.
    The only thing Neoplanet offers is a customizable UI...for a cost.
  • The specification suggests that you do not use tables for your layout. That isn't what they were intended for. Do a little research and learn yo'self some CSS. It's much better at layout than tables (understatement) and much more advanced. One of the points of Gecko is that it will hopefully support CSS-1 in full.
  • There are browsers that don't use tables for layout either. Do you accomdate them? Probably not if you're using tables for your layout. If CSS is used properly (not CSS-P), the page is easily legible by any browser, including Lynx.
  • Actually, yes, M3 and M4 both have large amounts of debugging code in them, and yes, this does slow them down tremendously. The rendering engine itself I believe is running pretty much at full speed though, so actual page loading is about what you'll see in the "final" product from what I understand.

    Jeff

  • Read the release notes, please (Score:3)

    by robinjo ( 15698 ) on Thursday April 15, 1999 @11:53PM (#1931171)
    I'd like to point out that M4 is still very much a developer-only release. It has loads of bugs and everybody knows it, except you guys who are complaining that it's slow and buggy and lacks features. Oh, and one also said how Mozilla isn't improving.

    I just wonder if you have bothered to RTFRN [mozilla.org] or to run Mozilla from the daily builds to see the progress? I have been trying them for a while already and there is progress.

    A month ago almost no web pages were rendered correclty. Banners were here and there, text running in wrong places etc. But after each and every new version it started rendering better. That's progress.

    Also I'd like to point out that apprunner is really pre-code. People really haven't been working on it for long. Most work has been done to create the rendering engine and not for the bells and whistles in the user interface. Also remember that they are creating cross-platform code so it required a lot of planning and programming to even get this far.

    I usually use the viewer-program. It's the one that has been used to develop the rendering engine. No bookmarks or anything but it has been pretty stable and fast for me. To get an idea of Mozilla's speed, go visit sites with a lot of tables and resize the window. On my PII it's about ten times faster than Communicatore 4.51.

    So if you don't mind it crashing 10 times a day, rendering pages wrong and not giving you everything a finished product does, go and try it. But if you don't understand what M4 is, do find out before whining.

  • 'leet (Score:1)

    by Hanzie ( 16075 )

    I don't hang with d00dZ, so can somebody tell me
    what 31337 means?


    31337 = ELEET = elite
    just like d00dz = DOODZ = dudes.

  • Ugh. (Score:1)

    by Fizgig ( 16368 )
    Well, to be fair, your run-of-the-mill Netscape Communicator and IE aren't spouting debugging info. Isn't M4? I don't know, I haven't gotten it yet, but I think M3 did spout a lot, which would slow it down.

  • No (Score:1)

    by Fizgig ( 16368 )
    I take it back, there's no bebugging info. But it definitely seems faster than NS Com 4.5 to me. I would be posting with it, but it's form handling is not so good.
  • Deffinately faster.

    Using 4.5 freshmeat.net causes the browser to hang for a few seconds as it renders all the tables and other stuff. By-the-seat-of-my-pants benchmark: 23 seconds.

    Using M4 freshmeat.net pops up much sooner after the data comes in. By-the-seat-of-my-pants benchmark: 14 seconds.

    M4 kicks ass, nuff said... can't wait till NeoPlanet puts out their version.

    Sweeeeeheeeeheeeeeeet!
  • Hmm..

    I already have that problem witn Netscape 4.5 anyhow, so M4 can't be much worse; Currently running with 4 browser windows, sometimes as much as 7... One of them will hose itself and Netscape will suck up 99% CPU cycles, or Netscape will slow to a crawl, and if I kill one of them, all of them lock up and have to be forcibly killed.

    And sometimes Netscape will hose itself and none of the links will work, unless you right click and open in a new window, and then when you close all the netscape windows, a little dangly bit is left in memory, which you have to forcibly remove before you can run netscape successfully again...

    AS
  • Me Too!!!
    I'm currently running NT4.0SP4, but the system has been up for like a whole week, and thought the error may be just some little dangly bit that never erased itself properly and that the problem would go away after I rebooted, say this weekend.

