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Mozilla M8 Released 140

Posted by justin++ from the fear-the-lizzard dept.
bergie writes "The Mozilla milestone release 8 is now available! Go check the coverage on MozillaZine. Go fetch it! " For those interested, MozillaZine has a pseudo-changelog available. It seems blizzard's Xlib port is coming along quite nicely. Anyone at OLS next week will be able to attend Mike Shaver's "Inside the Lizzard" talk. Congrats to the Mozilla folk!
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Mozilla M8 Released More

Mozilla M8 Released

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  • I suspect that they intend to put this behavior in, and just haven't done it yet. It exists (alebeit with some problems, especially with pages that have big complex tables, slashdot sometimes being one of them) in the current releases of Netscape, and has for some time. I doubt that they would remove this feature, as many users (myself included) would bitch quite a bit about it until they fixed it.
  • Not only that, there is a Solaris package available for download. That's what I've been using, because I've been unable to get it to run on Slackware, even with libc6.
  • My understanding of the milestone process is that they close the tree every three weeks for stabilisation. This seems to take about a week, so there's roughly about 3 weeks between every milestone.
  • See "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3826" .

  • Who poured cornflakes in your chamber pot? Put down yer spoon for a second and stop chewing, in any case.

    Look at these M releases so far. The priority is including more and more features - sidebars, panels, icons for this or that (most of which don't work or only partially work so far).

    Yet the browser is more usable each time, as well. It used to be that I couldn't get the darn thing to load and render a Slashdot page without it choking; it's better at that these days. I suspect that your analysis of the development team's priorities is poor: if the true, number-one job were the inclusion of non-working useless features, I wouldn't expect much improvement in the ones that are already there.

    I would say that compared to other beta software I've tried (for both Linux and Windows) Mozilla is very substandard given the number of releases.

    But it's not beta. They're barely even releases.

    Yes, I know they call them "Alpha" releases but after this amount of time that is only a label to cover up the bugginess of the code.

    Uh, no, monkey. You can't summarily re-characterize the state of the project based upon your own impatience.

    Most Beta and even Alpha software works much better than Mozilla - it just works.

    What dream universe did you write that assertion from?

    And, most companies or teams producing Alpha and Beta products for public release do not have the billions of dollars the AOL/Netscape has to pump into such projects.

    You're stretching. I suspect that you're confusing pseudo-beta-test exercises like Microsoft's promotional Windows pre-releases with open development. Or trying to.

    Mozilla is under heavy development. The recent milestone builds are surprisingly usable but really just progress reports. You're pissing and moaning that it's not perfect when it's not finished.

    If NS 5.0 comes out before it's finished, then that's the time to trot out the trite complaints you're making here. Could happen...

    ObNetscapeHorrorStory: My ISP's storefront has a copy of Communicator in a shrinkwrapped box on one of its shelves (presumably version 4.x for low values of x). For sale. For money. The price? Over a hundred dollars.

  • Nevertheless, IE deals with that problem quite effectively by rendering a small placeholder where the image would go, then redoing the layout when it gets enough of the image to determine the size.

    ...thus causing the text to lurch and jump all over the page as it resizes the placeholders when it finally does get the true image sizes. Sounds nice on paper, drives me to distraction in practice.

  • Just a thought, for those organisations who have installed the full monty as an allinone client, they might not want to lose that training investment etc in order to upgrade from comm to moz so they make the two similar?

  • Unfortunately they don't have a category for mozilla, but linuxmall [linuxmall.com] does have contribution categories to a variety of other open source projects.

    Fede

  • 1: segmentation fault !!!

    whatever i tried, whatever platform i used,
    whatever milestone i used ...

    i'm willing to get a buggy preview of the new
    browser ... but ...

    no :-) on this one
  • After a bit of guessing, I've found it's actually bug #8559 which is about http proxies. Seee that for the info.
  • It's my understanding that the news and mail readers are just dll/so that are loaded on demand. The only issue I see is downloading of a larger mozilla install that includes the mail and news portions. Otherwise if you don't use the mail or news functions, then you should be just running the browser code.

    let me know if I'm off the rocker with the technical details.

    narbey

  • This is a bug with the cache and the network library. They are in the process of rewriting all of the networking code, and that rewrite should be the default within a week or so. If you clear your cache, the images show up.

  • Big improvement over M6 for Macintosh (Score:3)

    by imac.usr ( 58845 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @03:49AM (#1799721) Homepage
    In leaps and bounds. The interface is a lot cleaner than M6 (the last build I tried). It really is as fast as people say, too. Glad to see they're not just optimizing it for the x86. Of course, I'm on a fast connection at work; I'm keen to test it at home on the iMac over dialup to see if it's as speedy over PPP.

    Minor quibbles:

    1. The fullcircle version creates almost 900 separate files, a lot of which are just 1-2 lines of configuration stuff. That's a lot of wasted space, even on an HFS+ drive. Perhaps some of those options could be combined?

    2. It takes a bit of time to open, during which there's no perceptible activity. I almost Command-Control-Powered the machine because I thought it had hosed itself.

    3. Double-clicking a word doesn't automatically select it. Yeah, it's a little thing, but after 15+ years you get used to it. :-] And yes, I would fix it myself if I had the knowledge (I'm working on getting it now).

