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Mozilla M5 Released 174

Only minutes ago, the 5th Mozilla milestone (aka M5) was reached. Interested parties may download it from the mozilla.org ftp site. Mozilla.org head-honcho Mike Shaver says "Yes [I am pleased with the recent progress on mozilla]. Our memory leak count is way down due to the efforts of Bruce Mitchener, Scott Collins, and Mike Pinkerton." Go get it.
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Mozilla M5 Released

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    I'm using it under Win98 (apprunner.exe, right?) and while it is a significant improvement over Netscape 4.0, it is still nowhere near as fast as MSIE 5.0. It's impressive, but not enough to make me want to switch back to Netscape.

    Sorry, I use what's best, not what's most politically correct.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Like they need me to tell them this..but try and load www.nvidia.com in Mozilla. I thought Mozilla
    was supposed to have some sophisticated renderer?
    I guess that's sophisticated as in "breaks your
    current web page". :(
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I am not a hard-core C programmer, but judging from the output, a fair bit of debugging output is being generated. This might be a performance issue. Why did you think that a pre-alpha version of a browser would beat a stable release of its competitor? The idea is to totally redesign the browser framework and innards, then put it together and polish it up.

  • Can't find a better linux IMAP4 client than
    netscape messenger.

    Only problem: When NS4.51 crashes, there goes my email.

    In the pro/con NS/IE5 it should be mentioned thata browser crash does not take outlook express with it.

    So, perhaps running Mozzilla as a browser and NS4.51 messenger for mail will be a good solution...
  • You still haven't adressed the issue: GC can be added without any development effort. And it DOES help for some types of problems. It isn't an alternative to fixing bugs, it is an addition to fixing bugs, that will reduce the amounts of problems caused by memory leaks you haven't yet found or been able to fix (or that you didn't know exist).
  • I have the same problem with Slashdot's banners with IE4, IE5, Mozilla M4, and Mozilla M5. You can blame everything on Microsoft...

  • I address the real, root-cause bugs: inconsistent state.

    And GC allows the state of memory allocation/reclamation to be consistent automatically.

    Adding an external hack to hide the more benign instances of this bug gains

    GC is not a external hack, nor even a hack. It a very useful language technology. As for your second point: Memory management errors are not benign at all.

    Hiding bugs doesn't count in my world... fixing them does.

    Automatic memory management does not hide bugs. It eliminates a whole class of bugs from even being a possibility.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    I believe your supposed to run the mozilla-apprunner.sh program for the main browser interface.. read the release notes before posting!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 1999 @02:02AM (#1902707)
    Just untar anywhere, and then run the run-mozilla.sh file. The window decorations look a little rough, but the rendering is pretty good. The handful of sights I went to all worked, no crashes.

    I bet M5 will be a turning point for Mozilla progress.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 1999 @04:44AM (#1902708)
    Milestone 5 (of nine planned until final release) shows that it is time to stop the un/intentional FUD slinged at the Mozilla project by open source supporters. Facts are after the opinion... Then more opinion. Sorry about the length.

    **************

    Major congratulations all who have contributed to the Mozilla project and endless thanks to the Netscape employees ana management who are bending over back-asswards to make this spectacular software happen...

    This is the last great hope for humanity to bring open standards, consistency, structure, and freedom to the world wide web. Think that is a grandiose statement? You will support open standards and mozilla and eat your words. Or else we can either suffer at the hands of the Microsoft/Netscape buglists for the next fifty years or much much more.

    Let's run this down for the unitiated.


    **************

    Mozilla is NOT NETSCAPE. Mozilla is Open Source with a very very very liberal license that deserves reading and support (IMHO).

    Mozilla is going to consist of two releases. Netscape 5.0 will be built with the mozilla code. This will not be open source, because stuff like a Java machine, SSL, and probably other commercial plugins will come with it. The OTHER RELEASE WHICH YOU WILL BE/ARE ABLE TO HACK ON TO DEATH is the Mozilla.org browser. It will NOT have proprietary crap in it but WILL have JNI (Java Native Interface?) hookups so you can drop THE BEST JAVA MACHINE OF YOUR CHOICE in. Crypto hookups will probably not be in the official codebase for very legitimate legal reasons.

    Here's the feature list and a comparison with The Other Browser.

    Internet Explorer 5.
    *********************

    Sort of Javascript.
    Sort of Java machine that sucks enormous rocks.
    Loads fast. Displays fast. (Pentium only please)
    HTML 1,2,3,4 incomplete, majorly buggy in areas.
    CSS1 badly incomplete/buggy (mostly unusable).
    CSS2 badly incomplete/buggy (unusable).
    DHTML badly hacked together with bad bad proprietary behaviors.
    MASSIVE BLOAT. Around 30 megs installed for core functionality. 6 meg download minimum.
    Exceptionally clean, largely hard-coded UI.
    Exceptionally useful mailreader included. (Outlook Express 5)
    Brain-damaged XML.
    Extraordinarily bad, almost alien DOM.
    Mediocre support for XSL, a COMPLETELY INCOMPLETE standard being rammed through the W3C with major assistance by Microsoft. (Perhaps they need features for Office 2000)
    Microsoft Windows or certain Macintosh platforms only. (Solaris does NOT COUNT)
    Horridly unreliable installation procedure.
    Extreme work put into making MS-friendly web-apps, websites, and scripting easy.
    Bleeds memory.
    PNG broke. But those animated gifs sure are purty. Hyuck.
    Integrated with OS to extreme degree.
    If not given own process, brings down explorer.exe (MS's "windowing manager" as it were) when it breaks. (every hour or so)
    Cost: Free, as long as you write pages to the MS standard please.
    Gimmick:feature ratio: 9:3 (channels count for 4, remember those?)

