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Mozilla 1.8 Alpha Released
Posted by
timothy
on Tue May 25, 2004 04:12 AM
from the getting-well-nigh-indestructable dept.
from the getting-well-nigh-indestructable dept.
AllMightyPaul writes "Last Friday, the Mozilla Organization announced Mozilla 1.8a. You can download Mozilla 1.8 alpha (with torrents available) from the Mozilla public FTP server. Features include a basic upload FTP UI, improved junk mail filtering, and the number of cookies that Mozilla can hold has also increased 'dramatically.' What's amazing is that they haven't even released Mozilla 1.7 yet. Here I thought that Mozilla was going to standardize on 1.7."
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Old news (Score:5, Informative)
1.7 is about third party developers and products which rely on a fixed api.
1.8 is where new features will be found.
New features are for example ftp upload capability, use of 4. and 5. mouse button.
see http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.8a1/READ
But this news is already 8 days old. I wonder why this is picked up only now.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla doesn't use an odd/even scheme. We just designate particular releases and branches, such as 1.7 as stable. Previous releases with this designation were 1.0 and 1.4.
Gerv
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Happy :-) (Score:3, Interesting)
I use the Mozilla package at home and Firefox at work (since I have to use Outlook here).
They haven't let me down yet.
I used to use FireFox for the same reason... but! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.4/faq/mail-news.
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Middle mouse click on MacOSX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Middle mouse click on MacOSX (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Middle mouse click on MacOSX (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Middle mouse click on MacOSX (Score:5, Funny)
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Erm... can do? (Score:3, Informative)
Install Firefox (or Zilla, whatever)
Type "About:Config" into the URL bar
Type "middleclick" into the filter bar and hit enter
Find the entry that says "browser.tabs.openta
Re:Erm... can do? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Erm... can do? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, you're mostly right. Tabs were added prior to the 1.0 release, and middle-click to open the tabs was turned on then...except on OS X.
Kindly see Bug 151249 -- Middle click on links does nothing in OS X [mozilla.org] (You'll have to copy that link, bugzilla has a referrer check to block links from slashdot.)
Unfortunately, Carbon doesn't have the ability to recognize a middle mouse click, so Mozilla (Seamonkey) and Firefox can't do anything on a middle click. Camino, on the other hand, is built with Cocoa, so middle-clicking works on a default build.
Combine this with the lack of Ctrl+Enter URL autocomplete, and I don't enjoy my Mozilla experience on OS X. I use Firefox on a daily basis on both Windows & Linux; the second I go over to my Powerbook, Firefox doesn't behave even close to the same way, and it drives me crazy. I still use it, because I really dislike Safari's interface, and it's still missing too many features, but Mozilla on OS X needs a chunk of work before it will act like it does on other OSes.
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Re:Middle Mouse on Linux (was: re: ... on MacOSX) (Score:4, Insightful)
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Mozilla needs more speed and (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently Mozilla is the most powerful browing suite on earth. Problem is people don't care about all those features, we just want speed. So developers what do you plan to do to make XUL faster? How do you plan to reduce the memory footprint? How about reducing CPU load? What about actually speeding up the rendering of websites ?
And if you are going to add new features, try intergrating bit torrent into mozilla since it seems to be the new default download format why the hell are you upgrading FTP?
Re:Mozilla needs more speed and (Score:5, Insightful)
There are numerous cross-platform applications out there which support multiple native widget sets, at least Windows, and "everything else". Tivoli's TME10 system (I haven't seen it since they renamed it) had a management console application using a common codebase, built with gcc on Unix and with VS on Windows, which used I believe Motif on Unix systems and used the Windows widgets. All Tivoli GUIs are drawn based on a description file which instructs the system on which components to use where.
Now granted you'd have to end up having some library which was replaced system by system, but this is something I think Mozilla could really use. You could argue that faster machines run it smoothly (my XP 2500+ rarely slows down because of the mozilla gui, but it certainly does draw visibly slower under load) but there are many of Pentium 2 and 3 systems out there in the 333 to 733 MHz range under which Mozilla performs like an absolute dog but Microsoft Orifice 2000 is not only usable, but also prompt.
I don't think including new features necessarily must make Mozilla consume more memory or operate more slowly, as long as they either A> are built on top of the framework like everything else and thus not loaded when not needed, or B> are dynamically loaded at the time of use, which probably isn't happening today.