    If the finished version is as big an improvement over M8 as M8 was over M6, maybe it can replace IE as Steve's browser of choice. Now, if they can start supporting Mac OS Runtime for Java....

  • Or has the Mozilla team suddenly kicked everything into high gear. Two milestones in under a month, my lord.

    There are still things I'd love to see in Mozilla. I actually fixed a bug in the up/down key scrolling, Mozilla is amazingly easy to read and understand.

    I'm not sure why people complain that it's too much, it's a very clean C++/C program and my lord LXR is useful :)

    --
  • What I want to know is why Jasin is up so late (early?), but then again so am I :)

    I am also downloading mozilla now, but I am disapointed that a full 10 minutes after 8 is released the debian sites still are only on 7... tisk tisk :)

    Really it is great to see mozilla going.

  • ack, sorry Justin.. it is kinda late and my mind isn't all there :) (Jason.. Justin.. what's the differance)
  • Posted by Justin:

    hehe, no apology necessary. it's 5am and i'm doing that nasty miss a every sentence or so.

  • Top 10 things I love about Mozilla. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 15, 1999 @11:22PM (#1799728)
    10. Renders pages very quickly.

    9. Free!

    8. New features such

    *segmentation fault*
  • No browsers support CSS 100% properly at the moment. IE doesn't do everything properly, it may *seem* like it does a lot (as a casual glance at the MSDN SiteBuilder Web Workshop DHTML/CSS reference may imply), but when pushed hard it either offers only a proprietary solution, or no solution at all.

    Microsoft can claim they have best support, but if you want a particular feature that's in the standard, the high level of support is as good as Netscape 4.x's level.

    When the time does come for 5.0 to be released to the public, I see an intensifying nightmare for web developers. Now they'll have to design sites for Netscape 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0, as well as the IEs (fortunately IE5 is similar to IE4). Even with non-CSS based formatting, like tables, the three Netscape browsers will behave differently. Despite the standards compliance of 5.0, the decision not to support Windows 3.1 and mac68k will leave a number of users stuck with 4.x, waiting until Opera can come up with a completely compliant version of its software. As someone said somewhere, the web developer's life will get more complicated before it becomes simpler.

  • Anonymous Coward, reminding everyone that Real Men (and women!) know when to fight and when to agree to disagree.

    The last place that anyone should fight is online. There's far too much already. I'm an argumentative type, and I love arguments. But when they so clearly acoomplish nothing, that's when I stop arguing.

    I think that the both of you are taking this a leeeetle to far, and I certainly hope you enjoy it, cuz that's what will be gained from the whole thing. I've seen this so many times it makes me sick - but this one fits the mould perfectly. Guy 1 posts a decent-but-not-expertly-worded post about his or her point of view. So far nothing is wrong, but tbere is the possibility for harm. Guy 2 fires back a response, which tries or succedes to refute Guy 1's point of view. He thinks Guy 1 is an idiot, and doesn't have his facts straight. Layered with some genorous misninterpretation, we have ourselves the kind of post that we all love to hate. Guy 1 thinks (rightly or wrongly) that he's (she's?) being personally insulted, so he drops his gloves. Now we have ourselves a lovely little spat, and it's hard to say who's at fault. The bottom line: Stop.

    Micah McCurdy
  • There have been glitches in building on libc5 systems. In fact right now the configure process pretty much sucks, and misses a lot of requirements that it actually has but isn't programmed to look for. YMMV in compiling it yourself. Some people have had good luck with libc5 builds, as I seem to recall reading a while back in some of the mozilla newsgroups, others haven't. Personally, I haven't had much luck on anything but a pretty clean RedHat 5.2 or higher install.

    I build the new client every morning, automagically. Some days it works great, other days it doesn't. If you want to try building your own copy with libc5, I'd suggest two things -- if its not your first time building it, wipe the sources and repull them if you're using CVS. The configure process misses dependancies some times, and things don't always get built right. If everyone else seems to be able to get it to work but you, starting from a fresh pull is a good first start.

    Personally I think the CVS method of building it using client.mk is the way to go, any idiot can do it without any problems. Make sure you actually grab the M8 branch if you do though, because they're starting to drop the Necko code into the tree today (I believe), and the whole thing is likely to be horked for a while. I've heard its going to be even faster with the Necko code. I haven't even gotten close to having a Necko build work though. :)

    Either way, the i686 build will run fine on a i586.
  • (navigator!=msie)!=(navigator=bad)

    No
    (navigator!=msie)!=(navigator==bad)

  • Re:Is it my imagination? (Score:3)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @04:17AM (#1799743)
    M8 actually slipped a few days. I think its been progressing at a pretty steady state. I've built it from tree pulls probably a hundred different times this year, and its making pretty steady progress. Some milestones are closer together I think, because there are different goals for each milestone.

    If there are things you'd like to see in Mozilla, suggest them to the module owners, or better yet, talk to them and start coding them.

    Personally I think a great feature would be a toggle for font smoothing ala Gimp in Mozilla for the (of course superior ;-) ) X users who don't have the option of it. Its one of those things I wanted to tackle but the code is in too much of a state of flux as of yet, and I know I don't have time to keep fixing it as things change.

    I'm also hoping (and I believe its happening) that the e-mail system works with multiple accounts more like Eudora does than Communicator 4.0, where it remembers which account the e-mail came in from, and replying to it sets the correct "From" address.

