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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch 407

Posted by michael from the long-live-the-gecko dept.
iswm writes "MozillaZine has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4. The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch as well as the trunk. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird, a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to ensure that it is high quality."
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Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch More

Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch

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  • Oh glorious day! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:37PM (#8781795)
    News about a new firefox version, and it doesn't have a name change! There may be a hat trick yet, folks.
  • Mozilla development will continue with the releases of Mozilla Prime, Mozilla 2:This time its not Mozilla 1, and Mozilla: The Motion Picture.

  • in other news ... : US Navy uses mozilla as well (Score:4, Informative)

    by heymjo ( 244283 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:39PM (#8781827)
    it had to happen sooner or later : mozillazine [mozillazine.org]

  • 1.7 (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mithrandir_The_Wise ( 765275 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:40PM (#8781836)
    The odd number at the end looks so...odd :)

    I guess I've been too used to the Linux kernel "even is stable" noclamenture that a version number like "1.7" looks like a development branch.

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wavicle ( 181176 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:40PM (#8781845)
    So does this mean I can finally migrate off of Mosaic??

    • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:56PM (#8782108)
      You work for the government don't you?

    • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

      by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:21PM (#8782469) Homepage Journal
      No geek points for you! Real hackers telnet to port 80 and parse the html themselves :)

      • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Carewolf ( 581105 )
        If you ever tried that, you would know most public HTTP-servers closes the connection almost instantly due to timeout. You need to write the request in advance and copy it to telnet using the middle mouse-button.

      • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

        by ax_42 ( 470562 )
        You mean parse the XML, right -- get with the times though.

        The math geeks of course connect to port 443 and decode the ssl in their heads.

      • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 )

        telnet to port 80

        Ooooo. Sounds like some fancy-dancy user interface to me. That telnet's probably got escape sequences an everything.

        Us real trogs use netcat [atstake.com].

        • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

          by NumbThumb ( 468496 )
          i actually do use netcat / telnet sometimes to hand-craft http-request in order to test security etc in scripts. It really *is* useful.

  • how exactly do they crash Mozilla? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by victorvodka ( 597971 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:41PM (#8781861) Homepage
    If you read the article, they go on and on about trying to fix bugs known to crash 1.7 before releasing it. I'm curious: what exactly does it tak e to crash Mozilla these days? I know it still has subtle memory leaks that crash it eventually, but what can a QA person do to crash it? It's at least as stable as any mainstream application I use, crashing much less often than Photoshop or Flash MX, which I use considerably less.

  • The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly... (Score:3, Informative)

    by pdcryan ( 748847 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:42PM (#8781871) Homepage
    The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly exaggerated...

    OS X's Camino hadn't been updated since March of '03 (.7 release), and personally I thought it had been put out to pasture thanks to Apple bundling Safari.

    According to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ we can look forward to .8 soon.

    Welcome back!

    • Re:The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly. (Score:4, Informative)

      by justMichael ( 606509 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:51PM (#8782023) Homepage
      If you are still using Camino .7, go grab one one of these [mozilla.org].

      You will be amazed at the changes.

      Warning: Sometimes the daily is a bit of a mess, but I use it daily ;)

    • Camino & Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Biff Stu ( 654099 )
      The thing that has me scratching my head is the parallel development of Camino and Firefox. While choice is a wonderful thing, choosing between these two very similar browsers has me wondering wtf?

      I also wonder whether developer resources would be better focused on one or the other.

      Could somebody in the Firefox or Camino community enlighten us on the need for both browsers?

      (Posted from Camino. Camino is getting long in the tooth, but I'm too lazy to move bookmarks to Firefox and now I might not need to.)

      • Re:Camino & Firefox (Score:4, Informative)

        by Quobobo ( 709437 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:21PM (#8782478)
        Camino is designed primarily to be an OS X port of Mozilla, so it integrates well into the OS. It has a completely native interface, and feels far more at home on a Mac than Firefox. It's essentially a non-question unless you're on a Mac, in which case you can just choose one.

