Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller

ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."

Re:Firefox improved?

[yusufg]

yes, firefox is nothing without the underlying Gecko engine. Shortly firefox will branch on the Mozilla 1.7 branch, it is very likely that Mozilla 1.8-1.9 will have much faster page rendering that Firefox 1.0. See bugzilla for the bugs targetted for 1.8alpha

Re:Firefox improved?

[SimplexO]

Firefox will get the speed improvements, but since Firefox is already smaller and uses less, it won't be as significant (I think it is 3%?).

They basically rewrote the string implementation and it is "better faster stronger" than before.

So yeah, Firefox 0.9 will get a speed improvement too. (You can also grab a nightly. They have the improvements -- and more bugs.)

P.S. Also new in Mozilla 1.6 is the ability to block websites from hijacking your context menu (right click menu) in the browser. Yay!

Re:Firefox

[yusufg]

How can firefox render better, it has the same rendering engine as Mozilla, are you comparing the same Mozilla version as the one which firefox is based on
e.g, Mozilla 1.6-Firefox 0.8
Mozilla 1.5-Firefox 0.7

Remeber firefox will branch soon from the 1.7 release, so far a while, Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) will have rendering fixes/speedups and Firefox won't have it till it returns back to the trunk sometime after 1.0 is released

Re:5%?

[Nasarius]

You're looking at the README for the alpha. Try here [mozilla.org] instead.

Kerberos Support

[CNeb96]

It now support's SSO HTTP Authentication using GSSAPI Kerberos. Similiar MS's implementation of SPNEGO in IE. See bug 17578 in bugzilla for more information.

This is compatible with both IIS, and mod_authkerb for apache.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/modauthkerb/

Next the plan is to make kerberos support more general so it can be used for other protocol's like IMAP.

Mozilla Vs Firefox

[colinramsay]

Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.

And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark him as foe and change your settings to make him display below your threshold.

that way the rest of us who like his polls do not have to deal with the few of you who do not

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Planesdragon]

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Mozilla is a descendant, of sorts, of the Netscape 4 browser. OTOH, it doesn't have any real inherited code--and Netscape 6 and 7 were just repackaged Mozilla that did, AFAIK, get smaller and faster with each iternation, just like Moz did.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[vocaro]

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Because it doesn't have the same kernel.

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch. By throwing out the cruft that had been building up since Netscape 1.0, the Mozilla team was able to build a better browser...eventually. (Check out this BBC article [bbc.co.uk] for a nice pre-history of Mozilla.)

Mozilla in the wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

For detailed information aboutMozilla [wikipedia.org], read all about it in the wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

Re:5%?

[Jexx Dragon]

A Megabyte (MB) is now set at 1000 Kilobytes (KB) which is, in turn 1000 bytes. However, most of use still use MB = 1024 KB = 1024 bytes, which is now (officialy?) a Mibibyte (MiB), and Kibibyte (KiB). Confuses me too.

Re:A point each way.

[Utopia]

WinXP SP2 RC1 [microsoft.com] already has popup blocking.
Integrating MSN toolbar with IE is highly unlikely.

Re:Help me out

[Anonymous Coward]

Each firefox release is based on Mozilla. Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 will be based on Mozilla 1.7.

Mozilla will then make Firefox it's primary browser after 1.0, and Thunderbird it's primary mail reader after 1.0. The Mozilla browser you know will still exist as "Mozilla Suite".

Thunderbird... buggiest thing on earth

[caitsith01]

I tried Thunderbird for a few days last week... it was so riddled with bugs I found it unusable.

In particular:
- massive problems moving/deleting nested mail folders
- massive problems importing from another mail client (Eudora)
- seems to crash sometimes for no apparent reason
- crazy things happened with the preview pane all the time, like it would disappear at random or make itself really, really tiny and refuse to return to its former, big size
- some options tied exclusively to a particular account - e.g. filters - making the mail-checking process less transparent if you have multiple/many e-mail accounts
- seems to be trying to look a lot like Outlook, which is a shame and unnecessary

I wasn't looking for problems - I WANT to use it, and it has a lot of potential, but right now I'm not gonna use it myself and I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to any non-technical people.