    I guess it may be a more serious problem, perhaps an NT specific compatibility issue?

    I hope this post gets moderated up some so more NT users will see this...

    In my case I get
    "The instruction at "0x503371b0" referenced memory at "0x013751a8".

    From M$ Developer Studio I get
    "Unhandled exception in apprunner.exe(npjava32.dll)0xC0000005: Access violation"
    Whatever that means...

    AS
  • And this is part of the power of the Open Source model; free communication, open exchange of data...

    I'll try the above, and see perhaps if some funky path problems perhaps may have screwed up Netscape or something...

    I'm using Netscape 4.5, if that makes any difference...

    AS
  • . . . but also not usable yet. Is it worth the download? Not unless you're curious, IMHO.

    However, it is a big step up from M3 -- at least in the short time I've been here. I feel confident that something at least as good as IE4 will be out by 2000, which is more than I would've said after M3.

    . . .

    OK, that's enough -- back to IE for me. :^)
    --

  • Greetings,
    Under Windows NT 4, I get a crash:

    • ToolTipText: apprunner.exe - Application Error

      The instruction at "0x503371b0" referenced memory at "0x014e51a8". The memory could not be "written".

    The dosbox with the debug messages shows:

    • nsComponentManager: Using components dir: C:\mozilla\bin\components
      width was not set
      height was not set
      Reading file...
      Reading file...Done
      The Messenger component is available. Initializing...
      Messenger has been bootstrapped!
      The Composer component is available. Initializing...
      Composer has been bootstrapped!
      Reading file...
      Reading file...Done
      Reading file...
      Reading file...Done

      runtime error R6016
      - not enough space for thread data

    Is anyone else seeing this?

    I'm trying to work out how to submit it as a bug report right now, but if nobody else sees it maybe it's just my system...

    Cyberfox!
  • Greetings,
    Exactly! NPJAVA32.DLL. That was the key eventually for me.

    I got it... Same thing you did, went into MSDEV, and poked around. If you look at your debug window under MSDEV, you'll find that it's loading the DLLs from your Netscape directory instead of its own directory. I moved all the DLLs out of the normal Netscape directory (and the Plugins directory) to an 'ouch' directory under each location respectively, and re-ran apprunner, and it worked to some approximation of fine.

    Unfortunately, I can't figure out for the life of me how to make Apprunner NOT look at the Netscape DLLs to run, which means I can't run Netscape on the same system as Mozilla, a Very Bad Thing(tm) if I want to test it and yet be able to really browse when I need to.

    Damn...

    Cyberfox!
  • I don't hang with d00dZ, so can somebody tell me
    what 31337 means?

    PS. About to try on Mac. For those interested in whether it's slow or not,
    the HTML test with all the tables:
    IE 4.5: 1 second or so
    NS 4.5: 10 seconds (!)
    M3 : 1 second

    so it's the same speed on tables as IE 4.5, but PLEASE get a release :)
    Pope
  • On a PII-300 using Linux:

    On the bad side, it was as slow as mollasses, the sidebar on apprunner couldn't be dragged out (it had to be nudged out), lots of sticky graphics clutter (have I said slow already?) ... BUT,

    It hasn't crashed on me, yet; XUL works; GTK themes worked (I cycled throught 6 different GTK themes and it didn't crash the browser)

    Would really love to use the different modules in my own programs but they're too complicated to learn!
  • mozilla = netscape 4.x + old bugs*2 + new bugs
  • Known Issues: Opening multiple browser windows causes unpredictable results. Any URL entered into a new browser window affects only the first window. Closing multiple windows in the wrong order can cause a crash.

    That's from the release notes link above.


    LOL! No thanks!

  • And what exactly is the problem?
  • Just wanted to remind everyone that this is not even considered a "beta test" release yet. M4 is "Development Milestone 4". This just means the Mozilla folks have reached a certain stage in their development of the program. A bit better then "Wow, it compiled!", but not by much. Do not expect production-quality code out of a development release, let alone beta.

