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Mozilla M10 Released 166

Posted by Roblimo from the waiting-and-waiting-and-waiting dept.
pangloss writes "On the heels of the "Whither Netscape 5.0?" story comes M10. Proxies are working. Check out the release notes or the brief blurb at MozillaZine, which cites the new beta release date (12/15/99). Cheers to the Mozilla Team!"
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Mozilla M10 Released More

Mozilla M10 Released

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  • Cool, thanks that fixed my prob.
    I guess it was in the release notes somewhere.

    Thanks
  • You twit. Why don't you go find out the origin of the quote before making yourself out to be what you signed your comment as.
  • Since the Mozilla team is publishing a schedule the situation is entirely different. Furthermore, there are no vaporware announcements.
    ---
  • Mozilla's great, I'm using M10 to post this. But there's a problem with using a browser that works right. Zillions of pages on the web are just plain broken when it comes to standards. Case in point: (opens new window). Completely trashed. [zdnet.com]
  • The input box got FUBARed somehow (because Mozilla's not done yet?). Anyway, that link was supposed to be to ZDNet.
  • Next release will be alpha. It'll be
    feature complete. Once they hit that point
    it may make sense to use it. Once in alpha
    condition, it'll probably have fewer bugs than
    current navigator.
  • Oops, I meant architecturally complete.

  • It'd be nice to have a /. user-preference option which says "Insert text between reply and signature:" and accepts an arbitrary HTML snippet. Then individual users could set this according to their own tastes.

    Meanwhile, in your own .sig, you can put a
    tag in there too and it looks just like Usenet. For example:

    <BR>--<BR>"People tell me one thing one day and out the other."

    See my .sig below for how it turns out.

    --Joe
    --

  • Ack. Preview mode bit me. It turned my instances of &lt;BR&gt; into <BR> in my edit buffer and I didn't catch them all. Ack, ack, ack!

    I meant to say "you can put a <BR> tag in there too".

    --Joe
    --

  • I've got a 300MHz Ultra 2 on my desk at work, and a Pentium II 300MHz at home. The Ultra is alot faster at batch floating point jobs, but the Pentium II running Linux feels alot snappier than the Ultra 2 running Solaris 2.5.1. In general, the Ultra 2 is faster on big batch jobs though. X Windows performance sucks though, since my workstation seems to have a minimally accelerated frame-buffer.

    --Joe
    --
  • Hrm, I didn't t hink JavaScript had gotten that far along...like JScript...I guess I'm wrong :).

    Oh well.
    I guess I should have thought about it more...you can write COM components in Perl now too.

    Forgive me.

  • If you do web design that much, it's a good investment to actually learn HTML.

    HTML was origionally designed to be written in a text editor, and it's really easy to learn.

    One major problem with using an editor (other than producing dirty code) is that it tends to make you want to get the layout "exactly right", which frequently means that it comes out exactly that way in one browser, and completely screwed up in other browsers. This hit me really bad once when I was trying to get text to line up (to the pixel) with the background image... it worked great in IE but was 5-6 pixels off in Netscape...

  • Didn't find an old one, just one dated 10/9/99. Deleted that, and am getting further along. Sorry if I missed it in the Release Notes.

  • I had already deleted my old profile to no avail, but had forgotten about mozregistry.dat - deleting that did the trick. Thanks!

    Adam
    TSS Productions [html.com]

  • Mosaic 0.9 to Mozilla M10...a look back. (Score:3)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @04:21AM (#1627385)
    What have they accomplished? How for have they gotten? What have they contributed to the comunity? Lets step back for a second and look at the big picture.

    This is he original press release of Mosiac 0.9 [netscape.net] in 1994, just 5 short years ago. Mosiac featured , among other things, "Native support for the JPEG image format"(which was a big deal at the time!)

    One of the more interesting quotes in a Wired [wired.com] article is one of the First Review of Mosiac 0.9 [netscape.net] (a fantastic,sometimes funny, look back in time) features some quotes from then VP of technology Marc Anreesen. "If the company does well, I do pretty well," says Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."

    In just 5 years, Netscape has helped redefine the IT landscape, and has forced a lot of people to look again at the multi-platform delevopment model. As they rewrite the code base for the 21st centrury, Lets not be so hard on the team that has given so much.


  • I'd just like to point out that if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product (like, say....Windows 2000?) the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them rather than celebrate them.

    Mozilla and Win2k both are considered like new products (Mozilla have been rebuild quite from the ground up and MS say that people should consider win2k like a new OS rather than an extension of NT) and that when you makes new products this take time.

    But you forgot to point out that Mozilla didn't drop a lot of feature they planned to do like win2k (or feature that will be buggy). Mozilla is a step in the right direction, Win2k may be a step in the right direction but given MS track on new products (say win 1.0/3.0/95) we can think they won't manage to do thing well from the first time (i.e. wait for SP 5/6 or for win2002).
  • if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product, the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them

    Right - but in their betas, there's no real progress - W2000 beta 3 is not more reliable than beta 2 (it does fix some bugs - and introduces others to take their place). With the Mozilla builds, we at least see some progress.


    The war is over

    Not quite - it may be over in the Windoze world (for now - that doesn't mean it won't change!), but not in the rest of the world...
    And with Linux getting more important, products that are cross-platform are getting more important, and nobody sane would call Internet Exploiter cross-platform.