Re:Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers consider quicklaunch functionality to be a hack.

Re:MNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/mngsuppo rt

That's a plugin for MNG support in Mozilla/Firefox. I would read the comments, though, some seem to warn against installing the plugin for certain builds. I only glanced over it, though; MNG support hasn't really been a priority for me, especially since I didn't even know MNG existed until people complained that they took support for it out of Mozilla.

Good point ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I designed graphics accelerators for a living we did a whole bunch of work trying to figure out what 'faster' ment - at least from a subjective point of view - turns out if you graph actual performance to subjective performance there's sort of an S curve, on the left it's dog slow and people are just annoyed, on the right it's so fast people don't notice performance is an issue at all and in the middle there's a vaguely exponential region where if every time you make things ten times faster they think it got better, maybe by a subjective factor of 2 .... 10% is in the noise .... unless your UI is in that far left dog-slow region

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Tony Hoyle]

I actually doubt IE has a 90% market share any more.

I run a site that's for a windows app, so there's a majority of Windows users (I'd guess almost exclusively windows actually) visiting it... you'd expect a very high IE percentage there, but I've currently got (based on ~1.2 million hits):

IE6 60%
Mozilla 11%
IE5 6%
IE5.5 2.3%
Opera7.2 1.7%
Opera7.1 0.3%

The rest is made up of sundry bots and capture scripts.

Looking at those stats... why the $$% do people target IE5 over mozilla??? (I'd love to know why IE5 is 3 times more popular than 5.5, too...)

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[kundor]

You realize that many alternate-browsers spoof IE headers so that they don't get rejected by MS-powered websites? Konqueror and Opera may even do it by default.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[optikSmoke]

but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...

IIRC, those are boxes looking for an IIS hole in your system. Whoever wrote the exploits must have decided to use an IE user agent string. Hehe...

The "flip" over to 80% IE may just be a lull in traffic where the percent of requests from infected boxes is "amplified" by a smaller total number of requests.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one place most so called "web designers' should be looking and that's W3C [w3.org], end of story.

Re:noticeable?

[BobWeiner]

I just downloaded Mozilla 1.8 -- and speed improvements ARE dramatic -- it's FAST -- much moreso than Safari or even Firefox. Page rendering speeds are unbelieveably quick. Even the application loading time has significantly improved. I never would have considered using Mozilla as my primary browser -- but this version has me thinking otherwise. Download it, use it, and draw your own conclusions...

Bob

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Links 2 page is here [mff.cuni.cz]

Building for Both - Lacks features

[GAVollink]

There are three ways to build web pages.

1. Code to Any Browser [anybrowser.org].
2. Code to Internet Explorer [microsoft.com].
3. Code to The Mozilla Engine [mozilla.org].

4. Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's [meyerweb.com] CSS/EDGE [meyerweb.com]. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.

   In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load /similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).

   So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.

   Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.

   Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.

Re:noticeable?

[BobWeiner]

Oops. Should be 1.7b in my previous post.

w3m 0.5

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want small and fast, w3m [sf.net] 0.5 is out as well.

Get an optimized build

[1001011010110101]

Dig up a bit in the forums. I'm using a Athlon XP optimized build (with all that black magic voodoo compiler switches). If you have the hardware to support it, you can REALLY feel the difference.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch.

Actually, that's a bit of myth. It was really Netscape's management who dictated the rewrite, in order to accomodate the Gecko rendering engine (which was still called NGLayout or Raptor back then). Most of the Netscape/Mozilla developers (less than six months into the project, there were not many non-Netscape contributors) at the time were against the change, not because they didn't like the idea of a smaller, faster and more standards-complaint rendering engine, but because they were given a ludicrous six-month timeframe to achieve parity with Netscape Communicator 4.5.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[platipusrc]

On my version of Konqeror (3.2.1) ,

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; FreeBSD) (KHTML, like Gecko)

is the default ID string.

smb:// now supported, and better GTK+ integration

[sn0wman3030]

As mentioned in this [gnomedesktop.org] Footnotes article, the new Mozilla supports smb:// browsing through gnome-vfs, and the integration with your GTK2 theme has improved.