    I don't know if its different fonts being used or what the deal is, but I think most sites look *much* better under Mozilla than Navigator.
  • I downloaded the linux fullcircle binaries, and the thing won't even stay running long enough to pop up a window. M7 did the same thing. This is on a current snapshot of debian potato. Anyone else experience anything similar?
  • I think proxy support (and basic things like a cache) are coming with the Necko code drop this week, which hopefully will be stable by M9.

    Necko is the new networking code, replacing the current networking code. Promises to be more efficient, blah blah blah. I just hope it doesn't block on DNS lookups like Navigator does under Linux. That'd go a long ways towards making the program "feel" faster.
  • The Moz project is very important to the continuing success of Open Source platforms and while the code-donatin' heros know how much their work is appreciated I'd like to pass the team a few buck-equivalents from my long-ago-smashed piggybank.

    Where is the website where I can get a secure connection, pull out my CC and make a symbolic financial contribution to the volunteer Mozzers?

    Buy some hardware, get together for free beer or whatever - I'd just like to show my gratitude.

  • Re:"Barely"? (From the original poster) (Score:3)

    by Eccles ( 932 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @04:25AM (#1799748) Journal
    I knew this would be the most controversial of my ideas, but if you think about it, bookmark management really does belong in a separate application...

    I've felt this for several years now.

    1) Navigator's "Edit bookmarks" thing looks like a separate application anyway, so there's no reason for it to be all in one. Netscape itself should provide the bookmark manager as a separate app, but part of the whole package.

    2) people do have to use multiple browsers at times, and you could rig up the same bookmark manager to handle multiple browsers (Netscape, IE, kfm, Opera) instead of having each have its own bookmark list.

    3) The bookmark manager could be opened separately, or even have a way to incorporate it into a menu; then rather than start the browser and then select the bookmark, you just click on the bookmark you want.

    4) Navigator's bookmark management is woefully inferior to IE's. If I could fix one thing for Mozilla, that would be it. There's no reason to make me compile the whole app just to fix that manager.

    5) Some places will want to have a bookmark czar, who maintains a global set of useful bookmarks (say, to the company's key website pages, suppliers, and competitors) that should be accessible to some group of people as part of their menu. Having a separate app would allow building a manager that supports a global and a local list of bookmarks.

    Also, there should be a way (if there isn't already) to have each new page submitted to an external app. This app could then keep track of the page marks, just like the back and forward menus, but it would also keep a tree view of all links traversed so that if you (for example) go to slashdot, go to freshmeat, hit "back" and then go to a Slashdot story, freshmeat would still be visible as a previous path.

    BTW, I agree that responder to you was rather out of line, that there was no reason to be so antagonistic.

    P.S. To the mozilla crew, good work! I'm acquiver with anticipation...

  • Re:s'good (Score:2)

    by tgd ( 2822 )
    You didn't say what platform you're running, but one reason the Linux version is both less of a memory hog now, and less prone to crashing is, I believe, because there was a bunch of shared libraries actually being loaded a bunch of times each up until very recently, and for whatever reason I guess they were chewing up RAM, and causing problems with particularly shutting down Mozilla, causing coredumps.

    At least that was the explanation I read, I never actually noticed the problem myself. :)
  • I'm really rooting for Mozilla, but is it really necessary for it to have a newsreader, email client, and other code that doesn't have to do with actually rendering HTML?

    I don't mind if it comes extra; the only reason I'm concered about it for Mozilla is that working on those features might distract the team from focusing on the #1 goal: being a web browser.

    It is entirely possible that even if these features were stripped, and only added later, the code would take just as long to reach production quality, because there are already enough people on this, and throwing more bodies won't necessarily make it better. I can't help but think though that they could have moved along much faster if they had just focused on getting the pure web browser functionality first, then started worrying about plugging in extra things like email, news, and HTML authoring.

    Can someone who is familiar with the code or the development team comment on this? I don't mean this as flamebait; I'm just echoing a previous poster's concerns along these lines. Would focusing on just web browsing have helped much, or are the real issues totally unrelated to this and adding the extra stuff doesn't really slow things down that much at all?
    ----------

  • Can anyone tell me the magic incarnation to get M8 to use a proxy? I can get it working by editing the prefs and then turning proxy off and on, but not get it to just work upon startup.

    Cheers,
    Alex.

  • Oh yeah, it's fast. But half the pages on the net look awful. If this product shows the inherent limitations of the real HTML specifications, then sign me up for IE.

    It's probably less of a limitation of the real HTML specs as a limitation of the people who didn't follow the real HTML specs when creating their pages. My experience is that the rendering engine is positively anal about compliance, and just plain doesn't like the kludges people have put in to make things look good on IE and NS.

  • But half the pages on the net look awful.
    Yeah, the ones cut in FrontPage. ;-P
    What about BeOS?
    ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m8/moz illa-x86-beos-M8.zip
    What about AmigaOS (pfft)?
    http://segfault.org/story.phtml?id=378aaf ce-02759340 (pffffft)

    Zontar The Mindless,

  • It does a fantastic job rendering the IE5 homepage :-)

    I checked out www.mozilla.org, then "what's related", saw IE5, and decided to see how some of those horridly complex MS pages would render. Very nice.

    www.zdnet.com OTOH is completely broken.