As for bt > FTP, this is nonsense. Integrating BT would be neat but is unnecessary and the bt code available today is very much in its infancy. Besides, all you have to do is associate torrent files with your bt client and you're in like flynn. That wasn't so hard, was it? FTP is here to stay. It is used heavily by many websites and ftp support is just considered to be part of the system. FTP upload support in a web browser is often really handy for those who use Mozilla to edit and maintain their websites for whatever reason - Maybe they can't afford Dreamweaver, or maybe it's just not available for their platform, or maybe they don't think it's worth whatever the hell Macromedia charges for it these days. Regardless, FTP upload support is not unreasonable. Integrating the moving target of bittorrent (even the main branch of bt is horrendously unstable) at this point would be maintenance suicide.
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Re:Mozilla needs more speed and (Score:4, Insightful)
a) Justify "slow-ass" with figures.
b) Let's see you render an animated GIF background on a button using the Motif widget set.
Any browser which wants to support a decent part of CSS needs its own widgets, because OS widgets just don't cut it. IE does it too - and they have access to the underlying platform development team, _and_ only have to support one platform!
Gerv
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Improvements in Mozilla Mail (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla 1.8A is great! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's faster, more responsive, uses less memory and overall is just one great piece of code.
I'm looking forward to the final release, but to those who are sceptical to running an alpha release I recommend that you give it a try anyway - it's that great!
Internet Explorer will have a hard time keeping up with the great folks at Mozilla. In my book, the browser war has already been won.
Spam filter (Score:5, Informative)
I really don't understand why this is still a live issue. When I used to use Outlook I used SpamBayes [sourceforge.net] to filter my spam and within a few days it was catching 99.99% of my spam. That's obviously a made-up figure, but that's how it felt. I never missed a single real mail, and after a few weeks I don't think a single spam ended up in my inbox.
Then I moved to Thunderbird, and suddenly obvious spam is regularly ending up in my inbox, despite several weeks' training. Don't get me wrong, it's a great mail client, but I don't see why it's so hard to implement something that's already been done perfectly in more than one open-source project?
Re:Spam filter (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Spam filter (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this could be timing. I use Mozilla Mail as my client at home, and I turned on spam filtering for my wife's email account (because she was silly and gave her email address to Publisher's Clearinghouse). After a couple weeks of training, it was catching almost all the spam, but in the last few months the spammers have been intentionally misspelling words in random ways, which reduces the effectiveness considerably. Does anybody know if SpamBayes addresses this issue?
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Spammers changed their methods. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spammers simply learned how to (partly) defeat Bayesian. I'd be very interested to see your results if you tried SpamBayes now. I bet it wouldn't do better.
Or did you think the spammers would just give up and go home?
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Re:Spammers changed their methods. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the beginning, the included spam filtering worked wonders, but after time more and more spam began to leak through no matter how much "training" I did.
Instead of moving to a different email program as you did, however, I simply kept Thunderbird and used POPFile [sourceforge.net] as a spam-filtering proxy. Because of this, I can actually directly compare the in-program filtering of Thunderbird to an outside bayesian client. Right now, according to the built-in statistics of POPFile, it's at a 99.36% accuracy rate, even with the large number of random-word spam attacks I get daily, yet Thunderbird only catches about half of them.
So I have no doubt that you are correct in your argument that SpamBayes isn't being caught by the same random-word techniques that are currently ruining the effectiveness of Spamassassin or Thunderbird's built in filtering.
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Torrents (Score:5, Informative)
Win32 exe [mozilla.org]
Win32 Zip [mozilla.org]
Linux [mozilla.org]
Linux (installer) [mozilla.org]
Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought Firefox was scheduled to be *the* browser in the suite (with Thunderbird the equivalent in the mail space). How does that work if Firefox is on a branch and the suite ploughs ahead?
I hope bugfixes (217527 [mozilla.org] for example which affects Slashdot) are consistantly and promptly backported to 1.7 (and thus to Firefox) or the impetus could be there to reverse the flow back to the suite- up until now I have tended to think of Firefox as "the best of Mozilla"...
Re:Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
The Mozilla Suite is a platform that does everything (except the laundry - but they're probably working on that too) which the other standalone programs use as their base.
I always thought of Mozilla as the technology demontrator platform and the other programs as the bits that are useful.
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Re:Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, everything should be open for change. Every UI pixel spacing issue should be open for improvement, every 1px border in the interface needs to be justified. All text that is presented to the user needs to be constantly reviewed for easy of use, and so on... Of course, these things are only essential if you care at all about people actually using your software... The Thunderbird logo will convert more users than any single feature X you can name. If you can't see that you really don't understand the end user market and their need to download spyware infested wallpaper changers.
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Re:Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Not everyone has the same definition of "obvious UI mistake". Same point as last time.
nobody has the balls to draw the plans for Mozilla 2.0.