Re:OS X Talkback?

[va3atc]

Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.

I can't speak for OS X, but as for Windows, I inquired about the removal of the talkback feature in the nightly builds they had this to say about it: [mozillazine.org]

No, it's not possible to enable it. It's either built into the official builds or its not. Currently the official builds are not being built with talkback because of some talkback server issues, so there is no way to disable it. Hopefully by Firebird 0.9 all of the talkback issues will be sorted, but it's probably not going to happen for the Firebird 0.8 release.

Though if you page down it appears that we shall see it in this release of Mozilla

"The installer releases of Mozilla 1.7 Beta now include Quality Feedback Agent again, allowing users to report crashes, ..."

Hopefully all those new bug reports will help speed up development :-)

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[Tribbin]

Mozilla for windows has a very good keep-in-memory option.

It will then start about as fast as IE every next time you open it.

Re:Debugging code?

[Mia'cova]

The improvements are mostly in the algorithms, not the code-optimization. So yes, it affects both debug and production builds. But that being said, we're not downloading debug builds so it's a non-issue.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Anonymous Coward]

text-only links is trash. It attempts to recreate the layout of a page that is designed around graphics and mouse navigation, but does so ignoring the fact that keyboard and mouse navigation are COMPLETELY different, and graphics-based page layouts are useless when browsing in text mode. Even tables, links' big killer "feature," are ugly and almost useless in it.

I've never used the graphics-capable versions of links, so I won't comment about those.

But still, no doubt, the best text browser is Lynx. It formats text so that it is easy to READ and NAVIGATE. No stupid scrolling left and right garbage. Give me a Lynx window and the four directional keys, and I can make do (although I don't normally limit myself that way when I use Lynx). Try that in links and you'll find yourself screaming at your monitor.

IOW, links can shove it. Lynx is the supreme info browser, period.

Re:OS X Talkback?

[rmohr02]

The talkback servers were hosted by Netscape, then AOL. The Mozilla Foundation does not have access to those servers anymore, but will hopefully have new talkback servers soon.

Re:A point each way.

[minus_273]

actually, IE will see a major revision when MS relaeases SP2 for XP in a few months. You can do a quick search and see screenshots of it. It uses a new brusged metal theme and has popup blocking and a download manager built in. In addition, it is supposed to incoporate a lot of the corrections made since MS's security audit (this is a rumor BTW).
Overall, eventhough it looks liks a knock off of Safari,I am interested in seeing what changes MS made

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[cmacb]

Yes, I have noticed this. It used to be MUCH worse though. As you mention you have to browse for a good long time for it to become an issue. Every new version of Mozilla seems to make the problem less severe too.

If the comparison you are making is with IE though, I don't find it any better, in fact rather than just getting slower, IE tends to just blow up at some point, especially if you have viewed a lot of pages that contain calls to plug-ins.

Re:Debugging code?

[Myen]

I believe the stats come from tinderbox (automated builds), which are now also being used to build nightlies. As the nightlies are not debug builds (it would be a pain to download, for one thing), my guess is that those stats are for non-debug builds.

Camino 0.8

[rixstep]

Camino 0.8 is on the way too. [mozilla.org]

22 January 2004: We are in the process of driving the Camino 0.8 buglist to zarro boogs. We will be branching off Mozilla 1.7 (now scheduled for April) and will release shortly after. We expect Camino 0.8 to be faster and even more solid than 0.7...

Re:no googlebar

[Trillan]

From the GoogleBar FAQ [mozdev.org]:

Someone told me that this works in Netscape and Firebird. Does it?
The answer is both yes and no. The toolbar works best in most recent versions of mozilla, since this has been where development has occurred all along. Due to XUL changes in the mozilla versions following the release of Netscape 6.2, the Googlebar will not work at all in any release of Netscape 6.2.x or below. However, in Netscape 7, which is a close cousin of recent mozilla versions, the Googlebar works. It has also been tested to work in Phoenix/Firebird 0.2 and above.

that's KHTML

[tepples]

The Mozilla suite and the Firefox, K-meleon, and Camino browsers all use the Gecko engine. The Konqueror and Safari browsers use the KHTML engine. Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[cbiltcliffe]

By default, IE asks you if you want to download and install an ActiveX plug-in and show you who digitally signed it. It will never install an ActiveX behind your back.