    Things done right: User interface and simplicity. Easy to implement interactions with a Windows environment. Usable by many. Quick.


    Mozilla + Netscape 5.0 (at release in a few months, most standards complete already)
    **********************

    COMPLETE REWRITE OF LAYOUT ENGINE AND MOST FUNCTIONALITY.
    HTML 1,2,3,4 to-the-spec complete.
    CSS1 to-the-spec complete.
    CSS2 not promised, but largely functional.
    RDF ready to roll.
    Dynamic reflow of pages.
    To-the-spec Javascript (ECMAscript) complete.
    Whichever Java Machine you prefer, or a Netscape licensed one.
    Very quick. Lightning quick at most tasks. A vast vast improvement over NS4 and extremely competitive with IE5. A 386 may apply.
    Legacy/standard DHTML all ready to roll.
    EXTREMELY EFFICIENT. Minimal size. 4 MEGS download for browser and e-mail client prior to optimization.
    100% CUSTOMIZABLE CROSS PLATFORM USER INTERFACE. YOU CAN WRITE ONE YOURSELF IN 15 MINUTES! I am an idiot at computers and I have done this myself. Don't want a button or menu? DELETE IT IN MOMENTS. Want something clean? Busy? Animated? Obnoxious? THEMED? Do it in MOMENTS. The technology is completely open, called eXtensible User interface Language (XUL) or something like that. NO BINARIES, JUST TEXT. You will soon be able to ROLL YOUR OWN on the web.
    GTK widgetry when used in *nix. NOT ONE SHRED OF MOTIF.
    Exceptionally useful Open Source mailreader included.
    Precise, to the letter XML.
    Precise, to the letter DOM.
    Incomplete standards will be included when they are user tested, reliable, and DONE.
    Install with whatever method/packaging you prefer. Like the mozilla.org browser? Pull the tarball and COMPILE IT YOURSELF.
    Probable ICQ and AOL AIM attached with the NS5 downloads. Highly integrated if installed probably.
    As bug-free as YOU WANT IT TO BE. I am a dillweed who couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag and yet bugzilla.mozilla.org let me report and get fixed a bug in the image layout.
    Drop in any image format you want thanks to a standardized image processing interface.
    Bug-emulation mode for the horrendously shitty IE and NS browsers.
    Extremely modular.
    It supports a few platforms... Obscure shit, nothing you'd use, like, oh say...

    Linux 2.x
    Windows 95/98/OSRx/SPx/Mystery Upgrade X
    Windows NT
    Solaris Whatever Version
    IRIX Whatever Version
    Amiga Whatever Ya'll Use
    OS/2
    MacOS
    BeOS
    *BSD(?) (linux binary hosting?)
    These are not promised, they are either complete or in progress.

    Oh and if you've got a few buds and a few weeks you can port the mofo to whatever platform your little heart desires. The GRUNT WORK HAS BEEN DONE. Just give XPCOM a place to set it's feet, hook up some shit, and you're done.

    Cost: Free. As in beer, freedom, and bug-free.

    Things done right: Technically, almost everything. As GOOD AS IT GETS. Light on memory. Light on cycles. Complete from head to toe. Free. Hackable. Yours. Forever.


    ****************

    Okay, let's clear up a few remaining issues some people still have with this WONDER PROJECT.


    "But ironhead, JWZ said it sucked and was dead!"

    JWZ unnecessarily badmouthed a project that is about as dead as the sun. He's a great guy I suppose, but taking a leak on a technically excellent project sucked and was in bad form. He will use Mozilla and so will you.


    "But ironhead, it's a dead project because no-one is hacking it! It's AOL's project!"

    Gee, guess OPEN SOURCE is a code word for AOL DevTeam now. It's an INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT PROJECT TO DO RIGHT and NS/AOL has oh-so-graciously spent a small fortune on giving us the great developers who are intelligently crafting greatest software tool you will get to use this decade. So what if only 30 people are actively involved in the code from the outside. A few tens of thousands are helping in every other way. Millions will use it. NeoPlanet is donating developers now. So are other companies soon. THIS IS A GOOD THING.

    "But ironhead, it's slow on my Linux box!"

    Well gee, guess we should abort it at pre-alpha stage and live with NS4.. It's called debug code, and NOT OPTIMIZED YET.

    "But ironhead, lynx is better!"

    It's a tool. So is Mozilla. They do not fight. You can install both and they will never do battle. And grandma doesn't use lynx, does she? We've GOT ROOM FOR BOTH, FOLKS. Actually, we've got room for both four times over after we delete NS4.

    "But ironhead, it'll come out too late! Microsoft won!"

    JESUS CHRIST! Why do I hear this daily? WHERE IS THE INTERNET GOING FOLKS? Is there an expiration date on HTML? XML? SGML? Linux took 9 years, Windows took 9 years, computers took 40 years... This is only taking a year and it's nearing completion. CHRIST! The only thing that the spread of Internet Explorer is doing is lengthening the amount of time it'll take to phase out RETARDED WEB DESIGN.