      • Re:Camino & Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) *
        There's a VERY good reason to use Camino over FireFox. Camino will pull a lot of preferences from the system prefs, like proxy config and home page. Firefox needs to be manually configured. At a site like mine where users move from proxied networks back to their home networks a lot it doesn't make much sense to have to swith your location AND your firefox prefs.

        That said, I wish FireFox had some OS-specific 'glue' to pull those prefs from the system, it would make the product much more viable for office ro
    • Mike Pinkerton, the project lead for Camino, keeps us updated about their progress (among other things) via his blog [mozillazine.org]

  • Mozilla vs. Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moberry ( 756963 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:43PM (#8781903)
    On a decnet computer IE will load in just a second or two. In contrast Mozilla takes at least 10 seconds before you get anything on the screen. Firefox is just as fast as IE. However. probably a good 50% of explorer is already loaded all that needs to be done is draw a new window, this can be proven by crashing IE (not hard) alot of times the whole desktop disapears. This shows how well firefox is written because it must load entirely from scratch.

    • Re:Mozilla vs. Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hattig ( 47930 )
      At least with tabs Mozilla is really quick - opening a new tab takes no time at all, yet with IE opening a new window there is a perceptible pause. Especially as IE seems to think "oh, he's opened a new window. What I'll do is load up the same webpage he is viewing in the original window" ... weird logic that leads to even more delay.

      Firefox 0.8 has been the least stable version of Mozilla/FireWibble I've used though. It eats memory like a whore in a chocolate dick factory. It crashes and takes down Window

      • Re:Mozilla vs. Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

        by catbutt ( 469582 )
        Especially as IE seems to think "oh, he's opened a new window. What I'll do is load up the same webpage he is viewing in the original window" ... weird logic that leads to even more delay.

        That logic is the main reason I just can't stop using IE entirely (in favor of firefox), no matter how much I try. "New window" is useful in IE, because it not only opens the same page, but it makes a clone of your history...allowing you to "branch" your history.

      • Re:Mozilla vs. Firefox (Score:5, Funny)

        by RealAlaskan ( 576404 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:12PM (#8782328) Homepage Journal
        Firefox 0.8 ... eats memory like a whore in a chocolate dick factory. It crashes and takes down Windows with it ...

        Well, to continue your analogy, Windows goes down on everything, and spreads virsuses. It's a little like a whore with the clap.

      • And here I am , with my copy of firebird 0.7 on solaris , which runs for literally months with out crashing.

        I have installed the browser uptime extension and every time someone, mentions how stable XP is, All I do is show them my browser up time, arguments stop.

        I have firebird 0.7 on solaris, firefox 0.8 on Windows ME (yes the dreaded ME) and firefox , CVS build on gentoo linux and none has crashed on me so far.

        I did have stability problems with fireXXX What's more even my roommate has now switched to fi

    • Explorer IS the shell on Windows, and is always loaded, so that is why IE has a speed advantage.

      IIRC Mozilla has a quickstart thing that loads most of it into the background for Windows, which is only installed if you want it.

  • Contension (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jack Comics ( 631233 ) * <jack_comics@nOSpAm.postxs.org> on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:44PM (#8781909) Homepage
    What the article fails to mention however that there appears to be a point of contension between Mozilla developers over whether or not the next long-lived stable branch of Mozilla should be 1.7 or 1.8. Many feel that it is too late in 1.7's development cycle to make it the next stable branch after 1.4. For more information, see here [mozillazine.org]. It's a shame that the Mozilla Foundation apparently feels pressured to make decisions based on time frames instead of quality.

    • Re:Contension (Score:4, Interesting)

      by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:53PM (#8782988)
      The decision was made to improve quality. Several projects, including the 1.0 release of Firefox, were schedule to come off the 1.7 branch.