    People WILL consider alternatives like Netscape or Opera if it means they can use it on every machine they're using, and not just the one running Windoze.


    release browser components

    Take a look at (for example) the KDE libraries: There's a HTML display widget, there are http handling classes, there's the beginning of Java support (in 2.0 CVS), and there's more.

    And you even get a "sample" browser - konqueror.

  • What Mozilla is (for those who don't know) (Score:5)

    by robinjo ( 15698 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @04:33AM (#1627388)

    Less than 50 posts and I can already read how Mozilla is buggy, how it's late and how IE is better. Maybe some of you haven't been following the Mozilla development? I'd like to clarify a few things for you.

    Mozilla is still very much alpha. It means that there's a lot of bugs. M10 is definitely not for daily use. These milestones are released so that we can try them, report bugs and take part in the development process. If you don't want to do it, then you're better off with an old Netscape or MSIE.

    Those of us who do know programming understand really well why Mozilla is special. That's because programmers usually know to pay attention to basics. In Mozilla I see a really small browser which supports standards really well and has a really fast renderer. It's way more important at this point than having a beautiful screen or flawless scrolling.

    I'd like to talk more about programming big projects. I've been working on a big project for a year now and customers are amazed as I can't show anything yet. That's because I've been concentrating on building tools - a compact database, fast and versatile search engine and lot's of controls. When these are working well, it's really fast to build the application and it will be fast, reliable and small. This is exactly what these guys at Netscape have been doing too.

    Many say that the browser war is over. It's not as the internet is a moving target. We'll get new complicated technologies and browsers have to support them well. As the renderer in Mozilla is done well, it's easy to make Mozilla support these technologies. It wouldn't have been possible with Netscape4 or the code that the Mozilla team dumped when they decided to start from scratch. And as MSIE is a huge program, it probably also hides a lot of bad code which makes developing it worse.

    As I see it: Mozilla will probably be ready in the first quarter. It will still be small and fast and I'll definitely love to use it.

  • I've just tried M10, and have to say, i'm impressed.

    I've now tried M7,8,9 and now 10, and each version just gets better and better. Its not release quality yet, but, the differences between each milestone is a leap forward.

    I hope AOL doesn't stop mozilla, because it would be an absolute shame. This has got the potential to be the best browser around, certinely better than the 90megs+ of the full internet explorer download.

    I'll look forward to using it regularly - I couldn't use it yet, too many bugs in it - remember, its not even a beta release yet. But, they will be fixed.

    Finally, I was reading a previous post, where it said it was 6meg. I'd forgotten about that: the point is 6megs for everything that netscape currently does.. and more. It will be the most compatible browser around for html, javascript and xml standards...

    Compare Mozilla size to IE5... ah! makes you laugh - microsoft, big and bloated.

    Mozzilla is shaping up very nicely.

    If your one of the ones moaning about how long its taken, its only 6meg, doesn't take long to download, bare in mind its not even beta release, and think about its potential.

  • why doesn't slashdot put a "---" between the post and the signature, like in the newsgroups?

    I added that to my sig for clarity
  • Not. I use HTML for writing technical documents, it being quite a few cuts above MS .doc format in terms of transportability, compactness, other considerations. I haven't got time to type "

    " at the end of every paragraph. Etc.

    Netscape composer is a solution made in heaven, as far as I'm concerned... sure, it has it flaws but it works well enough to get the job done and the HTML it produces works pretty well, and looks pretty reasonable in source form too.

    To whoever clued me in about Amaya [w3.org] - thanks, it looks interesting.
  • I don't want to sound cynical, but the way I see it, NS crashes a lot (not saying it's their fault), and also NS3 didn't have CSS support. These are very important reasons to upgrade to NS4. NS4 is pretty buggy, so everyone keeps updating to the latest bit of NS4, hoping it's a bit better (that's what I used to do).

    Now, IE4 works fine, and has lots of patches from MS whenever a new bug is found. It is in my experience quite stable. IE5 adds a bit to that, but since IE4 is already fine, many people may not have a reason to upgrade to IE5. Anyway, it is relatively painless to patch/update (except for the large SP every now and then).

    I still use NS, despite crashes, because I like the interface better. However, when I use IE for sites that crash NS (sometimes on purpose), I don't mind whether I am using 4 or 5, they both work fine.

    NS updates are huge. The NS4.0x series went up to 4.08, the 4.5 series is at 4.7. That's 13MB for each update for the smallest version. Personally, I can hardly tell any difference in each NS update, and I don't find it any less crashy. I'm not even going to get 4.7 at 15MB+, since comments posted here earlier seem to indicate it's just about the same as before, except heavier.

    I'm not going to update NS until mozilla is finished and well tested for a while. I really am sick of 13MB updates with no "what's fixed" info.
  • The recent article "Whither Netscape 5.0?" was obviously an attention getter, designed by AOL to generate buzz prior to this milestone release, as well as elicit reaction from the slashdot go-with the-underdog crowd.

    Or maybe the JIQ (journalist in question) just got dick-slapped in the face after all...that's gotta sting. Go Mozilla!!! :)


  • >In other words, give me the toolbox to build my
    >own browser, instead of a complete browser.

    But that is what you have got! There are already several projects out there using only parts of the Mozilla toolbox, in particular the layout engine is popular.