Not true. I was visiting a site recently with IE, and it asked me if I wanted to install an ActiveX control. I clicked 'No'. It popped up a dialog that said I had to, which had only one 'OK' button that I clicked on.
Then it asked me again if I wanted to install the control. I clicked 'No' again. It popped up the same dialog that said I had to. I clicked 'OK', and it went ahead and started downloading the control by itself.

Not exactly hidden behind your back, but it still did it, even though I didn't give it permission to.

Re:Back button slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

edit>preferences>advanced>cache

See how much space you have allocated to cache.

If it's 0 then there you go. If not then i don't know, i'm just here for the free hat.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[mabinogi]

You do realise that 15% of 1.2 million hits is still 180,000 hits?

15% non IE is obviously not a majority, but it's not insignificant either. Only dealing with IE would piss off 1 in every 7 visitors to your site.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[leshert]

Generally, stylesheets overall _reduce_ the bandwidth usage of a site, mostly through the elimination of redundant tags.

Re:Oh no, there goes Tokyo...

[SphericalCrusher]

Amen! MoZilla (besides Safari) is the only browser that I use. Down with IE!

Oh, and what about that post forgot to mention it being 25% faster on the Mac OS X operating system? o_O

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[POWRSURG]

I have found that Quirksmode [quirksmode.org]'s section on older browsers to be very useful, especially detailing how simple it is to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer. You really do see a jump in CSS and Javascript support as you progress from 3 -> 4 -> 5.01 -> 5.5SP2 -> 6SP1, though I feel this is to be expected.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must be off to try and figure out why the changes I made friday night to work around some invisible transparent layer that was killing all of my links in Mozilla has now created the exact problem in Opera....

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[krosk]

Unfortunately, IE still has a strangle hold on website designers, *especially* when it comes to javascript applications and web based email programs. My university uses a javascript based email program for it's students. The *only* browser (and trust me, i've tried them all) that works with this program is IE. The university is also very reluctant to release the POP and SMTP server addresses so you can use a outside email client (not outlook!!). Somebody stop Gates from changing the industry standard to his own personal preferences!!

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[MechaStreisand]

I always thought it was just a vocal minority that used Mozilla

Evidently you don't understand the meaning of the term "vocal minority". More people voting for Mozilla than for IE is exactly in line with what a vocal minority would do.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[stienman]

It seems to me to only be a problem when I have a lot of data open at once, and leave it alone long enough for windows to swap it out to the drive.

For instance, I have a tab link that, when clicked, loads 63 comics pages at once. It significantly reduces my time spent reading comics (waiting for them to load, actually) but it's a TON of memory.

If I let my laptop hibernate and bring it back up it takes nearly 30-60 seconds to render the tab that was on top when I hibernated. After I read the first few and close a few tabs it speeds back up to its normal speed. I suspect it's more an issue with mozilla using a huge amount of memory (possibly for holding rendered versions of web pages) that is swapped out.

Using it interactively, even after having it open for several days, it's about as fast for me as when I first started it.

-Adam

Re:5% faster than 1.6, but..

[afidel]

Roughly 33% faster than 1.0 for pageload according to Tinderbox. Code size is smaller so startup should be improved as well. This is while ADDING support for more standards.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[The Snowman]

I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.

I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[0x0d0a]

May I suggest netcomics [sourceforge.net] and a dedicated image browser like gqview [sourceforge.net]?

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[HalfFlat]

but claiming MSIE on X11 is fun too

Are you aware that MS did make a version of IE for Solaris? It was astonishingly bad, but it did exist.