    "But ironhead, CSS1 is dead!"

    PLEASE. PLEASE. Get a clue, look at the source of many sites, and look up a word called INTRANET in the dictionary. Why this one is brought up mystifies me.

    "But ironhead, Netscape's browsers suck!"

    PLEASE. 80% NEW CODE. OPEN SOURCE. YOURS TO HACK. YOURS TO MODIFY. NOT NETSCAPE, YOU. If Mozilla sucks it's because you have NO SKILLS at programming/hacking and are to be LAUGHED AT and you're happy to crash every 5 minutes with Netscape 4.x.

    "I like IEx"

    Me too, when in windows. Why dontcha write up a XUL interface in about 5 minutes and make a precise clone of it? That doesn't suck? And won't crash?

    "But the build I downloaded broke on my favorite page! Mozilla sucks!"

    Well let's see here, why would we have a problem with a PRE ALPHA? HMMMMMMM.... It's either a bug in the largely un-hooked-up javascript, bug elsewhere that you need to report to bugzilla.mozilla.org, non-standards-compliant website coding, or something that just ISN'T FINISHED YET. Perhaps we could read the fscking RELEASE NOTES? The layout engine is almost complete and is a work of art. Plus it has compatibility mode to work around Netscape's and Microsoft's horrible bugs.



    ***************

    A few other things: it is NOT DONE YET. NOT DONE YET. IT WILL NEVER BE DONE AS IT IS OPEN SOURCE.

    You may spend as much time as you like writing your own 31337 browser, but if you care to save yourself a few years you may use any COMPONENT OF THE COMPONETIZED, OPEN SOURCE mozilla code.

    That's all there is folks. Mozilla.org will be great without your support and extraordinary with it. Please keep turning in bugs, please keep testing out the builds, please keep your MOUTH SHUT if you have opinions like "its dead because microsoft killed it and ie5 is better and mozilla sux cuz it loads up slow the first time.", please keep working towards an internet that has solid technology, open standards, and universal accessibility by all. It's time for javascript trix to step. It's time for crashes to step. It's time for Out Of The Spec HTML and CSSx to work PRECISELY. It's time for no more embarassing layout. It's time for NO MORE BROWSER-VALIDATION. (Does it work in ie3, nope, rewrite!) It's time for open source tools that get the job done right. It's time to stop dicking around with pathetic pseudo-standards. It's time for rock-solid internet browsing services on any platform we choose. It's time for cross compatibility, n-th degree customization, easy extensibility, and incremental debugging.

    We have been given a great chance by some visionaries at Netscape to do the internet the Right Way and it doesn't matter how many installs of IEx that MS makes up, OPEN STANDARDS WILL WIN! Please download and start exploring/testing, or wait until a final release is made so you can get hacking.

    http://www.mozilla.org
    http://www.mozillazine.org
    ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m5/

    Sheesh, chapter 2 in the morning. :) Thanks for listening.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 1999 @05:04AM (#1902709)
    Bugs like "www.pornwithlotsajavascript.com broke" are really lame and sucky. You have not discovered a bug if a site with a lot of graphical/JS doohickery doesn't work. You have discovered a tacky site that needs features that are yet to be hooked up in Mozilla.

    Example: "It's slow loading this page" is weak. "It's slow while rendering a png image inside of a box element, as shown in this test file" is submission worthy.

    Please read this and the release notes before some poor gal gets assigned a million bajillion "the toolbar hidey buttons don't work" reports.

    http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guide lines.html
  • M5 blew up on me within the first 3 minutes that I was trying it out. And no, I wasn't trying any funky pages -- only Example2 and goto.com

    I've had it explode reliably and cleanly while rendering www.cbc.ca [www.cbc.ca] three times in a row now. There are other eccentricities -- looks like it hangs if a page I'm trying to view is already in the cache, for instance, and the handling of JavaScript mouseover twitches is incomplete.

    Anyone who tells you to junk your current Win9x browser and use M5 is either delusional or malicious.

    On the plus side, M4 threw three fatal-looking errors just starting up on my Win95 machine. M5 starts cleanly and lets me turn off some of the superfluous toolbars. No question that progress is being made, and some pages just fly up on the screen.

    Now, if someone would just make it so that the scrollbar thumbs didn't blink. What, are they trying to remind me that I just used them?

  • Anyone who tells you to junk your current Win9x browser and use M5 is either delusional or malicious.
    Uhh, I'm not aware that "anyone" *has* made this suggestion.

    That was a pre-emptive warning more than anything else, fear not. Sooner or later, some doofus posts on Slashdot advocating just about anything...

  • At least Mozilla makes a stab at (i) rendering things correctly, and (ii) conforming to standards. Unlike a certain browser from a so-called software company based in Redmond.
  • It would behoove the people that download, install and run this milestone build if they would take the time to read the releas e notes [mozilla.org] for this build first.

    Please also note that posting complaints, or half formed bug reports do virtually no good in the Slashdot forum besides inflaming troll like feelings or pointing developers in directions that they should not be headed in.

    More informed users would be better served by checking out the well written bug reporting documentation located here! [mozilla.org]

    I want to die peacefully in my sleep as my grandfather did...