    I can't wait to see how the "translate" button works.

    It doesn't seem too bad for submitting comments to Slashdot either.

    I still don't see the speed benefits, and I don't consider it usable for day-to-day tasks, but it is damn close. I'll take everyone's word for it that it will speed up when it is out of Alpha. When Necko is finished, that might bump up the speed dramatically too. I'm beginnning to really like what I see though.

  • Hey, I thought proxy support was supposed to be broken? (it's in the faq somewhere)
  • I think the Xlib version is 100% the way to go.

    I am not saying that you would look in the Mozilla code and see X calls. That is also stupid. What they should do is write a "toolkit", but that "toolkit" is totally dedicated to running Mozilla, and is statically linked with it, and the source code is right there with the Mozilla source code. It would provide a portability layer over the various windowing systems (on Windoze it should use WIN32 api only).

    Multi-application toolkits have their uses, but on a system as large and complex as Mozilla it is much more efficient and less bug-prone to write everything at a very low level. In my experience it takes more code to interface to a toolkit when you need it to perform the slightest different than it was designed, than to just write all the gui widgets at a low level.

    This was one of the reasons I created a toolkit of my own ( fltk [fltk.org]). I tried to design it so that it could be static linked, and if you needed to make it work with your appliation, you were free to change the internal code and make it into an application-specific toolkit. I am actually rather disappointed that fltk is pretty much being used just like other toolkits, including the making of it into a shared library, which is exactly not what I intended...

    I wish Mozilla all the luck in making the "Xlib" version and really look forward to seeing it. IMHO this version will be vastly superior in every way, and I do wish they would devote all their resources to it.

  • Remember that a lot of IE is now "integrated" away, making it seem that much smaller. I would wager that there're a lot of files within the system that are only necessary for Internet Explorer
  • Nevertheless, IE deals with that problem quite effectively by rendering a small placeholder where the image would go, then redoing the layout when it gets enough of the image to determine the size.

    I've heard it said that the current Netscape doesn't do this because its layout engine is too slow and cumbersome... that's why the improved rendering engine in Mozilla is exciting, because it allows for on-the-fly rerendering a la IE.

    Which still doesn't excuse idiot web authors. Actually, what's worse than those who don't use HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes at all, are those who try to use reduced HEIGHT and WIDTH values to generate thumbnails. Now that sucks.
  • 1) I've always been frustrated that I could not download Navigator + mail/news (which I use) without Composer (does anybody use that?), Calender, the push client (RIP) and AIM. At the very least they should allow you to select which components you want at install-time. But I guess that didn't fit in with the whole Communicator strategy...

    2) In my experience, the back button takes you back to the original link in Nav4.x, but it often fails on certain websites (Slashdot being a notable one).

    3) When is Mozilla going to acquire an interface that doesn't feel clunky? I hope Netscape is coming up with a sleek skin, because write now it looks and feels horrible.

    KookOut.
  • Maybe I was being a little thin-skinned, or I was being full of myself (I've just been offered -- out of the blue -- the opportunity by a major publisher to co-author a programming book, so my ego factor has been a little, um, bloated, lately, I guess), or I hadn't yet had enough caffeine, or some such thing, but there is a lot of FUD of this type ("damning with faint praise") being slung about, and if I misread you (and it seems I have), please accept my apologies. No offense intended.

    I see my original response was downgraded to a "0/Troll". AFAIK that's the first time that's ever happened to any posts I've made @ /. (+/- 18 mos). In fact, I've had several of my previous posts on the subject of Mozilla upped to "3", "4", and perhaps even one "5" -- so maybe I was a little out of line this time. I'll try to be a good boy, and just offer helpful info when I see an opportunity to do so and otherwise keep my opinions to myself from now on, okay?

    Yes, I'm against anonymous posting. I volunteer-host another Web discussion board where we don't allow it at all, and I think our discussions there are much better for it. Yes, I overreacted to your AC status. I may not agree with using it -- but it's your choice. Use it wisely (unlike the vast majority, you seem to be doing so).

    Peace.

    Zontar The Mindless,

  • That's not exactly true - the install files are
    pretty much just 5MB - some of those are system
    update files, but they're still just part of IE.

    A Win95 machine, upgraded to IE 5, still only
    used about 12MB of space (that was mainly DirectX, too).

    Random opinion of mine is that IE 5 is just plain better than old Netscape, and just better than Mozilla right now (maybe when it's finished, without the bug fixes). I'm just glad they fixed it so that it doesn't have to rerender every damned time you resize the window.

    Now, I just wonder if it handles pixel sizes correctly...

  • Re: not lib5c problem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The problem is that Mozilla is built using broken RedHat
    c++ libraries (versions of libstdc++ patched by RedHat to fix
    their lib5c problems when originally making transition to lib6c).
    RedHat and other distros based on RedHat continue to use these
    broken libs (they all have the __ double underscores in error
    messages).

    I am using a modern glibc distro (Stampede), not Slackware, and
    Mozilla will not work with that distro or any other that doesn't
    use the broken RedHat patches. Mozilla will work just find if
    one replaces all the C++ libs with broken versions, but who wants
    to do that?

    It may be possible to find a place to get snapshots of Mozilla
    compiled with standard libararies, but not from the official
    Mozilla download site. Or, you can compile it yourself. It will
    work just fine with Slackware, or Stampede, if you do, but I do
    not have the hard disk space for the intermediate files or the
    recommended ram. (128 meg).