Mozilla/FireFox Usage According to Google

[CritterNYC]

The Google Zeitgeist [google.com] shows their current visitor breakdown as a graph. It isn't labeled, but by breaking it down and determining which pixel the lines fall on at the end, the percentages look like this:

Internet Explorer (5/5.5/6): 89%
Mozilla/Netscape (5/6/7): 5%
Unknown/Other: 6%

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[haeger]

Here's one:
This is a Swedish bank [handelsbanken.se] that needs to fix their site. Feel free to send them a friendly mail if You're swedish. I really think they should wise up.
Also, it appears to be a domino powered website. :-)

.haeger

Mozilla still in bad shape

[mnmn]

I dont know quite what went wrong, but Mozilla's development just spiralled upwards into features and bloat year ago. That is bad considering its the only really free standalone browser. If youre running say NetBSD on some exotic hardware, or Solaris on x86, or something not mainstream, youre really stuck with Mozilla unless you can get around the overhead of KDE/GNOME and use their browsers.

Mozilla firebird/thunderbird has caught most peoples attention and can be far more popular than mozilla if it didnt crash so much. For now, people with exotic setups will have to use lynx, keep trying mozilla and firebird intermittently and turn back to Windows or Linux on x86 when they get frustrated. I do wonder whose interests is Mozilla serving anyway with such extreme bloat.

Re:Mozilla@linux + Macromedia (flash/shockwave)

[sam0ht]

Ok, I used
http://macromedia.mplug.org/tarball/generic/ instal l_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz
I think. Works for me with Mozilla 1.7a on Fedora x86.

BTW I also got Flash Click-to-play, which stalls each animation until you click to activate it.

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Check
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html
f or more links

Re:that's KHTML

[Brane]

Here you are: Mozilla ActiveX Control [www.iol.ie]

Not just a similar API

An identical one! That's right, the Mozilla control will implement the IWebBrowser and DWebBrowserEvents interfaces that Microsoft have already defined for Internet Explorer.

Since the Mozilla control implements exactly the same API, it will mean that developers can take existing IE code and port it, sometimes in a matter of minutes!

Re:that's KHTML

[jsebrech]

Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

There are good reasons for not implementing that. Implementing just document.all does nothing for IE-compatibility, since you have to implement the rest of the MS Document Object Model to actually get things done. Once you do that you would have three DOM implementations, the mozilla native one, the W3C one, and the IE one. All three would have to be maintained, and you'd need to constantly chase every new release of IE (though with IE's current lethargy this is less of a problem). Also, it's impossible to have perfect IE compatibility. IE for mac was a different engine, and wasn't anymore compatible with windows IE than mozilla is. You need to not only implement the same features, but you have to implement the same bugs, the same way of responding to error conditions, the same timing of screen updating behaviors.

Gecko's design is a very good trade-off between standards and compatibility. Dave Hyatt has stated on his weblog he tries to do things the gecko way often (looking to gecko for guidance on how to do a compromise). And safari pretends to be gecko in its useragent string.

Anyway, if a site doesn't work in mozilla, you can file it as a bug. If it can be fixed in the engine without breaking standards compatibility and a lot of sites would benefit from that fix, it probably will be. Otherwise it will become an evangelism bug, and mozilla people will contact the site to advise them how to become mozilla-compatible.

Re:Help me out

[jsebrech]

Firefox roadmap [mozilla.org]. Plus, it's been announced on mozillazine.org in even greater detail.

Rollover menu?

[GAVollink]

Rollover menu wasn't my choice, or my problem [slashdot.org]. In some sites I've been required by the customer that rollover "light up" menu links appear. These are relatively easy with a decent understanding of CSS.

CSS2 and Mozilla (not I.E.) can do full roll-over menus without the help of scripting. But this does NOTHING on I.E. Similarly, microsoft.com [microsoft.com] has menus (in black, top right of screen) that do nothing unless I.E. is loading them).

If your boss/client wants menus like that, then there is no choice but to break the Any Browser [anybrowser.org] campaign (which I believe in), and use JavaScript (or Server Side Includes) to create different pages for different browsers - again, breaking many browsers that spoof their headers, or otherwise lie (Opera, "MSIE Compatible").

Re:Firefox

[FooBarWidget]

Firefox *is* faster than Mozilla 1.6 (and Galeon using Mozilla 1.6). Try loading a large page like http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html
When loading in Mozilla, my CPU usage was at 100% for 22 seconds. When loading in Firefox, 100% CPU usage lasted for 16 seconds.