  • The release notes say you can't add to or edit your bookmarks. This alone would keep me from trying it out. Can anyone verify this, or is it just old data? I would figure bookmarks would be trivial to implement.
  • Correction - Java is not a good language for big "user" applications. For big "server" applications it's great.
  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    The layout guys -- including the guy who is responsible for integrating expat into the layout engine -- tell me that expat does handle well-formedness and entities (though maybe not ``PEntities''? What are those?).

    In fact, the switch to the expat parser found a pile of well-formedness errors in our XUL files, so I'm pretty sure they're correct. Maybe you need a newer version of expat?

  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    If we've advertised M5 as a beta, I must apologize: it is certainly not beta quality (perhaps not even alpha, as if anyone agrees on what those terms mean) yet.

    If anyone out there finds something describing M5 as a beta, please mail webmaster@mozilla.org and we'll get it fixed. Thanks.

    M5 is simply the fifth milestone, and will be followed in three weeks by M6. There's no beta here, and I promise that everyone will hear _all_ about it when the first beta is released.

  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    FYI, the esteemed Bruce Mitchener and his many clones produce frequent Purify reports and file dozens of good bugs (with fixes, often) from the results.
  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    There is a garbage collection mechanism in the Mozilla codebase, in the form of the reference counting provided by XPCOM (AddRef/Release, thank MS/DEC COM for the poor names).

    The basic problem, as Scott Collins described very well in his posting to mozilla.builds, is one of ownership model (objects owning objects, not people owning code). This problem doesn't go away by using mark-and-sweep or any other GC technique: you still need to have a Grand Plan for which objects root other objects, and which have weak refs, etc.

    While all the GC weenies are here, though, I have a question: does the Boehm GC allow weak refs?

  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    If the stuff in the release notes about font size doesn't work for you, you should file a bug.

    Does your X server report the correct DPI for your monitor?

    No -geometry support, as with all GTK apps.

  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    You can have both gtk 1.0 and gtk 1.2 on your system at the same time. I do, right now. Just make sure that you only have one _devel_ RPM or equivalent.
  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    Five bucks says you're using X.

    Ten says your X server is reporting a DPI that doesn't match your actual screen.

    Fifty says you didn't read the release notes, where they tell you about an environment variable that lets you scale the fonts.

    If I'm wrong, I'll pay up at Linux Expo (plug, plug).

  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    Bring me the code, and I'll slap it in the tree so fast it'll make your Qt-loving head spin.
  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    In the course of your in-depth investigation, you no doubt discovered that the page in question was authored by Adam Lock, an external contributor.

    Speaking for mozilla.org, we really don't mind people using whatever tools they want to write documentation for their contributions. Rumour has it that mozilla needs MS VC++ to compile on Win32, too!

    The shame!

  • Posted by shaver@netscape.com:

    You are quite right. My apologies.
  • I just tried IE5 with Slashdot, and it does not like the banners at all -- so much so that it stops rendering the page and displays a page of complaints about the problem. To get around this, I have to hit the stop button before it has completely loaded the banner.

    Do you have this problem? Is Rob intentionally driving IE users nuts? :-) Do you turn off images? Seems to me like it's overreacting a bit to hide the whole page because of a problem with a single element.
  • (Original poster following up)
    Actually, it turns out IE was handling it better than Netscape 4.51, which would just sit and spin its wheels. I had just downloaded the new Mozilla -- which didn't render the page right, but didn't wig out either -- so had been using that as the basis for judgement. So of the latest non-development browsers from the Big Two, best implementation goes to IE5.
  • I think most of it is that nVidia has an incompetent web designer who relies on Net Objects Fusion for page layout. Did you notice how many 1 pixel images were used for spacing? That's usually a good sign that the "designer" doesn't understand HTML tables and doesn't care about anything other than 648x480 (and Lynx users, of course, are invited to perform anatomically improbable acts with a goat. nVidia doesn't care about them...). Oh, and they really need a basic JavaScript tutorial, particularly RollOvers 101 as it's painfully obvious the "designer" didn't understand preloading.
  • But - it's not fast. In fact, it's jolly slow. (w|wout debugging, w|wout optimization - the difference in speed is not appreciable).
    It has nothing to do with optimization or debugging code.
    Define optimization. You are referring to compiler optimizations. The Mozilla team is starting to perform algorithm optimization which can does lead to dramatic performance improvements.
  • I am dying to try this out but the Mozilla developers have made it all but impossible to get Mozilla compiled without Sun's commercial C compiler (GNU tools do not work, spent an afternoon hacking on makefiles and gave up).
  • Agreed, its the main thing missing from Linux dev tools IMHO. I've been asking them to port for a long time, but they need more requests.

    And for those who suggest Java, hahahaha. Check out the jdk bug lists on image manipulation memory leaks with java if you really believe that Java will solve all your problems.

  • does anyone have a fix for this ?

  • posting from it, and it looks damn cool...

    a lot faster, and renders slashdot beautifully...
  • I'm the least IE advocate you'll find. But some of your nonesense has to be refuted.

    Mozilla's XML support uses Expat. That means no validation, no support for PEntities, no external DTD support. IE's XML parser supports all of this (although validation isn't generally performed in the browser, it's still available to developers as a DLL or OLE control). Now, let me also say that I use expat every single day and it's a great parser. Fast too.