Says who? Just because we haven't reached the stage where it's appropriate to publish them doesn't mean they aren't being looked at.
That's all it takes to spin a 2.0, nothing more.
You've got it all backwards. You don't pick a version number first and a set of features second. We are not thinking "goodness me, what can we do so that it looks sensible calling it 2.0?", we are thinking "what's the next big step in Mozilla's evolution?" and, incidentally, deciding to call it Mozilla 2.0.
it also gets Mozilla a new fresh round of much needed media coverage.
Who says the Mozilla suite needs media coverage? It's certainly not obviously true. One could argue that we should spend all our effort getting media coverage for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Also, there is no plan to leave maintenance mode at the moment
No, and that's the point. That's what maintenance mode is. Seamonkey is still around because some people care about it, but they care about it being like it is now. Any massive marketshare increase we get will be driven by Firefox, not by Seamonkey.
Heck, you could hold "Vote for Mozilla 1.X splash screen" sessions at Mozillazine.
A vote is (well, was originally, it's now mostly inertia) the reason the suite is stuck with that current weird throbber. Votes, in general, suck as a way of choosing anything. Open Source projects are (mostly) not democracies.
If you want to be listened to, come out from behind that cowardly anonymity and engage in constructive discussion.
Gerv
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Re:Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
So how is "Mozilla developers aren't taking any UI patches" related to "there hasn't been a worthwhile new feature for ages"?
Also, why are you looking to Seamonkey for new features? The suite is in maintenance mode - there are still people and companies interested in it, but they are interested in it staying as it is. Firefox is where the innovation is happening right now.
Gerv
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Re:Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox is only on a branch for 0.9 and 1.0. That's no different from how Mozilla 1.7 is on a branch. Future versions of Firefox will be built from the trunk (or, more likely, from a more recent branch from the trunk), and thus will contain all the backend work that's been going on since 1.7 branched.
Of course, you're welcome to download the trunk builds of Firefox (which are being made available daily) -- you'll get the same backend fixes that 1.8 Alpha1 has, but it won't be anywhere near as stable as the branch builds.
I hope bugfixes [...] are consistantly and promptly backported to 1.7 (and thus to Firefox)
Actually Firefox is on its own branch now, based off the 1.7 branch. And no, not all fixes will be backported, that's the whole point of having a branch. And the bug you mentioned isn't even fixed yet.
or the impetus could be there to reverse the flow back to the suite
That doesn't make sense. If you wanted the bug fixes that 1.8 had, you could just get a 1.8 build of Firefox instead of the one from Firefox' 1.0 branch. No reason to switch back to the suite.
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Xft version (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Xft version (Score:4, Informative)
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More cookies? (Score:5, Funny)
I have submitted this as a bug!
Speaking of Kitchen Sinks (Score:4, Funny)
Still no SVG? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still no SVG? (Score:5, Insightful)
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THANK GOD FOR MOZILLA!!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Geeks don't get to see how the other half lives (fixing mom's computer doens't count).
I am required to configured the customer's computer and setup their e-mail. Part of the install process requires me to hit the cable company's web page to allow the customer to chose their e-mail. Every day I get to see 20 or more fscked up customer computers that have so many spyware programs, viruses, trojans and other assorted crap gumming up their desktops. It's not uncommon to see 15+ instances of IE load up with ads before I can get a usable browser. More often than not, the browser's spyware add-ins have the customer's computer so fscked, that I have to ftp to mozilla and pull down an clean, standards compliant browser that blocks pop-ups. Only when I load the same web page back to back between IE and mozilla does the customer begin to understand just how fscked microsoft software is.
So, even though I don't have the money to contribute to the Mozilla project, I would just like to thank the hard working folks who put that fine browser alternative togeter.
Thank you so very much. Without Mozilla, my install time would increase from an average of 20-25 minutes to well over an hour.
And to Microsoft: Shame on you, your shoddy code and your market share. If there's anybody headed for a fall, it's you.
Fix the damn calendar!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Corporate users can barely grok "Mozilla" but they certainly understand "Oh, no functional calendar? I'll just stay on Outlook..."
Re:Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yet more bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mozilla is supposed to be bloated (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox, Camino, and Thunderbird are the browsers and email clients for those who don't need JS debuggers, consoles, ftp clients, text editors, whosits, and whatsits.
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Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Mozilla is supposed to be bloated (Score:4, Informative)
Yes you can - you just select "Browser" during the install process and deselect the other components. It's really not that challenging.