    It also appears the release notes page contains a list of problems reported. That does not make them universal. I suspect some things (e.g., JavaScript) work poorly for some, better for others. But that is pure speculation on my part.
  • M4 works better than M3 did ... no crashes yet ... but re-draw is really ugly when dragging the side scroll bar up or down
  • Accually your problem is that you clicked somewhere on the page!
    for some reason the arrow keys control the scroll bar and not the cursor, meaning if you clicked somewhere placing the cursor where you clicked when that cursor gets pushed off the page when scolling with the arrow keys it immediently jerks the page back to a point where the cursor is on the s5creen where you last left it.
    Whats really freaky is when your cursor is in a input box like this using the up/down arrow keys goes up and down the text and up and down the scroll bar.. really freaky effect
  • The pop-up ads are done through basic html and javascript. If you removed the javascript command to create a new window with the no file menu/scroll bar/explorer stuff that would effectivly be deviating from the DOM pertaining to the creation on windows. While I abhor pop-ups like everyone does, when we start picking and choicing which standards to incorperate and which ones to leave out, we become no better than the guys creating proprietary standards in IE and Netscape. Now one thing that can be left out safly I'm sure if that onexit command or whatever its called that allows a site to dictate a final command when you leave a site. This command was created at the request of advertisers, and is generally only used to keep people from leaving a site unless you purposfully crash your browser. Though luckly very few sites, but the PrOn 31337 sites sink to this level.



  • This is not a pointless browser upgrade. This is following the phylosophy of release quickly and release often. And if you'd take the time to look at the release notes provided you'd see everything that has been done and what is planned to be done for the next milestone.
  • apprunner.exe
  • I've had the same problem for ages. Some days it doesn't bite, some days it does.

    Most often, I get the "dangly bit" error: most of Netscape works except linktext, and then all windows have to be closed and the dangly bit process killed off.

    Three times today, even.

  • ...from the release notes (pertaining to Win32, the only version of this build I've tried yet):
    1. The preferences dialog is almost completely nonfunctional. One would seem to be expected to muss about with the prefs50.js file to do typical things like set proxies, cache size, and so forth (*sigh*... I run that squid for a reason!) Seems like a lot of that interface was there in the last build I tried... But that was pre-gecko.
    2. Unlike as documented, the prefs file, cache, and other stuff that should be in ...\Netscape\users\username\ are actually created in the current directory. Scripting or shortcut foolishness must be resorted to. Worse than the last time I tried a mozilla build.
    3. No, it's only pretending to hang. Blur and focus the window and it will wake up. This is an improvement.
    4. Shrinking a chromebar with its handle has somewhere between little and no effect. This behavior also seems more broken than the last mozilla I tried.
    Some things I noticed but aren't really brokenness:
    1. There's some kind of ugly spinning barbershop thing at the bottom of the window. Its purpose seems roughly equivalent to the load animation, except it's even uglier and more distracting.
    2. cellpadding is taken very (way too?) literally. Check out /. under mozilla and marvel at the slashboxes.
    3. The chrome feels really sluggish. In fact, the whole app feels sluggish except for the blazing rendering. This lends it a kind of IE feel, where pages render fast, but the app feels unresponsive.
    4. URLs aren't "corrected" in the location box. This is good in one way (it doesn't seem to want to take the focus away from me to do things to the widget -- an IE behavior I abhor) and in other ways bad (there can be bare hostnames in there with no protocol specified).
    It's more functional than your average Amiga browser, but less functional than anything I would want to use on a regular basis. I ought to contribute something because it really feels like mozilla is making jack squat progress in terms of delivering a usable app, but I'm in no position to be picking up enormous projects, or parts of them. It's all I can do right now to keep up with my rinky-dink stuff!

    I guess it's back into the peanut gallery for me...

  • I'm running NT 4_and_SP3_with_Communicator4_and_no
    crashes_(yet).
    If_I_hit_the_spacebar_my_windows_scrolls_down,_h ence_
    the_underscores_instead.
    Not_bad_for_prebeta,_I_guess...
  • > I'm now just hoping someone will develop an XSL system for Mozilla. Seems doubtful though...

    Don't count it...