    Mozilla has zero plans for XSL support. That's bad news. They hope someone might contribute it, but that's still looking unlikely, even given the prize money available. Microsoft also did something bad - providing XSL support before the standard is ratified. What the hell are they thinking of? Now everyone must make sure their XSL is backwards compatible to MS's. Duh! But I think you're unfair about the process through which XSL is going through at the W3C.

    Having said that - I'm now getting excited about mozilla. If they ship XSL I'll be dancing on the ceiling. If they don't, then I guess I'll get more work doing server side XML transformations ;-)

    Matt.


    perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'
  • Sorry, but well-formedness != valid. Yes, of course expat does well formedness checks - if it didn't it wouldn't be an XML parser. And yes, it does internal entity expansion. That's not the same as external entity expansion, which is really a requirement for more complex DTD's.

    PEntities are parameter entities, another requirement for complex DTD's. I know that expat found well formedness errors in your XUL files, because I was the one logging the bugs about it... :)

    Note though that expat _does_ return enough information to be expandable to support all the above (with the possible exception of validation) - that's how you do it using Perl's XML::Parser.

    Matt.


    perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'
  • I've found that 4.51 (glibc version) is more stable and faster under RH 6.0 (glibc 2.1 kernel 2.2.5) than it was under RH 5.2 (glibc 2.0 kernel 2.0.36). That being said, it still crashes or hangs much too often. It seems to work better when you delete history.dat and the clear cache on a regular basis.
    --
  • Wow. I have to give credit where it's due, and in this case it is. The M5 milestone looks like a tremendous and dramatic improvement over previous incarnations of Mozilla.

    I'm posting this comment from M5 right now, and apart from a few minor and a few not-so-minor issues with rendering form widgets, everything feels like its coming together.

    Communicator 4.51 is a joke. It should never have been considered releasable software for stability reasons. I hope Mozilla can turn that around. M5 is almost as fast as Communicator, and probably (sadly) almost as stable. With a few more releases and some good bug hunting, we might just have a Quick, Reliable, Standards Compliant web browser for Linux.

    Imagine that!

    -Seth

  • Wouldn't it be (easier || simpler || faster) to just use Java? Yes, it takes a while to load the classes and the VM, but most Java VM:s out there are very fast and gives a considerable speed push compared to previous versions. That, the XP stuff and a wonderful language is a killer.
  • Use junkbuster - gets rids of ads and such, and solves this problem too.

    http://www.junkbuster.com [junkbuster.com].

    -- http://www.wholepop.com/ [wholepop.com]
    Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
  • I'm getting more and more pumped for this the closer the program comes to completion.

    I can't wait until I have a small, fast, clean, lean web browser that still complies with most standards and offers the most important features.

    It's great that we're getting back to what counts, losing some of the feature bloat and returning to a really good program.

    Great job Mozilla team, keep up the excellent work!
  • JWZ was on sabbatical for a while before resigning, so I don't really think he'd been doing much for some months before that. I read several of the netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups, and hadn't seen a JWZ posting for months before his resignation. Mike Shaver and other Mozilla staff were quite visible during that time. Frankly, while JWZ's departure was the end of an era, I don't think it really mattered to Mozilla development, since it had been getting along without him for a while.
  • NS/AOL has oh-so-graciously spent a small fortune on giving us the great developers who are intelligently crafting greatest software tool you will get to use this decade

    They have done no such thing. quoting jwz:

    Bear in mind that, for a publicly-traded company, if a CEO makes a decision because it's the right thing rather than because it's the most profitable thing for the shareholders, he will lose his job, and possibly be sued into oblivion. That's the way the rules work.

    "But ironhead, it's slow on my Linux box!"

    Well gee, guess we should abort it at pre-alpha stage and live with NS4.. It's called debug code, and NOT OPTIMIZED YET.

    Wrong. On Linux, although the speed has improved, it is still slow as molasses, although I guess you can say it's migrated from dark to light molasses. Check out the mozilla.builds ng if you don't believe me. A recent post said much the same thing

    But - it's not fast. In fact, it's jolly slow. (w|wout debugging, w|wout optimization - the difference in speed is not appreciable).
    It has nothing to do with optimization or debugging code.
  • For what its worth we use a tool called "purify" to combat memory leaks (and overruns and uninitialized memory reads etc.). I have literally seen bugs that might have taken hours or days to ferret out found in minutes using that tool and it is available on platforms other than just windows (we use it mostly on solaris). It is very, very hard to create a non-trivial application that is completely clean - in fact even the best applications typically have bits of naughtiness that are going to be exceedingly difficult to completely eliminate unless you have a programmatic way of identifying them. I've written the folks who make purify before and they're not planning a linux port at the moment - perhaps that'll change in time. If you'd like to lend you voice to convince them to port this great tool to our great OS here's the url: http://www.rational.com/products/purify_unix/index .jtmpl
  • Have a look in the README file in the directory you have to download M5 from:
    ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m5/RE ADME

    It states clearly:
    This directory contains precompiled binaries of Mozilla.
    These are pre-alpha. They are not thoroughly tested.

    If that is advertising their product as a beta then they need a new advertising department.