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Not 'real' bloat though (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you done a quantitative ascessment of this feeling that Moz is big or slow? I think Mozilla is quite fast, certainly faster than IE. Also, I think that if you could un-marry windows and IE and get a full grasp of how much RAM IE was using (even when it's not loaded, mshtml.dll and friends are in RAM) you'd change your story.
Every web browser is going to use a fair amount of RAM because it needs at least a window-sized buffer to composite on. Safari and IE are tricky because they use the OS libraries for that, so it's not as easy to see the footprint, but Moz does it inside itself, so the footprint looks somewhat massive.
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Re:Jabber ? (Score:4, Informative)
hey look features are features but a few are missing
I would like a IM client (IRC does not rock my world) a Jabber client would be good
jabber support [mozdev.org]
I would like a iCal clone... (in process)
Indeed it is :) [mozilla.org]
I would like OpenPGP intergrated (only 128bit to save the export legal stuff) just basic crypto would be great (make it easy to setup as well)
There's a gpg [freshmeat.net] extension, will that do?
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Re:What everyone is interested in... (Score:5, Interesting)
And together they use more memory than Mozilla does, or at least no less memory.
As far as usage goes there's no perceptible difference in browsing speed between Mozilla and Firebird.
I think people like to say Mozilla is "bloatware" because it's the trendy thing to do, but I don't think it deserves the title.
The interface used to be fairly slow in pre 1.0 versions, particularly in the Mail/News component...but that really didn't have a hell of a lot to do with "bloat".
Now I don't notice any difference between the speed of Mozilla's interface or any other Windows Program.
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Re:What everyone is interested in... (Score:5, Insightful)
IE is slow compared to Moz. Firefox is probably slightly faster, especially on slow machines, but IMO it's really more about which browser's features you prefer at this point.
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Re:What everyone is interested in... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla is a platform for internet. I fully *expect* mozilla to be composed of multiple collaborative applications. Like today. You may call this bloat, but having a single app (single download, single install, single version tracking) that does web + mail + calendar + html editor + irc on every existing platform is required.
By porting mozilla, any new platform get access to the whole internet suite. This guarantees that Microsoft cannot get a hold on the web by fragmenting the offer.
That is far most important than all your little my-browser-is-smaller-than-yours pissing contest.
I would not mind to see the mozilla suite extended to include a blogger, an im client, a pim synchronisation tool or a p2p client.
Btw, your so-called small browser is waaay too big to be usable on a handheld.
One size fits all don't work. Do not turn mozilla into what it is not. If all you want is to browse the web, then, by all mean use a standalone web browser (based on mozilla, if you want), but don't divert the mozilla.org resources into fullfilling your personal needs.
The war for the control of the internet is not irrelevant and Mozilla is the single most important application in that field. Don't divert mozilla resources into a browser war with Microsoft (because they already won it last century).
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Re:What everyone is interested in... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) This is not the unix way of doing things. Small individual apps that can be combined in powerful ways.
2) What is this "internet" thing you talk about? To me it's a moving target. It does the "big three" (browse, mail, chat). What about streaming MP3s? How about P2P? How about unknown protocol-X? I like mozilla as much as the next person (typing in it now...), but the goal is overstated.
Mozilla should break into separate apps to handle separate tasks.
Then the desktops should provide a standard way of providing inter-app communication (is that what message bus is attempting?), so that clicking on a link in my e-mail client of choice it sends it to my browser of choice...
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Re:What everyone is interested in... (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. But it's time to start working towards some unification and integration on desktop apps because the 'UNIX Way' has failed to capture the desktop market.
Mozilla is OSS, so improvements to any part of it wil ripple through the different products automatically. FireFox, ThunderBird, Mozilla and Camino are all coming from the same base code, and improvement to that code improves all the products. Continuing to develop the 'monolithic' mozilla is vital to the rest of the projects, because the monolithic app showcases and tests the ground for features that may or may not dribble down to the 'birds.
Thinking about it like 'if you write code for Mozilla, you DIDN'T write for FireFox" is backwards, if you improved Mozilla you improved ALL of the mozilla.org offerings.
If you add code to Mozilla that does AOL mail or AIM protocol, that would be fscking AWESOME! Someone else will modularize it and make it a plugin for FireFox later, and we'll have a better offering, and it won't be shoved down anyone's throat.
Personally, I just moved from Mozilla (for mail and web) to FireFox and ThunderBird, I'm not at all impressed. I saved a few MB of RAM, but overall I was happier with the monolithic app. I switched so that I could file bugs and make the new apps better.
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Re:Why new features if they have an extension mode (Score:5, Informative)
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