    However, we still need Mozilla as a flagship and showcase for the wonderful components of the toolbox.
  • anyway, I couldnt use it since M9 - I dont have the libstdc++ it requires (the one provided with egcs-1.2), I have gcc-2.95.1 instead. So Im compiling it myself. But it hangs on startup (yes, I have glibc-2.1) if I run mozilla-apprunner or doesnt find its resource if I run mozilla-viewer, therefore lacking its stylesheet, making pages unreadable. So I starterd cvsing the code every night, but it doesnt work yet.
  • MPL is mostly similar to the LGPL, i.e. you can link it with closed source projects, but changes to the MPL files themselves must be open.

    NPL gives some extra rights to Netscape. They had to use this because of contracts with third parties, who were allowed to use future versions of Netscape Navigator source in total closed source products. But even if this hadn't been the case, I'd find it a fair reward for the work and money they have put into Mozilla.

    Netscape is quite cooperative, for example they have released their Javascript implementation under a dual MPL/GPL license, presumably because some GPL'ed project needed it.

    There are plenty of GPL'ed browser projects, but I think they are mostly a waste of time. Mozilla is both open source and free software by the RMS/BP/ESR definitions of the terms.
  • I can agree that the mozilla project is making progress but you have to ask yourself, how much longer? The milestone map only goes to february 2000 for milestone 13, but for some reason I want to say a previous milestone map was more optomistic than that, anyone know?

    toufic
  • This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer.

    It's accually pretty good. Mozilla Composer is to Netscape Composer right now what Mozilla Navigator is to Netscape Navigator (as in, good, but not prime time yet.
  • I'd just like to point out that if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product (like, say....Windows 2000?) the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them rather than celebrate them.

    Look, I like the Mozilla guys as much as anyone, but as far as the release of an integrated browser goes, "everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost."[1]. There are already free (as in free beer) browsers available for every platform. In terms of importance to the open source community, a project to release small, documented, interchangable browser components freely (as in free speech) would be of much greater value.

    In other words, give me the toolbox to build my own browser, instead of a complete browser.

    [1] Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"

  • Is anyone else getting this error? Just did a fresh download of the Win 32 binary, double-clicked on apprunner and:

    APPRUNNER caused an invalid page fault in
    module XPCOM.DLL at 015f:60ad1510.

    Damn!
  • Then Mozilla gains market share as Linux does

    Don't forget also, Moz1 =! NS5. Other people can use Gecko to build their own browser. These little browsers will push Moz on very effectivly. There are even musings that IE5 for mac uses gecko!

  • You can do that too. Check out GtkMozilla [lysator.liu.se].

  • For a supposedly Alpha release it is working really well. I am typing this on it. There are a couple of bugs,but I am using it instead of Navigator as my default browser. Once the bugs are worked out it is going to be great.
    Renders really quickly.
  • a project to release small, documented, interchangable browser components freely (as in free speech) would be of much greater value.

    You seem to think that it is possible to have a nice set of components. But is this possible?

    I can imagine cutting it down into display engine, different clients (ftp, news, ssl) and maybe the language stuff (java, javascript, different HTML versions). Nonetheless I have the feeling that even the smallest possible browser component (HTML, nothing else) would turn out to be quite a big module.

    It has not been called close to a large monster for nothing.

  • The war is over ??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Incorrect. The war is just about to begin.

    The capabilities of new generation browsers are going to have to be radically different from the old 4.x series. New browsers will have to accurately implement XML, XSLT, CSS, DOM; and they're only the foundations for technology like MML, SVG etc -- we're not talking a few JPEGs and some virgin HTML anymore, Toto.

    Currently Netscape still has a 30% share with what is basically a two year old browser, which is impressive brand loyalty. But the new generation products are going to be a whole new ball game... you ain't seen nothing yet!

  • NPL, MPL (Score:1)

    by xyz ( 79275 )
    The last time I checked NPL gave way too much control over to Netscape/AOL to be a seriously considered as a non-profit, volunteer based effort (and I sure wouldn't contribute to any other kind,) now I see that they have an MPL in response to the criticism they received.

    Could anyone more proficient in legalese comment on MPL, and the differences between it and L/GPL?

    And whatever the answer, could someone just please start a GPL browser project? Or is that being worked on already?

  • It was much better than Netscape 4.x I'm pleasantly surprised. For Windows it still cannot compare to IE, but in Linux if it is this smooth I'll surely replace Netscape (that piece of crap). I've used the Windows version for about an hour now and no crash! Netscape (under Linux grant you) crashes a few times an hour on my potato debian machine with Navigator 4.7 from Netscape's site. I can't wait to get home and try it.

    I especially liked the language translation, but I'm a little disappointed that it includes all the usual netscape bloat. When will netscape/mozilla realize that the browser is just that, a browser and stop integrating things with it... but rather have addons or user defined choices, like Microsoft has done with IE.

    • For Mail I have mutt which blows away the integrated mailer.
    • For html editing I have vi
    • And I hate AOL, please Mozilla team do not make AIM an enhancement as Netscape has done
    • And what's with the built in text editor?

    Does anyone know what (if any) javascript works with M10? The pages I visited whihc I know include javascript did not work correctly.