      That caused the Mozilla people to delay 1.7 in order to work on stabilizing it so that the products using it would have a higher level of quality.

      Making 1.8 be the stable branch wouldn't have been of any use to any of the major projects using the code.

  • Problems... (Score:5, Informative)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:44PM (#8781910) Homepage Journal
    The blurb doesn't mention it, but quite a bit of dissatisfaction has been expressed about 1.7 becoming the next long lived branch, rather than 1.8. The issue seems to be that the APIs for this version are rather half-assed, which means that those who develop on the platform won't get a clean interface and will need to get used to some hacks and kludges.

    On the other hand people are happy that there's finally something to replace 1.4 which was showing its age.

    Note that this means that the next version of Netscape, if there is one, will be based on 1.7 etc.

  • What about the previous roadmaps for Firefox? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Synistar ( 8654 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @01:49PM (#8781977)

    The question is when will Firefox and Thunderbird become the core applications?? That was their original plan for Pheonix/Firebird/Firefox.

    • Re:What about the previous roadmaps for Firefox? (Score:5, Informative)

      by steeef ( 98372 ) <steeef@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:43PM (#8782842)
      Here's your answer (from the roadmap [mozilla.org]):

      We are not retiring the SeaMonkey [Mozilla] application suite, or its XPFE front end, in the foreseeable future. Several companies have shipped and will ship products based on this venerable component of the application suite, and on the entire suite. Many organizations deploy it or a derivative of it, such as Netscape 7.x. We intend to keep supporting these deployments in at least a conservative, sustaining engineering fashion. However, we still intend to focus on evolving Mozilla toward the more flexible application architecture pioneered by Firefox and Thunderbird. That's where our innovative engineering effort should go.

  • Don't forget... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The rumoured new version of Netscape being released by AOL [mozillazine.org] will also be based on Mozilla 1.7.

  • Still doesn't work well for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by pcraven ( 191172 ) <paul.cravenfamily@com> on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:00PM (#8782171) Homepage
    I like using a lot of div tags and css styles. 1.7b is better with several bugs fixed. But this bug:

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2041 93

    This one still makes me go back to IE. With the wrong setup, you can't access links for form controls. While the bug is marked as fixed in 1.7b, the test case I put in still fails.

    Go to CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com] for learning by example on stylesheets. My pages mostly just have div tags any more, and the style sheet does the rest.

    (And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.")

    • To answer your last question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:11PM (#8782317)
      And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."

      Because the developers use Bugzilla, and a slashdotted bugzilla means they cannot get their work done.
    • And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."
      Because several years ago Slashdot posted a story in which someone had linked directly to a bug. I think the bug was the subject of the slashdot story. Anyway, it brought bugzilla to it's knees and no one could use bugzilla for several hours as it just wouldn't respond.

    • IE and CSS layout. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by zonix ( 592337 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @04:36PM (#8784326) Journal

      That's a bug alright, and unfortunately a longstanding one. I'm curious though? What type of effect are you trying to create by this kind of positioning with respects to form controls?

      Personally I find it odd, that you would favor IE when creating complex (or even simple) CSS layout - personally I find IE lacking and frustrating in so many areas. Try taking a look at this site [positioniseverything.net] for example. There are some serious IE CSS positioning bugs discussed here which I can't imagine you haven't encountered? Some are misinterpretations of the W3C specs, and others just exhibit unexplainable behaviour. There are workarounds for some of them, but not all of them will leave you with valid markup. There are also some Mozilla position bugs explained there, though I don't know whether they have been fixed in the meantime.

      Another classic IE CSS1 bug as shown by the Complexspiral demo [meyerweb.com].

      I remember an interesting story here on slashdot about how Microsoft winning the browser war stopped the innovation with IE. Think about it? How old is IE now? This MSDN document [microsoft.com] about the CSS enhancements (box model implementation) in IE 6 is dated march 2001. That's ages ago, and now CSS2.1 - if I'm not mistaken - is the current recommendation with CSS3 around the corner. When is the IE 7 due? 2006? 2007?