    If you want to comment on this release get your facts straight first.
    --
  • Has anyone built M5 on the Alpha? I've built previous releases here at orangesherbert (and in fact, this post is coming from an older Motif-based Mozilla), but I'm short on HD space and don't have room to build M5 right now. So has anyone else? Does it work better than M3/M4? Is there a cache? :)
  • Perhaps ALT-N would work. The linux version of communicator 4.5 and probably all versions use the alt key for things like this. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the same in the windows version, but don't thinkj there isn't (or won't be in the final version) a way to do this kind of thing with the keyboard. What made you think that mozilla would use the same combos as IE5?
    --

  • I haven't finished downloading M5 yet, but the 3/19/1999 Mac build renders the www.nvidia.com page almost right, except that not all the little images line up quite exactly -- they're each pretty close, but there are small white gaps between some. Is that the same as what you're seeing?

    Also, does anyone have the URL for that "acid test" page that uses just about every crazy thing the W3C has dreamed up? I'd like to try that one again, but I don't remember where it is. The 3/19 build got that one very nearly perfect, and a lot better than any other browser I have seen try it.

    The problems on the nVidia page are a bit disappointing, but given the stage this thing is in, I still think it's very impressive. Just call me one more person who can't wait for this to be really ready.

    David Gould
  • i was having a couple problems at first.
    the first time it stopped, i just ran it again, and then it stopped again a little further, and then i ran it again, then it finaly stoped on the editor. i can't remember the exact error, so i just ran configure again with the --disable-editor option, then ran it again, and it went without a hitch. Ran apprunner and viewer and it works fine.

  • if you use what's best you wouldn't use Win98. You'd use unix :)
  • try x86rel/apprunner.exe
  • Just wanted to point out that now there's a jazilla binary (win32 for now) at ftp://ftp.jazilla.org/pub/windows-native-exe/ Also interesting is this project to embed gecko in a java canvas: http://members.cts.com/sd/k/kbaker/
  • including keyboard shortcut "themes" to make it easier for those coming from IE or Opera or whatever
  • please submit the bug report (but I tried cbc.ca and had no problems.
  • >> You still haven't adressed the issue

    I don't want to sound rude, but I think I have.

    I address the real, root-cause bugs: inconsistent state.

    Adding an external hack to hide the more benign instances of this bug gains me nothing, I'm curing a trivial symptom and leaving the cause way open. Hiding bugs doesn't count in my world... fixing them does.

    I use a heap walker to show me a list of memory leaks, but I don't then just add a loop to free them all - I want to know what logic faults left them there.

    If you want to continue the chat (it is rather OT) then feel free to mail me [mailto]
  • Trying not to troll but...

    The original poster goes on to state that "he's just repeating what he's heard" - he makes claims about code quality when he states twice he can't code, he makes claims for compatibility or lack thereof and then admits he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he launches personal attacks on anyone criticising his rambling logic.

    Someone moderate it down to -1, please. I don't doubt it's well intentioned, but MS mis-information is bad enough, I'd hope we can not lower ourselves to that level round here.


  • >> I really can't understand why anyone would like to punish themselves by not using a GC.

    Because memory leaks are only one instance (and are the trivial instance) of a generalised problem, and GC does nothing to solve the more general problem.

    The real problem is (I'm going to say objects, but this applies equally to non-OO code, just terminology) when two objects disagree over state. A memory leak is just a single case (one thinks it's free, the other doesn't), but the real serious problems occur when objects aren't initialised, they're initialised twice, they're not saved, they have poorly designed "flux states", they don't notify changes properly, they blindly propogate changes throughout the object-space, etc.

    GC does absolutely nothing for this, and, more importantly, no GC "Band-Aid" techniques help with these problems, so I try to write code (and debug) to fix the general problem: the memory leaks are the trivial case - easiest to detect and simplest to fix.

    Find me any production program where memory leaks are "the biggest code problem", and I'll show you a project which doesn't even realise where they've really got problems.
  • Um, it's not finished - it's pre-alpha, not even close to beta
  • Experimental JaZilla binaries are available for download. Read about them and find where to get them here [mozillazine.org].

    Z.

  • You can install gtk+-1.1 and gtk+-1.2 without it having any effect on your current installation. You need to *keep* the version you already have though ( use rpm -i to install the new ones, NOT rpm -U ) The newer versions have different so-names ( so the linker knows the difference between the different versions of gtk )

    -- Donovan
  • Netscape very rarely crashes on me. I *have* seen the occasional SIGBUS or SIGSEGV, but it's been weeks or months since I got one (not that I use Netscape for hours and hours every day either, but I do run it once or twice a day on average). This is Netscape 4.08 or so, running under Linux, using only the Communicator part, and with JavaScript disabled. I suspect that the JavaScript part may be significant.
  • err... I mean "using only the Navigator part", of course.. not Communicator. I read my mail at the console most of the time, with mutt.
  • I really hope that this moves the web browser arena forward. There are no adequate web browsers for Linux at this point; Communicator 4.xx is some of the most unstable software I have ever run on a Linux box. Konqueror dosen't support CSS. Gnome MC just plain sucks. I'm left with Lynx. At least it dosen't crash and renders CSS correctly.

    It sure would be nice to be able to run that QNX web browser on Linux...

    Blah, 40 minutes left. Gotta get me a DSL...
  • However, my experience with Mozilla releases on the 2 major platforms so far (Windoze and Linux) has been most unimpressive. Extremely slow and jerky rendering, many bugs, many if not most buttons and keys non-functional, too many crashes, and the list goes on.