    " Sun will put up $30,000 for implementations of XSL to be added to the Mozilla.org open source effort, developing the source code to Netscape Communications' Communicator browser. This implementation would be a plug-in that would provide XSL formatting apabilities for the Mozilla browser and would fall under the Mozilla public license."

    see: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,33534,00.html
    for more details...
  • I hate Javascript. I've had more of it than I can take.

    I agree with the concept - something like it should exist. But in practice it is HORRIBLY overused. All too often I see javascript used again and again to perform functions that are exactly the same as what plain html can do - except it makes it harder to actually get the information from the site that you want. Javascript is obfuscation of information, and that's why I hate it. Gamasutra, for example, often makes you click on stupid Javascript popup windows just to get a picture in an article. What for? So that you HAVE TO view the site interactively, presumably so that they can shover adverts down your throat. I can't spider the sites with wget. In my country phone billing is done according to how long your phone call is - so for every second I'm online I'm getting charged - and it pisses me off that some lame site is forcing me to sit for hours online, clicking link after link after link just to get one silly little article. Just give me the damn *information* that I want, without all the damn frills and crap getting in the way. Ideally I want articles etc to be made available as zip or tarball; this is what I try do on my webpage.

    Javascript should be used extremely sparingly, and only when necessary. The way companies use Javascript to artificially keep you clicking away at their sites while they shove ads down your throat goes against all my principles. The way amateur web designers obfuscate their web pages by throwing in as much "keWl stuff" like Javascript also annoys me.

    Java by itself is alright, as long it is used sparingly and in a useful way, for example to demonstrate algorithms. Java doesn't screw over 'wget' either.

    For an arbitrary example of a site made totally useless to me by all the ^$%#^$ frills, have a look at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/9589/ , an electronics website. (Quote: "ActiveX - please use Internet Explorer".) And those damn geocities popup ads. Bah humbug.

    Three or four years ago the web was pretty damn cool, and useful too. Now you can't go two hops without having ads pushed at you, and it's become increasingly difficult to wade through all the useless commercial blurbs when searching for real nuggets of info. The current move towards search engines that return links of companies that pay the search engine is going to kill the Web. It will become almost impossible to find information without being steered towards someone selling a related product.
  • It's looking pretty good, but things get real exciting if you try to scroll using the arrow keys. (At least under Linux) Doesn't draw the page correctly and scrolls uncontrollably. I like it though. It's going to be some excellent software when it's all finished.
  • blah grow a brain. in case you didn't know a lot of stuff is slow because of debugging symbols and no optimizations have been done, remember this is not even alpha.

  • Well, I have M3 installed right now, and it feels way faster than both Communicator 4.5 and IE 3. Lynx is faster, though, but lacks progressive rendering :-P

    (those are the only browsers installed in this machine, which is an NT 4 box, PII 266, 64 Mb RAM)

    Can't wait for M4 to download, but the bits are flowing slowly... I hope we don't get mozilla.org slashdotted this time.

  • No kiddin? Didn't know. Thanks for the tip, this is something really wanted to see.

  • I see someone pointed you at mozilla.org's ftp server already. But even if there's not an 'M4' source tarball, that only means it hasn't been packaged yet.

    You can get the up-to-the-second source [mozilla.org] with CVS anytime you like. Afaik, there's an M4 branch you can use, if you don't want to get the code people is hacking at right now. Ask around in the mozilla newsgroups about this.

  • Something's broken in your NT (or Communicator, or Mozilla) installation. I'm running both Communicator 4.5 and Mozilla M4 at the same time here. No problem at all. The system is NT4, SP3 (soon these bozos will have to let me run linux in the office.. :-)

    Anyway, I have no idea about what could be wrong. Sorry. I mean, is your Communicator directory in your path, or something? Are the Netscape DLLs in \WINNT?

  • Anyone know why the linux binary size if 2-3x the size of the win32? Static gtk?

  • XSL (Score:1)

    by Tekhir ( 32379 )
    I think its CSS for XML, but don't quote me on that.
  • What's NeoPlanet, a code fork?
  • iCab is nice, but my largest problem with it at the moment is the lack of stylesheet support. As I've shifted to doing most of my pages using simple stylesheets, this just won't work for me...

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