  • >Netscape (under Linux grant you) crashes a few
    >times an hour on my potato debian machine with
    >Navigator 4.7 from Netscape's site.
    No netscape problems here under potato.. this machine is always a few days back on updates (after something got screwed up between lilo and glibc) until the test machine runs the updates first...
    Only thing I do is disable java, it never seemed to work right under Linux in 4.07+, so I never keep it enabled anymore, and I don't seem to miss anything. :)

    >When will netscape/mozilla realize that the
    >browser is just that, a browser and stop
    >integrating things with it... but rather have
    >addons or user defined choices

    Agreed. I really must try mutt, to lazy to move from pine atm...

    David, who leaves netscape running 5+ hours a day (longer if I forget to logout and such before I go to sleep) and hasn't seen a netscape crash in a long time..

  • Mozilla (and M10) is a really, really big deal (Score:4)

    by neilv ( 96511 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @05:24AM (#1627416)
    Netscape once had 100% of the market. Now they don't. They still are the browser of choice for over one third of the internet population, which is what now, 100M?

    Now, if you look at your server logs, you'll notice something pretty interesting - users of MIE form a "normal" bell curve - they're distributed from 2.0 to 5.0, with the biggest bump at 4.x. But all the netscape users cluster around the latest distrubition, and virtually all of them are using 4.x. OK, to be fair, "you're" server logs means across the board (I imagine slashdot's server logs break every curve).

    So what? So, when Netscape 5.0 is done, and it works great, people will upgrade. 30 million people. This is a major milestone (to my mind) for the open source community - linux is in the purview of a very (dare I say select) few, but Netscape is centered squarely in midstream.

    Now, you can argue that Mozilla isn't true open source, but you'd be needling semantics, and missing the big picture: A major company which makes a mainstream product is using public and volunteer help to develop a product that a major percentage of the internet, and indeed the US population are currently using, to say nothing of the rest of the planet....

    Linus may have been the prime mover, but Netscape is taking the concept (and the result) to the streets.

    I think that's worth crowing about.

    neil

  • SuSE 6.1 uses the glibc 6.0. You need to upgrade to glibc 6.1.

    But this may be a rather dangerous thing, as the libc is one of the most central parts of the system. It would be easier to upgrade to Suse 6.2 which already uses the glibc 6.1

  • don't load the components you don't want (this is the first browser in which you will *ever* have the opportunity to do that)

    From what I remeber, both IE and NS (for Windows at least) give you some ability to control what you install...NS seems a bit less willing to do so, though (whatever happened to Standalone Navigator?).
    --------------------------
  • Thanks for the good feedback. Yes I left the original copyright and banner adds on the article so that there is no confusion as to the source. Also, Wired still gets the banner hits without the bandwidth. I make no claim that the content is my own, and even refer the source of the original post. Soon after this slashdotpost calms down, I'll take the page down. I hope this clears up any confusion.

  • Where did I say you were at fault for the glibc bug? What I said was that NECKO broke NSPR threads, and that rewriting netlib was a poor idea since it worked and wasn't a source of bugs. If rewriting netlib is such a great move and will save so much developer time, then why did you wait so long to do it?

  • If you're just using it as a RTF replacement, I guess you can get away with not actually writing the HTML... just don't expect it to be a WYSIWYG format like most people who use netscape composer to write it do.

  • Comparing Open Look to Gnome is apples and apples? Of course Gnome is going to be slower. Not that I'm claiming that the Pentium is faster or anything...
  • Oh thanks. I'll download it tonight and try it. It's just so annoying to have to resize mozilla everytime you use it. :)

    --
    Scott Miga
  • Many multi-threaded programs have problems with glibc-2.1.2 (previous releases are ok). Maybe you are hitting this..

    See this bug report [gnu.org]. No solution yet.

  • I've got a pretty much stock SuSE 6.2 setup and I can't get M10 to run. At all. I'm following the directions to the letter, and after some chugging I get ".//run-mozilla.sh: line 29: 2269 Segmentation fault $prog ${1+"$@"}"

    M9 worked, I tried a couple nightlies but they didn't. Chalked that up to "it's a nightly, anything's possible." I must be missing something obvious, but what is it?
  • >[snip]
    >Or I can make a new Search band, or maybe an IRC >band to snap onto the left or bottom of IE's >window. All with COM...funny...isn't xpCOM based >on COM?
    Acually, it's not. It's a COM clone.
  • Just FYI, they were going straight to M11, but they decided somewhere that they needed more testing before beta, so M10 is for regression testing.
  • [snip]

    Does anyone know what (if any) javascript works with M10? The pages I visited whihc I know include javascript did not work correctly.

    [snip]

    Javascript should work, but if you want java, go to japhar's homepage (sorry, I forget the URL) and build it /w OJI.
  • I'm running SuSE 6.1 with glibc installed, and i get
    viewer: error in loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    when i try to run the binary from the tarball compilation fails too, with
    ../../dist/bin/xpidl -m header -w -I ../../dist/idl -I. -o _xpidlgen/nsISupportsArray nsISupportsArray.idl make[2]: *** [_xpidlgen/nsISupportsArray.h] Segmentation fault
    Any ideas from the mozilla hackers?
  • Because if you have and you actually found a bell curve for IE versions and clumping for Netscape, that's a bad thing. It means that IE has been a better product for longer and that people keep upgrading Netscape.


    ---
  • If the only reason you code is for the approval and applause of others, maybe you should find a new job. The Mozilla team isn't doing Mozilla for you. They're doing it because they want to build it. Whether you or I or anyone else like or use it is immaterial.