    Way to go RedHat. May you rot in hell. What a shame!

  • up down key scrolling...

    hmm... it doesnt work in WinNT!!

    at least not on my computer
  • Not Intended To Be A Troll, I'm Just Having A Little Fun Here, Okay?

    I do know the difference between "=" and "==", thanks. That "=" is being used as an assignment operator, and not a test for equality.

    If you prefer, how about "navigator!=msie"!="navigator=bad"; (substitute neq if you desire)?

    Zontar The Mindless,

  • 'm also hoping (and I believe its happening) that the e-mail system works with multiple accounts more like Eudora does than Communicator 4.0, where it remembers which account the e-mail came in from, and replying to it sets the correct "From" address.
    That's something I'd really like to see as well.

    Zontar The Mindless,

  • Two milestones in under 1 month is great but How many Milestones are there?



  • You can use program such SockCAP32 from http://socks.nec.com that's what i use to run behind my work firewall.
  • Could someone who has played with it please report on what sorts of embedded scripting languages it supports? Are we still stuck with just javascript, or can we now say SCRIPT LANGUAGE=xxx for other interesting values of xxx?
  • People are afraid to develop CSS-based content using W3C standards because of the non-standard implementation by *both* NN 4 and IE4/5. I personally enjoyed how MS, instead of cleaning up and fully implementing CSS level 1 in IE5, instead just added new stuff with more problems. While I'd love to see Mozilla kick ass and be completely standards-compliant, the truth is that it probably won't matter, because we're stuck with the stupid mistakes of the past for years to come as folks stick with legacy browsers. It's discouraging because had Netscape and MS just had the tiniest bit of vision a couple of years ago, web developers could be focusing on creating amazing sites instead of wasting an inordinate amount of time just making sure their pages don't break on one browser or the other.
  • Yeah... sad, isn't it? I've personally come to the decision that when a usable Mozilla is finally released, I'm going to go to pure HTML 4.0 with only CSS for formatting on my personal pages. If people don't want to make the choice between plain grey pages and screwed up CSS formatting, they can get a real Web browser. I'm not going to spend my personal time supporting their some-"standard"-we-just-made-up browser, especially if they're going to make me make a choice as to which non-standard browser to support.

    My employer's page is another matter, but I'm really looking forward to the day when I can dump the layers and layers of proprietary extensions from that, too...
  • (Note: I didn't throw that remark about IE in as flamebait; it has its own passle of problems that make it next to unusable too... although I suspect many of the multitasking problems are results of the underlying OS, but then, since IE doesn't run on Linux, and is made by the same people who make the OS, the blame still goes to the same people.)

    Or is (allegedly) part of the OS...

    Since I've never gotten Mozilla to work properly, can anyone tell me if they've removed a "feature" of Netscape 4 that I found incredibly annoying? I'm talking about how when you open a link in a new window, the "Go" menu starts at the new link instead of retaining the history of the parent window. I find it incredibly annoying since my mind doesn't treat them as "parent" and "child" windows when I'm reading two pages of the same site.

  • Nobody says you HAVE to do it this way, but you're the first person I've met who doesn't agree that that's the way the "back" button should work. Have you never experienced the frustration that I illustrated, using Freshmeat as the example? Yes, there is a workaround: open every link as a new window. However, let me stress that this is a "workaround" for what is widely perceived as broken behavior. I know I don't only speak for myself; read the other comments.

    Your "workaround" is actually how I browse normally. Nothing annoys me more than having to hit back to follow other links I've already picked out as interesting. It wastes time and it interrupts my browsing. If I find a link I want to follow I open it in a new window and continue reading the current page. By the time I'm done with the current page the new page has loaded and I can read it. When I'm going through the news on slashdot I usually open a dozen article/comment windows and by the time I'm done with the main page the first few have finished loading. The single most annoying thing about win95 for me is that I can't open new windows with a single click like I can in X. Perhaps the 3rd button does that, but I only have a two button mouse and AFAIK there is now Emulate3Buttons for windows.

    However, I do agree that the back button working how you describe is not desireable. I rarely use the back button, but when I do I usually appreciate that it takes me back to exactly where I left off.

  • It was a bug in libc that caused shared libraries to be loaded more than once. So the bug is still there if you run RH 5.2 or Debian 2.1. If you build mozilla from cvs, the configure script will bark at you if it detects a buggy libc. The problem is cured in Debian potato and RH 6.0 though.

  • Thanks. No use me downloading it until then-(
  • >This isn't a problem with Netscape.

    Yes it is, Slashdot occasionally shows the problem when ad.blockstackers.com is acting up. Netscape won't render the page at all, IE5 will but then throws you into an error report page. (IE is still more usable, since you can go back and hit the stop button and see the page.) Hopefully Mozilla will handle this problem better.
  • From the readme file in ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m8/ :
    The fullcircle (or fcircle for mac) packages include third party

    software, to aid the mozilla developers in the tracking of
    crashing bugs; the windows fullcircle package does not contain
    many of the test executables contained in mozilla-win32-M8.zip.