      A lot of other browsers like Mozilla and Opera are much more up to date, with respects to CSS, and at least with one of these browsers you can file a bug, and see it getting proper treatment and being fixed in the end.

      z

  • No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1.2 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:05PM (#8782232) Homepage Journal
    Even if you believe Steve Jobs 'reality distortion field' figure fron his keynote speech that 40% of mac users are running OSX, that still leaves 60% on OS9, and we've not had a port of Mozilla for OS9 since 1.2 (which was as buggy as hell).

    If you hack macs, please do the silent majority a favour and port a stable version of mozilla for us!

  • OK, I'm confused... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by el-spectre ( 668104 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:14PM (#8782352) Journal
    What's with calling it firefox 1.0? I thought by the time the product hit 1.0, it was supposed to be Mozilla 2?

    Why are they calling a development version 1.0?

  • o.k but now the 1.7 stable has been pushed out (Score:4, Informative)

    by darthcamaro ( 735685 ) * on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:18PM (#8782418)
    Great news, but now the 1.7 stable release has been pushed back by a month. So, if FireFox is based on the 1.7 trunk it would mean that the FireFox 0.9 release will be pushed back too.
    It would have made more sense to make this decision before 1.7 hit beta, this is really an ass-backwards way of handling the stability of the trunk.

  • Good news for our organization (Score:5, Interesting)

    by illtud ( 115152 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:24PM (#8782528)
    Good news for me. We moved from NS4.7 to Moz 1.4 (then up to 1.4.1) but Moz has been a moving target since then. A lot of bugs that we've been hitting (IMAP especially) may have been resolved in 1.5/6, but with 1.7 already in beta, this is an upgrade treadmill that has MS beat. A stable target with backported bugfixes is great news for us.

    We also depend on a localized version [gwelywiwr.org] which unfortunately needs work every time a new Moz is released. Bug releases shouldn't need a new version of the language pack.

  • features (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adamruck ( 638131 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @02:39PM (#8782774)
    ok.... here is my question. When are they going to make a version of mozilla that comes all set up and ready to go when it comes to things like flash and java? Look I know that there are pluggins, and if you follow instructions carefully its not hard. But thit isn't the days of kernel 2.2.... I shouldn't have to sym link stuff anymore. How about a little box that comes up during install that askes if you would like to install java or flash support?

    One more thing.... when are they going to include neat things like... right click -> kill a frame... start/stop animation... block image(not all images from the server... thats different)?

    Well those are the two things I would like. I love mozilla, it rocks. I have never had it crash... even with like 20 tabs open. Thx Mozilla dev people.

  • Dumb Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ishamael69 ( 590041 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2004 @06:54PM (#8786116)
    Okay, I have a stupid question.

    What is Mozilla?

    Their website says "The Mozilla project maintains choice and innovation on the Internet by developing the acclaimed, open source, Mozilla 1.6 web and email suite and related products and technology."

    Now, I've used Phoenix (Now FireFox) in the past. I always thought that Mozilla was a web browser suite, kinda like Netscape (Browser, News, and Communicator) used to be.

    However, what is confusing the hell out of me is this: "[Firefox]...and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7"

    Okay, so if Mozilla is a suite, what does it mean by based on? Does that mean that Mozilla 1.7 will have Firefox 1.0 as it's browser?

    Is it that this would be a stable suite of products that you can download right now, but with each one being updated seperately?

    Man, I feel like an idiot asking this...
    • Mozilla was originally the name for the Netscape internet browser. When Marc Andreesen developed the replacement for Mosaic, the first proper web browser, it was named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla). The marketing guys at his new company decided to change it to Netscape Navigator, but the original core of developers kept the name.

      Then a bunch of stuff happened, AOL bought Netscape, but at that point the source code had been released into the wild under its original name, "Mozilla". The team of develop

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