    That's not exactly a valid complaint yet. Mozilla is just now halfway to it's planed completion. Saying it's crap because it crashes and buttons don't work is akin to complaining your 10 year old hasn't gotten his PhD in quantium physics yet.
    --
    James Michael Keller

  • > Milestone 5 (of nine planned until final release)

    M9 is the current plan for the first public BETA, not the final release.
  • Yes, there are lots of newsgroups (described at http://www.mozilla.org/community.html)

    Your problems are the sorts of things discussed in netscape.public.mozilla.builds
  • IE5 CSS support is just enough to hurt yourself with. That is, it lets you do a lot of things, but doesn't let you do everything you should be able to. Unfortunately, since these specs are never documented, it becomes difficult to tell if the error is in your own coding of a stylesheet, or in the implementation in IE.

    A good article [webreference.com] on IE 5's css support is available.

    This goes for every other incomplete implementation of CSS in release browsers. Incomplete is just a subset of wrong.

  • I, for one, have added to my bookmark list. Can't remember if I used it later, though. Win32.
  • by Byter ( 11845 )
    "It has many many problems with most current programs. Obviously mozilla m5 hasn't been ported to that version of glibc. Just use a pre-compiled version until it is fixed."

    1) The only thing that glibc-2.1 really breaks (at compile time) is yacc's output (because it's a lovely file pointer = STDIN, STDOUT, etc)..

    2) It DOES break some binary compatibilty though... if anything. pre-compiled binaries would have much more trouble then compiling the code.

    "It is unfortunate that glibc 2.1 is largly incompatible with glibc 2.0."

    How is it? It uses versioned symbols.
  • That would incluide telling us in the documentation or the release notes exactly which sections of mozilla are expected to ccmpile, and which ones don't. I end up doing 3-4 compiles until I get a ./configure setting that works.

  • Could you elucidate what config problems people might have with Netscape on Linux? I'm actually curious - this is no troll.

    In my experience, Communicator 4.5 on Solaris x86 has been great, while 4.0x from Linux Mandrake 5.3 has been an utter POS.

    (It's hard to sell users on the "stablity" of Linux, when the web browser seems so drastically broken.)


    --
  • Lynx is one of the best web browsers there is. It supports SSL [albatross.co.nz], so it's better for e-commerce than most commercial browsers available (internationally).
  • by wahay ( 12517 )
    I have no idea what milestone 5 means. 20 minutes on the mozilla site didn't help. I remember a good description of M1, but I haven't seen any since. I'd sure like to know if this is worth downloading, but I don't have a clue what's in it.

    Anyone?
  • Remember Javagator? Java is not a good language for big applications.
  • Does anyone else run HotJava?

    I fire it up occasionally, and on a Pentium 200 with 64 megs of RAM, it is usable, but quite slow.

    IMHO, Java VM performance on Linux still has a way to go before usable (big) apps can be written for it.

  • Well I don't know exactly how much of a coding brain you have to be to get it up and running in win32 but I ran every executable I could and if there is any semblance of a browser in there I wasn't able to find it. maybe my expectations are a little high or I'm under the incorrect understanding that there is actualy a workable version of Mozilla browser out. I (personaly) was not impressed with what was available so far.
  • I cannot get Mozilla M5 to compile on my Red Hat 6.0 system. Apart from the thousands of compiler warnings I get, it eventually gives up. Any ideas why?
  • Sure, it's probably way down on their list of priorities, but not being able to CTRL-N for a new window or CTRL-O to open up a box for me to type in a new URL means that I end up playing around with these new releases for maybe 20 minutes before returning to the ease of IE. I know for sure I'd be more willing to use it for longer stretches if I didn't have to reach for the mouse to get just about anything done.

    FWIW, M5 blew up on me within the first 3 minutes that I was trying it out. And no, I wasn't trying any funky pages -- only Example2 and goto.com -- and I had no other apps running at the time. Please tell me that the bug situation is better than this, especially when there's so much still missing. (And yes, I was a good little trooper and let it send my system info to mozilla.org after the crash.)

    Random note: "M5" looks a lot like "MS" at 4:15am.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • by Zico ( 14255 )

    Using ALT instead of CTRL for action combos on the Win32 versions would be a disastrous mistake, because everybody and their sister expects to use CTRL for them (ALT combos being used to access the menu bar). As for why I would expect N or O to be used for New and Open, that's because every version of Netscape and IE that I've used, on every platform on which I've used them, have used those two. Why would they annoy users by changing these?

    As far as the final version, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the CTRL combos will be present. I was just throwing out a suggestion that they start coding them in (I would think that it'd be one of the simpler coding tasks in the entire project), so that some of us keyboard-oriented users could start racking up a lot more usage, helping them iron out bugs in the process.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Why not come with a standard set of keyboard combos that everyone is used to, letting them change it if they want to? Who the hell wants to go through all the combinations to have to set their own? Lemme guess, you enjoy hand-editing your XF86Config file, right?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • I have had much greater stability with my Netscape on my Linux (RedHat 5.2 and now 6.0) box than with my HP-UX box at work. And my HP-UX box is a much faster machine. Go figure.
    ----------------------------------------- -----------
    Jamin Philip Gray
    jgray@writeme.com
    http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
  • I have also tried to talk to rational about porting there stuff to Linux and they are not into it at all! It should be fairly easy for them to port to another *nix as they have it runing on a bunch already..