    I hack because I want to. Not because you want me to. I'm willing to bet that they feel the same way.

  • There is an M8 release for Bezilla, but there is not a single build on the site after that. No M9 build, no M10 build, no nightly builds. Is Bezilla still chugging along? I am really looking forward to it...

    --
    grappler
  • I installed IE 5 on my Windows partition when it came out ("early adopter", and all that ;) and promptly uninstalled it after about 3 days. Yes, it displays pages a little faster than IE 4 or Netscape, but it takes up gigantic amounts of RAM and has a ridiculous number of bugs. I like IE 4.01 (with the appropriate security patches) a lot better.

    Also, IE 4 comes stock on Win98, which is what most consumer (read new Internet user) PCs have. These people aren't very prone to upgrading a browser, particularly when it involves a 30 meg download over a liable-to-blow-at-any-time WinModem.

    And of course all those iMacs (same sorta users, better modem ;) come with IE 4.5 standard - I don't know if the original poster differentiated Mac IE 4 from Win, but that's another datapoint.
  • see picture [xoom.com]
  • It did the same for me on Mandrake 6.0

    I got around it by doing:
    export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/path/to/package
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/package
    then run it with:
    /path/to/package/apprunner

    where /path/to/ is the directory where you untarred the release.

    Also make sure you don't have an old
    ~/.mozilla directory hanging around, it seems
    to cause problems too.

    YMMV as always.

  • Has anyone compiled Mozilla on OpenBSD 2.5 (sparc)? I would like to know how it went before I upgrade a bunch of packages to be able to give it a try.

  • But of course.. (Score:3)

    by Kitsune Sushi ( 87987 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @06:11AM (#1627452)
    The last time I checked NPL gave way too much control over to Netscape/AOL to be a seriously considered as a non-profit, volunteer based effort (and I sure wouldn't contribute to any other kind,) now I see that they have an MPL in response to the criticism they received.

    Yes, the NPL is indeed another one of those sneaky bastard "open source" licenses.. However, it was finalized sometime in 1998, and I don't believe AOL bought Netscape until 1999, IIRC (I don't know, do I? =P). I'm not too excited about the MPL either, however, although it is better than the NPL.. Being somewhat of a die-hard GPL'er, I'm annoyed with the MPL's incompatibility with it..

    Could anyone more proficient in legalese comment on MPL, and the differences between it and L/GPL?

    You may want to read On the Netscape Public License [gnu.org] by Richard Stallman. It covers the differences between the NPL, MPL, and GPL. The GNU Project [gnu.org] Web site is also an excellent source of information with regards to free software in general, the GNU philosophy, and the history of the movement. ;) Ok, so, enough shameless plugs..

    And whatever the answer, could someone just please start a GPL browser project? Or is that being worked on already?

    There are a couple well-known ones.. And a few others that I can't think of right now.. The first, and most obvious, would be Lynx [browser.org], but I rather doubt that is what you are looking for.. On the other hand, there is Emacs/W3 [indiana.edu], which you may find to be of a little more interest.

  • Mozilla requires glibc2. It will run on Slackware 4.0, if you selected the glibc2 compatibility library at install time (if you didn't, you should be able to add it easily enough with pkgtool). You'll probably need to compile Mozilla yourself... I haven't been able to get any of the binary tarballs to run on Slack. Something about a missing symbol... After a recompile, viewer works fine. As of M9, I'm still having trouble with apprunner dying silently when it tries to open its first window, though. Maybe M10 fixes that. We'll see...

  • They always release a new Milestone the day after I download the previous one. Of course, in this case, I'll admit it was kind of dumb of me to download M9 yesterday when the Milestone page clearly stated the target date for M10 was 10/08/99. That whole discussion just got me itching to download something, so I did.

    I'm about two hours away from being able to try M10, but I have some comments on the Mac version of M9: the browser functionality is coming along nicely -- for example, it loads Slashdot perfectly, though it still can't log in. The front-end is starting to look relatively polished, but my concern is that it doesn't look like a Mac application. Actually, with previous builds, I assumed that it was simply because the GUI-polishing was being left for last. Now, though, it seems to be starting to look the way it's meant to look, if that makes any sense. I'm seeing the interface that they're designing, and it doesn't seem Mac-like.

    As I understand it, they use some sort of cross-platform front-end framework to make all versions use a single codebase. This doesn't seem to use native widgets, so things look funny. This could be okay, if the widgets were similar enough, and if they worked right (even so, the non-native look-and-feel would be a turn-off for many Mac-users), but in fact, many of the text fields, radio buttons, etc., don't draw quite right. Text fields are too tall and narrow for their text, radio buttons are too small, and a few of their pixels get chopped off, the sidebar in the Preferences window sort of jumps when I click something, etc.

    This sort of thing is a problem with cross-platform GUIs, I guess, because corresponding things have different relative sizes, and some amount of platform-specific attention is needed to make everything fit. I don't know how this compares to other platforms; maybe the Mac version is just not getting enough attention.

    By the way, what's with the second date for M12 on the Milestone Page [mozilla.org]? "M12 - 12/7/99 - 15/99/99"? Is somebody having Y2K trouble?

    David Gould
  • I've seen many people still using Netscape 3, especially in corporate settings. So, it doesn't matter how much nifty stuff they're adding support for now, it's not going to mean much for a few years.
  • It's at least compileable [mozilla.org], although I have had no luck, yet.