    The third party code is *not* open source, but
    most of the build is the same as mozilla-win32-M8.zip.
  • A couple things... To the best of my knowledge, the Windows version of Mozilla writes all of it's info to the file \windows\mozregistry.dat, NOT into the system.dat and user.dat files which make up the windows registry.

    To your other question about a simple web browser, try viewer.exe. It is the browser, and nothing else. (Even so, it may insist on a profile.)
  • First: How do one "install"/run this beast? Which script to run?
    I can't find any guidelines on the site and the tarball is kind of sparse on readme's.

    Second: The plan of milestones are ambitious. That is nice!


    Best regards,
    Steen Suder

  • Improvement over Netscape, but barely (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 15, 1999 @11:59PM (#1799794)
    This message is being posted from Mozilla M8.

    It's long been my contention that the biggest problem with Linux these days is that there are no decent graphical web browsers for it. I'm looking to Mozilla to make that change.

    The current standings:

    This version seems to be okay for stability on Win98. It hasn't crashed yet, although the "back" feature is still a bit quirky so I had to quit once and restart Mozilla to make it work again. Please note that this is not a huge issue for me yet, as I know this is still alpha software, but it's good to know where it stands so far.

    Speaking of the "back" button, it is still broken: like Netscape, it takes one to the TOP of the previous page, rather than to the link on the previous page that was used to proceed to another page. This, IMO, makes it unusable for browsing: if I click on a link at http://www.freshmeat.net/ and then return later to resume reading Freshmeat, I expect it to take me where I left off, not dump me at the top of the page to spend a minute finding my place again.

    IE seems to have figured out this little feature. What's wrong with the Netscape guys? Is this in the blueprints for Mozilla, and simply unimplemented at this point?

    (Note: I didn't throw that remark about IE in as flamebait; it has its own passle of problems that make it next to unusable too... although I suspect many of the multitasking problems are results of the underlying OS, but then, since IE doesn't run on Linux, and is made by the same people who make the OS, the blame still goes to the same people.)

    As for style sheets, I must say I am impressed by Mozilla's renderer, much improved over Netscape. This has been a sticky point with me, considering that serious web designers (many of whom I work with) only laugh at Netscape and barely (and grudgingly) bother to throw in a little extra code on their CSS-enhanced pages to make it readable in Netscape. And they're right: the CSS design is a good one, and Netscape's non-conformance to the W3C's standard is a serious detriment to the growth of the 'web and structured document development and acceptance. That is, people are afraid to develop content using W3C standards since 50% of the popular browser market (Netscape) doesn't support them. The fact that Mozilla renders HTML "correctly" according to the W3C is a saving grace.

    Other than these issues, little else in M8 is particularly notable or worth its bloat. When it becomes a little more stable and fixes the "back" button, I'll try my hand at compiling it without the myriad of consumer eye-candy schlock that is handled better by external programs (like mail, news, and bookmark management). If I discover anything else worth noting, I'll try to remember to drop a note here for anyone interested.

  • How do one "install"/run this beast? Which script to run?

    Just open extract the tarball, go to the 'package' directory and run ./mozilla-apprunner.sh

    /Bergie

    --

  • Re:XLib version? (Score:5)

    by bergie ( 29834 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @12:06AM (#1799796) Homepage

    Does this mean Mozilla will not require GTK+?

    From the Mozilla Xlib Project [mozilla.org] page:

    "The fact of the matter is that there will always be more than one toolkit for Unix. Right now the big players include Motif, GTK+ and QT. Each of these toolkits unfortunately has its own look and feel for many things including menus and scrollbars.. None of these toolkits is going away anytime soon and it is inevitable that there will be ports of mozilla to each of these toolkits.

    ...

    One of the goals of the Xlib toolkit project is to create a common base, written in Xlib, that will include all of the functionality that is common across the Unix toolkits. The majority of the code will include simple drawing and image handling in the gfx module. It will also include some of the widget side of the toolkit. Some candidates include the nsWindow class which is the simple drawing surface used by the html layout and the XP widgets.

    One of the project goals should be to make it very easy to plug in your toolkit of choice. This means that you will be able to use Mozilla in your Motif, GTK+ or QT application. Until the world chooses the One True Toolkit or dies in the process, Mozilla should be able to run on all the toolkits without hardship to people writing applications.

    ...

    It should also be possible to have a stand alone Mozilla browser that is based entirely in Xlib. While this compromises one of the primary goals of the many Desktop Projects for Unix and Unix-like systems, it allows for a lightweight browser implementation that could be used on a Kiosk system, or on very old hardware. The fact is that Mozilla contains most of the functionality of the modern Unix widget toolkits and it is a very small stretch to turn it into a complete toolkit system."

    So the answer to your question is yes, altough I'm not sure if the Xlib port is that far along yet.

    /Bergie

    --

  • Wow, that works. This is the first time mozilla compiled for me on my humble old Slackware 3.5 with libc5. Too bad it registers, creates a neat profile, loads the main window and... POOF! Gone. I'm looking forward to M9, getting closer all the time I guess.
  • Most of the problems on the Linux version that I have seen (in M6 and M7, haven't done M8 yet) is versioning problems with GTK and friends.

    Fresh compiles seem to operate MUCH cleaner.

    jf

  • When we get the installer working you'll be able to download separate components. Don't know exactly how Mozilla is going to be split up, but mail/news and the editor will definitely be add-ons to the browser.