    Lets all mail rational and see if we can get them to port some of there products to Linux..

    Here is the person I dealt with, send a polite email expressing your interest in their products and hoping they get ported to Linux. (If you are interested in there products.)
    Franco, Kathryn [mailto]

  • Have you tried the new HotJava version 3.0. It looks great, OK its a little clunky but it hasn'y crashed on me yet. The only problem is it doesn't seem to deal with css properly, but it now does JavaScript. Well worth a look. :)
  • Netscape 4.08 crashes on me almost daily. Actually, technically speaking it no longer "crashes" (though it used to a lot), nowadays it just hangs and I have to kill it, usually with a -9.

    I use RedHat Linux (i386) 5.2, all the latest patches, with GNOME and Enlightenment.
    ----------

  • For what its worth, I found netscape crashes much less if you "downgrade" to the libc5 version, no matter what your system uses. On my redhat6 box, Netscape 4.08 libc5 version crashes exceptionally rarely, if at all. The libc6 4.51 that came with RH6 crashed on my daily. I hope this helps.
  • You're not supposed to switch to it, it's _pre-alpha_ software. This means it probably doesn't even work the first try. Did you try IE5 in the pre-alpha stages? In my opinion this mozilla release was better than the IE5 early _betas_..

    --Matt
  • Every time I test a Mozilla build, my third test page is microsoft.com to fool around a bit and leave Mozilla traces in their logs, just to show that Netscape is far from dead. They check their logs for sure.
  • Go to bugzilla.mozilla.org [mozilla.org] and file a bug report. I've reported a dozen rendering bugs and the Mozilla developers have been very keen about fixing these "minor" bugs. Rock on!

  • ftp://ftp.digiforest.com/mirrors/mozilla-m5/ ( link [digiforest.com] )

    25 users because I've never mirrored something and posted the URL to slashdot before. If things go well and I don't get attacked I might mirror other things as well. It's a dedicated, Bay-compressed, PtP T3. Have fun.

    And read the release notes [mozilla.org]!

    R. [mailto]

  • Mmmmm. Fresh code.

    OK, so it still has lots of bugs. But it sure looks good. I'll be switching my primary browser to Mozilla by M6 or M7, if development continues at this rate.

  • Sweet mother of god, I tried out Lynx v2.8 based on this post, and was quite impressed indeed. The last version of lynx I used was on VMS a year ago. It didn't support cookies, choked on wierd HTML, yadda yadda yadda. Sweet! A fast, stable browser! Man this is nice.
  • When Ie5 crashes on my NT box, it never takes the shell with it.

    It does crash though, at least every day. Almost as much as Netscape 4 did on Linux.

    Mike
  • too bad that no one of import will see it.
  • No, not ironic...

    That page is designed for the Mozilla Active X control, showing mozilla running as a control under IE (yes... its true!!! it does that)

    since IE is the only browser that supports Active X, and there FPE allows web designers to insert them easily.... thats all it is..

    More likely, that page has been "Cut and Pasted" from another "public" page as a template
  • by Panoramix ( 31263 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @02:09AM (#1902803) Homepage

    Check under Project Sea Monkey [mozilla.org]. You probably want to see the milestone plan [mozilla.org].

    There are release notes [mozilla.org], too.

  • by Another MacHack ( 32639 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @02:06AM (#1902805)
    Given the ubiquity of memory leaks, why don't more programs use garbage collection? The idea being not to rely on garbage collection, but to let it clean up after your mistakes, because you can't find them ALL. The Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector [sgi.com] is such a package for C/C++. (And before everyone jumps all over GC, please read this portion of the GC faq [iecc.com])
  • "If you need a little chuckle, or just need to see something strange, then read this. In order to see this you will need to download the new Mozilla M5. Go into the directory you unzipped it to, and follow this path:
    \x86rel\res\MozillaControl.html
    This should open up your browser. Right click the middle of the page and click View Source or whatever you need to click to see the source code of the page. The generator tag said the page was made with Microsoft Frontpage Express 2.0. Even amidst all of the browser wars, Netscape developers must still prefer IE and its components to their own Netscape. Strange, isn't it?"

    Note: Stolen from betanews.com
  • Shortly after I emailed the link to d/l M5 to some friends, one replied with a link to JWZ's resignation [jwz.org]. I guess he thought that JWZ leaving meant the death of Mozilla. Tell me if I'm off-base, but here's how I replied:
    Losing Zawinski was a great punch in the stomach for Mozilla, but I think by no means is it dead. I think after Mozilla gets over this rocky stage, it will flourish. Here's why:
    1. The code is just now becoming something presentable. Too much code done internally made it hard to follow in early releases.
    2. People won't contribute until there is something there. I think that the nearer and nearer that Mozilla gets to their target, the more and more people will jump on board. The organization will probably explode when they release the final product, and the general public sees how good it is.
    3. Milestone 5 was reached and released yesterday, without Zawinski. Life will go on.

    I just thought I would also share my insight with all of you. Let me know your opinion, and thank you for your time. BTW, I am running M5 from my office on Windows NT, and it is pretty cool.
    -NG



    +--
    Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare.
  • I don't want my browser to crash AND TAKE MY SHELL WITH IT. That alone is reason enough to avoid messing with 'Doze and IE.

Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer

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