  • Great job (Score:1)

    by nd ( 20186 )
    I just downloaded the M10 linux bin and I'm very impressed with the progress. Startup times compared to M9 are much improved. Context menus now work (ie, you can right click on a link and choose "Open link in new window"). But one of the best things i noticed is that the Gtk widgets are MUCH more responsive in this release. In the past it took like 5 seconds for a button on a toolbar to highlite and allow me to click it. In M10 it works almost right away (on a lowly k5-100 here).
    Of course, it's still not perfect. I noticed that the text input stuff seems worse than before :) As I'm typing this message right now in M10 I can't see what I'm writing... it also has backspace problems. One thing that does bother me is the whole profile thing. Why does the linux version even NEED the profile stuff? This is something that should be on Windows/Mac only IMO. On the Linux version, shouldn't mozilla just use your home directory for the preferences file? This way mozilla would just use the existing userbase on your linux box for storing profiles.
    Anyways, great job Mozilla people, keep it up.
  • Keep in mind as well that many 'portal' sites and isps like to have their own customized browsers available. Mozilla has this functionality built into its very core, and it seems they have at least tried to make it easy to use. Couple this with the lack of licensing fees, and I think that this may be one of the biggest markets for Mozilla.
  • Just tried out M10/Linux. IMHO this is the first release where the HTML rendering is usable for most sites (well hey, first time it has done a good job of Slashdot for example). And the rendering IS very slick.

    But it's still butt-ugly, and user unfriendly. Would it kill their schedule to say implement a decent button bar, and "Open link in new window" functionality? If it's there I can't see it. That would be a bare minimum for me to think about using it.

    And what of bookmarks, preferences, mail/news reader, java etc etc? Don't they have anything to show in these areas? I don't want to criticise, but if this is all they've got it looks a _long_ way from user release.
  • has anyone gotten mozilla to compile under libc5(perferably slackware 4)?
  • Bugzilla now has a "vote for the bugs you want fixed" feature. Personally I voted for "option to disallow window.open" and "gtk refreshes everything when resizing".
    ---
  • That did it. Dumbass me, I tried both your suggestions at the same time, so I don't really know which did it.

    Wow, BIG progress since M9. I'm more impressed with Mozilla every day.
  • You're probably right that people aren't going to switch from IE on Windows in droves. The whole concept of downloading and installing software is foreign to much of the user base. And about one in ten times you try it, Windows stops working from DLL incompatibilities and you need to uninstall, or worse, re-install Windows. People learn to leave well enough alone. While IE is not perfect, it certainly works well enough. The best hope in that market is being able to convince system vendors to put a Mozilla icon on the desktop.

    However, the situation for Linux and some other OSes isn't like that. I can easily see Mozilla rapidly capturing nearly all of that market. Then Mozilla gains market share as Linux does. This is enough of a presence to restrain incompatible web standards I hope.
  • Good (essential news) to hear it's looking up at least in terms of speed then.
    Erm... as far as profiles go, I think it depends on how many people you want to impersonate - like here, I have my work 'hat' and the normal PigleT persona to maintain, and one of the things I've never seen either netscrape nor mozilla do properly, is auto-detect which identity to use to reply to mail / news.
    I also tend to want to flip between them on the fly - both that and the auto-change-on-response thing are things MS OE5 can do(!).
    So some form of profiles, possibly a two-tier form where one is the system user, the other is "within" that, would be a good thing.
  • hrm.. i have a potato debian machine running netscape, usually less than a week off current, and I dont have many problems with Netscape crashing anymore..

    what i DO have a problem with tho, is that it leaks memory like a sieve :P
    leave it running for a day or 2 and it grows to like 80megs.

    I just installed squid this week and turned off all netscape caching... so hopefully maybe that will stop it leaking so bad...

    for those who havent tried setting up squid, try it :) its MUCHMUCH MUCH faster than netscrape's built in caching.. and you can use it with KFM, lynx, whatever else as well as one unified cache :)


    smash
  • I haven't downloaded the M10 release yet but I have one thing to share with you guys. The nightly builds from the same mozilla ftp site are doing pretty good. If you have the time to give one a try I recommend yesterday's Build. It is much more stable than M9 and I bet more than M10 since it includes the work progressed beyond the M10 tree. I have been downloading nightly builds right after the M9 release and I am very impressed by the performance of Mozilla. It is going to be one heck of a browser when it is done. Try out a nightly build and see for your self. PS I am refering to Linux nightly builds !
  • Mozilla is a bunch of guys who write code in their spare time for the general good of the community.

    Umm, that's not true of all of them. To quote the "Who We Are" page on the mozilla.org Web site [mozilla.org]:

    The members of
    mozilla.org are employees of Netscape Communications Corporation. We are some of the people who wrote Netscape Communicator. We are the people who know the code best, since (until March 31st) we were among the very small set of people who have ever seen it.

    As time goes by, it will no longer be the case that the people who know the code best are necessarily people who are also employed by Netscape Communications Corporation; we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number.

    ...

    Netscape is paying our salaries, and providing hardware and bandwidth in the hope of making mozilla.org a success.

    Other than that, Netscape's role is the same as yours: Netscape writes code, and makes use of code written by others. Netscape will contribute new code back to the public just as others will.