    Bookmarks could conceivably also be distributed separately for those few wierdos who said they wanted a separate bookmark manager, but I doubt we'll actually do that. Too many small optional packages will be confusing and just as bad as one monolithic chunk.

  • Sanity Check (Score:3)

    by John Fulmer ( 5840 ) on Friday July 16, 1999 @07:17AM (#1799802)
    I have read most of the comments here, and although most are pretty positive, there are enough 'odd' ones that require I make the following statement:

    MOZILLA IS CURRENTLY ALPHA SOFTWARE!!

    Please remember this when you download the Milestone releases. Feedback on problems is very good, go to http://www.mozilla.org/bugs/ for more info. But griping and comparing the Mx releases to Communicator or IE is really counter productive. It's a lot like comparing early Linux versions (pre .9) to NT 3.0. Guess who would have won that one? The actual beta won't happen until about M12 (October 1), and by Jan 1 the Seamonkey browser should be finished.

    Netscape will probably start tweaking Mozilla into Communicator 5 about this time (M12), if not before.

    Also please note that Mozilla is not Netscape! the Milestone releases are actually Seamonkey, which is the reference browser for Mozilla, and will not be the same as Netscape 5.0, although Netscape 5.0 will be almost completely Mozilla components (including much of Seamonkey), with some 3rd party additions.

    The Mozilla project develops code, design, and modules that may be used by anyone (under the Mozilla License) to create their own browsers or app that requires HTML, CSS, or XML rendering.

    Personally, I think it is going great, and the Mozilla guys are still right on track.

    jf

  • Actually I'd just like to see Eudora Pro for Linux, but I can't see Qualcomm being that progressive... still the best mailreader I've used.

  • I hate Netscape, because sometimes if I'm just waiting for a page to load to click on a quick link, netscape just shows a blank page. Hitting the stop button then shows all the stuff that could have been rendered as netscape was waiting for a network connection. I'd rather have it allocate spaces for the pictures, and put the text as it gets it.

    I agree, if it can render when you hit "stop", why can't it render along the way? Even if it rendering automatically would be too difficult or too annoying (I see half-loaded tables jumping all over the place), there should at least be a button that shows what's loaded so far without stopping.
    --

  • The xlib version of mozilla already works better for me than the gtk toolkit version. When I tried to submit a comment with the gtk build, first it paused, then everything shifted, then scrambled. Of course, with the xlib version I couldn't even get to slashdot, but it seemed more stable and it let me use my arrow keys and spacebar to navigate pages.

    You do have to build it yourself, but it's pretty painless. Just add --enable-toolkit=xlib when you run configure. If you add --disable-debug, you can save massive amounts of space, ~250M. I also add --disable-mailnews --disable-editor --disable-tests --disable-static too, which saves some more space and speeds up the compile. On my roaring P133, a build takes 1.5 hours and uses about 165M total (100M source, 65M for build).

    Should be a pretty slick and small browser when it's finished.

  • these guys are working on it http://www.NexwareCorp.com/
  • I take it I'm not the only one who has problems getting images to load correctly under Mozilla.. Is this just a temporary thing to do with gif copyrights or is it a bug?
  • Lynx uses environment variables like HTTP_PROXY. Not knowing a thing about it, Id guess this is a convention and viewer follows it. If not, one can always add that feature.
    --
  • Proxy support is currently broken. See bug #8859 (and its duplicates) for more information.

  • I dunno, but this seems like a huge improvement. I'm running with only 32 megs of RAM so any memory sucking is very apparent to me... This release seems a whole lot lighter than the older versions. I'm starting to get excited - Our little baby Mozilla is all grown up!
  • Does this version support http proxies?
  • the startup time is much better now. It makes it much more easier for me to replicate all those bugs (and some that I found were fixed for M8)
  • There appear to be some focusing issues. The scrollbars tend to flash terribly when moving over any of the widgets. Its only an annoyance though.. and it seems that Mozilla is on the road to becoming usable.

  • Oh my god... It actually works.. mmmm... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For the first time, I finally get to see what people where talking about when raving about rending speed.

    Oh, she is speedy [rendering]. And this is with 20MB ram, the crappyiest video card on the planet, and a Cyrix Overdrive, and win95.

    The last milestone I managed to coax into working was M3. It's still pretty fragile, but it's come a long way.

    I just can't wait until they get rid of the debug code.. mmm... (there is still debug code in this baby isn't there?)

    Someone said something about pictures not displaying properly? Everything's pretty and graphical with me. Using Windows 4.00.95a.

    --
    Mountain (martinjs.NO@SPAM.ihug.co.nz)
    Posted from M8. I don't even know what my password is.
  • Sorry, Tom -- no perl support yet.

    It's not a high priority for this release since that would distract attention from shipping the browser, and JavaScript is Good Enough. Apparently it's also not a high priority for perl folks since we've gotten no volunteers.

    Mozilla.org would be overjoyed to get such a feature. On the other hand it could lead to a return to the "Best viewed with X" days since I doubt IE would ever add similar support.
  • There is an FSF-sanctioned web browser. The web browsing mode in Emacs.
  • No, Mozilla is the BEST example of the "its whats under the skin that counts" philosophy. Sure its *SKIN* is buggy, to use your own words, it "sort of works", but the core of the browser, its standards compliance and brand new layout engine are approaching completion. It already does things that MSIE5 wont or cant do.

    It doesn't support HTML "a little better" it supports them better than any other engine available full stop because it is a completely standards compliant engine.

    Also, Mozilla isn't even ALPHA. It's pre-alpha, *in development*. Its not ready for any sort of usability testing. In the words of one Netscape employee, the UI shell is a TOY to let them test that the underlying code is working. I would wager that if you wrote a program the program wouldn't be completely usable at every stage of the development process!

    It was written from the ground up to be modular, so I would be most surprised if you couldn't have just a Navigator web browser. People are bleating about bloat and yet the browser is about 4.5Mb to download for the full suite of applications! That's even smaller than Navigator 3.0 Gold, and less than half the size of Win32-IE3.0. I download a build about every day, and it only takes about 20 minutes on a 33.6k modem all the way down here in NZ to pick it up. Also, after the size has finished going up (after all the features have been added), expect it to go back down again as they performance tune, pack the UI into JAR files etc. The reason the browser has all it does now is because (once again everyone) it is IN DEVELOPMENT.
  • All it really needs is a reload button and a keyboard accelerator for "New Window" and it'd be perfect =)

  • It depends on what you want. When I got sick of Navigator, I needed a browser and a mail client, as well as a Java VM. All in all, the IE5 folder in my backup disk is about 30Mb. Thats compressed cab files. I don't know how much it is installed. Sure IE5 may run as low as 7Mb - but that just gets you a plain jane browser. A lot of people are thrilled at that prospect, I personally wasn't, and I'd wager a few other people wouldn't be either.

    BTW: Now I'm itching to switch back to Navigator. IE5's crashes are even more annoying than Navigator's, since IE most often topples Windows 95 as well (even though I don't have it "integrated"). IMO IE's best features are its speed and the ability for a crash in one window to not bring down the other windows like Navigator does.
  • Man, I love it when people "damn with faint praise" because they know they have little if anything from which to generate food for FUD...
    I expect it to take me where I left off, not dump me at the top of the page to spend a minute finding my place again.
    Good Lord. Fussy, fussy. Who says that's the way a browser is supposed to work? Is it in a W3C spec that I missed? (Besides, you contradict yourself about 2 sentences later on this very same point with regard to MSIE.)
    I must say I am impressed by Mozilla's renderer, much improved over Netscape.
    As well you should be, seeing that it's not an "improvement" -- it's a whole new renderer/interface/whole ball o' wax. It's only the freshest code of its kind on the planet. There's no legacy Nav4 stuff anywhere in it. It's NEW. ALL NEW. Got it?
    The fact that Mozilla renders HTML "correctly" according to the W3C is a saving grace.
    It's not a "saving grace" -- it's the fscking point of the entire exercise. (Where's Commando Cluestick when you really need him, anyhow?)
    ...serious web designers (many of whom I work with) only laugh at Netscape and barely (and grudgingly) bother to throw in a little extra code on their CSS-enhanced pages to make it readable in Netscape...
    I get so tired of seeing/hearing this, because it's not really true. I'm a serious Web designer, I use CSS all the time, and believe you me, IE 4/5 has plenty of its own quirks with regard to CSS rendering. It's certainly no better than Navigator/Communicator in this respect.

    (navigator!=msie)!=(navigator=bad), okay?

    ...worth its bloat
    Hmmm... MSIE 5: 70-110 megs, depending on your installation options. M8: 4.5 megs. Now, would you mind giving us that definition of "bloat" once again? Thanks.
    ...the myriad of consumer eye-candy schlock that is handled better by external programs (like mail, news, and bookmark management).
    1. Some of us like having an integrated mail/news reader. 2. Why shouldn't a user agent manage (its own!) bookmarks? Personally, I wouldn't want one that didn't. 3. Fact: For its 4th-generation product, Netscape has maintained parallel releases of Communicator (Navigator+Messenger+whatever) and Navigator (and absolutely nothing else, except maybe that stupid AIM thingie -- which can be excised by any six-year-old with half a clue). If you don't like Messenger, download the standalone and quit whining. At any rate, I'd say that Netscape will likely continue this pattern in the 5th-gen releases. Besides, this "bloat" you speak of includes (at present) the browser and email/news client, and it's still smaller than the standalone Navigator 4 or the standalone MS... oh, wait a minute, there ain't no such critter. Sorry!

    I wish people who are looking for something to complain about would find something to complain about before... well, you get the idea.

    This is Zontar The Mindless, reminding you that REAL men (and women!) don't post as AC.

    Later.

    Zontar The Mindless,

  • I agree with regard to the back button, have you tried suggesting the new (msie) behaviour on the relevant Mozilla development list?
  • ...but I've not seen the answer anywhere; or maybe I've just been blind or something. anyway...

    when Moz is finally released, are they going to continue to release the standalone client alongside the communicator? I, for one, have no need for the massive disk bloat of an html editor (still use pico, vi), mail reader (pine), or newsreader (tin). Thus, it would be nice if I could download just the neccessary component...

    thanks.
  • The bit about the back button having broken behavior is hardly picky; long web pages (such as slashdot comments) make the current behavior extremely annoying.

    Secondly, the fact whether Mozilla renderer has new code has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is improved or not. It would be quite possible for the new code to be worse than the older code; fortunately this is not the case.

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