    (emphasis mine). Has the situation changed since that was written, such that the folks on Mozilla with e-mail addresses ending with "@netscape.com" aren't being paid by Netscape^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAOL to work on Mozilla?

    That page also says that

    Netscape will also continue to provide an executable-only release of Mozilla that bears the "Netscape" brand (e.g., the name "Netscape Communicator."

    which, if still true, may mean that there's at least some extent to which a development project by a commercial entity depends on Mozilla, and might put some pressure on Mozilla to have schedules, etc..

    However

    They are not looking for a profit.

    is, to some extent, presumably true, as AOL will probably be giving Netscape {Navigator,Communicator} 5.0 away, just as they're giving 4.x away. However, that's also true of Internet Explorer, if you treat it as a separate program rather than a pile of OS/GUI COM objects to provide HTML display and Internet access, plus a browser wrapper around those objects (if you treat it as the latter - which is true only in Windows - then you could view its developers as part of the Windows OT and Windows NT development teams, I guess).

  • I'd just like to point out that if Microsoft had spent this long releasing a long-awaited product (like, say....Windows 2000?) the release of a new beta would be an opportunity to mock them rather than celebrate them.
    You seem to forget that Microsoft has billions in the bank (growing each time a PC is sold anywhere)
    They can throw whatever resources into a project as they feel is necessary.
    Microsoft's products are as good and feature rich, or as bad and buggy, as they feel their products need to be, because they have the resources to do it.

    That said, IE$ has been one of the most important projects at microsoft in the last five years, and look how long it took then to put out something that wasn't a complete joke.

  • This is the first milestone release where where the gif's on idsoftware [idsoftware.com]'s site don't look broken and out of position. I don't know what the problem was before - maybe the site was off-standard and happened to work in netscape/i.e., or maybe it was just Mozilla bugs... the point it, it works now. Obviously, development is going fine. I found one site that didn't load text correctly, but I'm not panicing. This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer. Hmmm, I'm looking into my crystal ball, and I can see a whole lot of programmers, myself included, jumping into the Mozilla project in the near future. Gotta scratch those itches, you know, and who would pass up the chance to lay a claim to having a part, however small, in building the new lizard?
  • I think persistence in window sizing has been hooked up, but maybe it came in after M10 was branched. I'm not entirely sure. If not, its coming soon. There are some attributes on the XUL tag that suggest support of it.
  • Installed M10 on my Mac but it kept kicking out 'Cannot Create Profile' errors. Hmmm... and I made sure to move my Communicator Profiles folder.
  • Yes, it's pre-alpha and it crashes occasionally (only about 30% more often than my Netscape 4.08/4.61/4.7 installs over the past few months).

    There is an argument about possible "bloat" -- you got a problem, don't load the components you don't want (this is the first browser in which you will *ever* have the opportunity to do that) so "can it" (maybe there's a market for making "Mozillas distros" with various configurations... hmm....).

    Every once in a while there comes along something so cool in a product that that one feature alone justifies everything else. There are arguably a number of them, but I just came across this one for the first time and almost pissed myself. Under "View". there's a "Translate" menu. Go to your favorite website and select a translation. This is not some "cut-and-paste babelfish" hack -- this thing (using a 3rd party service) re-renders the entire page (properly even), with the text translated. It's like you hit the official German/Spanish/Japanese site of wherever you were located, but you didn't...

    HOT

  • IE 3/4 also come pre-installed on OSR2 (and later) versions of Win95 and Win98. People who use this probably take for granted that the browser comes pre-installed and have no experience downloading new versions. Netscape users on te other hand often have to manually install Netscape, thus they know how/where to go for downloads.

    Sadly though, most of the people I work with upgrade Netscape Immediately in the hope it will work better, consume less resources, crash less, make a more pleasurable browsing experience. Too bad this has not been the case for a very long time.

    I myself rush to download the newest Netscape for Linux only to see it just as unstable, but now with a new SHOP button!

  • When I downloaded IE5 just yesterday for someone at work it had an 18 megabyte max and 13 meg minimum install. Are you sure it was really 30 megs?

    I've found if you install IE5 w/o the desktop addons that IE4 had it is great (part of IE's SP1), but my Win98 machine is a snail thanks to IE's explorer enhancements.

    It's painful to admit, but IE is a much better browser than Netscape.

  • What amount of Mozillas current code originates from Netscape? (Netscape 4.0 or whatever it was..)

    --

  • Yup, same error on this end. Tried it after a fresh reboot twice with no luck. Running Win98SE here..

    Guess I shouldn't have deleted M9 :P

    Adam
    TSS Productions [html.com]

  • M9 works ok, but with M10 I'm getting

    Gtk-WARNING **: /usr/lib/libgdk_imlib.so.1: undefined symbol: gdk_display

    I'm going to try to recompile from source;
    as the Imlib I have (1.9.5) is the latest version.

  • STOP WHINING!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1) For crying out loud, how many times will people whine about the time it's taking Mozilla to get a Gold out!! THE ORIGINAL CODE WAS CRAP -- ok?? Understand? They had to rewrite a lot -- which part of that don't you understand?? 2) The war is over? Ha! As long as people are downloading, testing and improving Mozilla it ain't over!! 3) Browser components? The reason why it's so difficult for developers to help out is that a browser is NOT easily split up into modules. The guys working on Mozilla are doing a fantastic job and I'm not gonna let people whine and put them down like this -- and get away with it -- keep on going guys!! You're doing an excellent job!
  • Because everyboy had to rush to the ftp
    site 1st. All hoping that the lack of a
    direct link wold delay some of us.
  • Sorry Charlie,
    This was downloaded an installed in a clean directory (extracted to desktop). No previous builds were installed since the last time I had to reinstall Windows (grin!).
  • Read and follow the release notes
    Care to be a bit more discriptive?
  • Look: I completely disagree with you. You're wrong.

    The first thing you're wrong about is in thinking that I'm criticizing the Mozilla team. I ain't. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants to write code can go ahead and do it without hindrance from me. The people I'm criticizing are those (like, say, YOU) who are willing to judge Mozilla (or any software project) based on its PR and good intentions rather than on its results. I would be criticizing you just as strongly if you were a pro-Microsoft lackey.

    I don't particularly care that the Mozilla guys got a lousy source base to begin with, and that that made the project take longer. Hey, life's rough, OK? The fact that the original source base was better doesn't make the current product any better (note: I am speaking PHILOSOPHICALLY here -- I haven't looked at the M10 release yet, and I certainly am not passing judgment on its quality!)

    I don't really know what to say about your utterly wrong comments about a "browser not being easily split up into modules" except "Wow, what a complete load of bullshit." Of course a browser is easily split up into modules. I ssupect that a lot of the rewriting the Mozilla team was doing, in fact, was exactly this sort of encapsulation. For example, the truly excellent HTML and HTTP classes with Java2 (footnote 1) are a great example of what you can do with decent components. They certainly didn't take too long to write, and good programmers can use them easily for things like transparent HTML editors, viewers, etc.

    Lastly, I am not whining. I'm not putting anyone down (well, ok. Perhaps I'm putting you down.) What I am trying to do is inject a note of sanity into the sycophancy. I've said what I want: encapsulated browser objects (footnote 2) instead of a browser. That doesn't mean I expect the Mozilla guys to give it to me if they're not interested in building it. But I stand by my original point that at this point I think getting excited about Mozilla would be like getting excited over an open source FTP client. The moment for excitement about this particular project passed us all by long ago.

    footnote 1: There are lots of valid criticisms of Java and the java classes. The HTML and HTTP classes, however, are great.
    footnote 2: The earlier poster's point that there are already other systems to do this (such as Gtk) is well taken.

  • Just downloaded M10, and boy is it looking good. Besides the usual crashes, espically with the bottom toolbar, is there anyway to save the window size when you close mozilla? It always opens as a small window and I'm a 800x600 man. But besides these small things, I love the new moving logo in the corner, and the pages fly when loading now!

    --
    Scott Miga

  • iMac (Score:1)

    by Pope ( 17780 )
    Apple OS comes with both (At least, my 8.5 CD did), just with IE set to the default.
    You can ditch it any time, and UNlike Windez, there's NO system integration, thank Jed!
    Just make sure you delete that damn Arial font and the Extensions that come with it.
    My beef with MS over IE for the Mac: if it's so damn Mac-centric (like their press likes to tell us) why do the preferences sit in the System Folder, and not in the Preferencse Folder like they're supposed to? :P
    P
  • I've been downloading the nightly builds almost nightly,.... I love the way mozilla is going.
    Within the last 2 weeks, the startup time was cut in like half. It's getting extremely fast and extremely
    fast.. I can almost use this as my dialy browser now.
    I still have faith in this project.
    ChiefArcher

  • And AOL does not?

    I don't agree with the original poster (in the end Microsoft ARE judged by the quality of their products and nothing else) but that isn't really a good point in this case.

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

  • Re:How much of the current code is from Netscape? (Score:3)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @11:51AM (#1627495)
    Not very much of the code is from the original Netscape.

    The last major piece of original Netscape code was the network library (netlib) which was replaced by necko (new faster modular networking library) in the M9 release.

    The layout engine has been totally rewritten (that's why it's took so long to get this far) as well as the widgets and other front end code. A lot more code in Mozilla is designed to be cross platform to make porting easier.

    So it's a hard task to find any major bits of original Netscape code in Mozilla.
    --
  • ...Mozilla gains market share as Linux does. This is enough of a presence to restrain incompatible web standards I hope

    Don't forget that AOL will also be pushing Mozilla heavily, in its netscape 5 incarnation. Also, many teens will get Mozilla just to get Jabber [jabber.org] - never discount that factor, it worked for ICQ. Then there is the fact that Microsoft won't be able to engage in much of it's usual strongarming with OEM's and ISP's, with the Justice department on it's tail...

    I'm sure there are other factors also, like Mozilla just plain being a better, more stable product, with development that will never stop. The bottom line is that things are looking pretty good for Mozilla at this time.
  • Here's a PNG screen-grab of the Windows version. Looking good...

    m10.png [min.net] - 66k PNG (1024x768)

    --

  • FWIW the more recent nightly Mozilla builds now remember the size of the Window when you close it (however the size is not remembered if the browser crashes).

    Remember the milestone releases are slightly less upto date than the nightly releases.
    --

  • Try this (Score:3)

    by mozillaZineAdmin ( 75409 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @03:44AM (#1627515) Homepage
    Hmm... Try deleting mozregistry.dat in your c:\windows directory. Also, if you still have problems, try finding an deleting old profiles in the user50 directory that Mozilla had installed, and see if that helps.

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