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."

MNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it have MNG support?

5%?

[AnonymousCowheart]

5% decrease in binary size? According to Mozilla's site [mozilla.org] it says:
"Mozilla's binary size has been decreased almost 2% since Mozilla 1.6."
Is the binary size in the summary from a different version?
One thing that I'd like to see mozilla mail do, is have the address book open, like in thunderbird. I don't even use the address book in mozilla since it's such a pain. Am I just missing something?

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[LBArrettAnderson]

Obligatory Poll:

Browser of choice?

MSIE [calcgames.org]
Mozilla [calcgames.org]
Opera [calcgames.org]
Netscape [calcgames.org]
Konqueror [calcgames.org]
Galeon [calcgames.org]
DA [calcgames.org]
curl [calcgames.org]
Mediapartners-Google [calcgames.org]
Avant Browser/contype/NSPlayer [calcgames.org]

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 9.4).Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 9.4).

Help me out

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Ok. So, mozilla was supposed to addopt the phoenix/firebird/firefox code right? Did they do that already? If so, why are the developed separately? If so, what advantage does firefox offer, or is it just a fork of the code?

No diffirent then the last release

[Jexx Dragon]

I've been using Mozilla since 0.4 or 0.5, can't quite remember which. It's always been the best, and keeps getting better (tabs anyone?). Every release gets faster, and most get smaller, though not all.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[LBArrettAnderson]

i wouldn't consider it spamming... it's a lot easier to vote in a poll than to post a comment... i find it interesting to learn what everyone on /. (and other websites) think about certain issues, such as what browser they use. I've already learned something from this poll -- so far more people have voted mozilla than MSIE, which absolutely surprises me. I always thought it was just a vocal minority that used Mozilla, but I suppose i might be wrong. (then again maybe the ones who use mozilla got here faster than the ones who use IE)

A point each way.

[irokitt]

IE is not expected to see a major revision until Longhorn ships in 2006-2007. It is rumored that the Longhorn version will have tabbed browsing and some kind of pop-up blocking. This would probably be accomplished via the MSN toolbar, which is similar to the Google toolbar but with that *other* search engine.

But the truth is that IE has so much of the market share that revisions don't matter. People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5. If Microsoft didn't push the patches, quite a few people would be using these older version even now.
BTW, I'm using Firefox.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[bobthemonkey13]

It would be great if you could link it to Referer: headers to see how many people lie.

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

[WoTG]

Anyone know if memory use has gotten any more efficient? I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage. It's not a problem if when it's up and browsing, but if I flipped to another application for awhile, and Moz gets paged out to disk, the delay to switch back to Moz is a little annoying. At least on my relatively slow by today's standards, WinXP box.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[LBArrettAnderson]

i'm checking the log files right now... and of the 15 voters, 10 used MSIE. (only a couple actually voted IE)

Re:Thanks Moz Team.

[petabyte]

I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.

Yeah, I have similar issues with epiphany. I like its layout and its Gnomeiness but there are certain options it blocks (even out of regular mozilla) that I would really like to have. Every time I download something and the damn download statusbar comes up I want to put my fist through the screen. You can't dare close it either as that will stop the download. Hopefully tomorrow when 2.6 launches I'll be able to play with Epiphany 1.2.0 and it'll have more options.

Galeon

[AnonymousCowheart]

The latest Galeon is out too [sourceforge.net]. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.

Re:Help me out

[spacecowboy420]

On a similiar note - I thought Mozilla was going away in lieu of FireFox and Thunderbird. I stopped using Mozilla long ago for this reason - when are they going to focus on just FireFox and Thunderbird - or are they really? It seems that Most linux distros use Mozilla instead of the seperate clients. This bugs me when I have to install firefox/thunderbird and always makes me ask - "If Mozilla is going away, why do we still use it? Why is it included in the distros?" And ultimately "Why Bother". I know mozilla is a good product, but maintaining a "to be discontinued" product is like cpr on dead people - what's the point? Please enlighten me.

Re:Who fucking cares

[koody]

Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!

Feeding the troll:
You are right. Mozilla's marketshare isn't large. Most Windows users probably don't even know it exists. This doesn't mean they haven't used Mozilla or that Mozilla would be insignificant.

I've seen Mozilla based browsers used in several public web terminals. You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).

Mozilla will not gain a 95% marketshare today nor tomorrow, but it will gain marketshare. IE will live long, probably a time counted in decades, but Mozilla isn't going away.

I've been following Mozilla closely since milestone 16 and I started using it as my main browser arund version 0.96. Before that it was basically horrible. It was unstable, ate memory like crazy and was too slow for me to use.

Mozilla today is a different beast from the early days:

The most stable (modern) browser I've used (links is the most stable ever)

Best standards support

Getting faster by every release

Getting less resource hungry by every release

The most extendable browser around.

IE will live long but so will Mozilla. Mozilla's marketshare will grow, IE's will probably not. Mozilla is evolving fast, IE is not. Mozilla will always be free, IE might not be. Mozilla will be developed as long as anyone wants to do it or has the money to fund it, IE will not.

All I can say that I hope that the current version of IE lives long and that Microsoft keeps iproving it at the current pace. That will ensure that Mozilla will gain marketshare as it races past IE.
Long Live (the current version of) IE

Re:Why...

[BobWeiner]

Mozilla has a built-in email program - if that's important to you, then that's one reason to use Moz instead of FireFox. Me? I toggle between using Safari and FireFox. FireFox was indeed faster than Safari 1.0, but with Safari 1.2, I'd say both browsers feel about the same, speedwise. Anyone have benchmarks?

Bob

Never understood why people use Mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox/Thunderbird separately are LOADS faster than the mozilla suite could ever be.

I don't even know why they still make it. What's the difference other than Firefox/Thunderbird are faster?

OS X Talkback?

[Megane]

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.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Jexx Dragon]

I just code sites in plain W3C-Complient HTML. No stylesheets, no javascript, a few small images maybe. Decreases bandwidth usage, dosent annoy people using Lynx. And dosent rely on pictures, animations and fancy crap... All of witch are used too much on the internet. If I do use these I don't care if IE users can see them, since a browser that dosent support the standerds shouldnt be used, or even legal. Of course, people seem to like designing sites for a particular browser, which is pretty stupid, and I'm sure everyone here agrees with me.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm, it best not to "design" for any one browser but rather follow W3C standards. However I always leave checking of IE the last job I do, this way I have found that I get better working functionality across most of the browsers. Designing the other way around (Working mainly with IE) I have found nothing but hassle. I guess it the bad habits that IE lulls you into.

Re:Mozilla Vs Firefox

[ezzzD55J]

slightly offtopic perhaps, but perhaps someone here knows, speaking of improvements.. what i'd really really like greatly is roaming profiles, allowing me to share bookmarks, cookies, history etc. with mozilla's on each of the systems i use.. It would be such a huge improvement to my browsing usage, at least; currently I don't bother with bookmarks, for instance.. I know this feature has been talked about endlessly, i haven't read the full bugzilla bugs about it because they were so large :) Anyone know what the status is of this?

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[GregWebb]

For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.

Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.

I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me
* What form fields are around and what values they have
* What images the page contains
* What links the page contains

saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?

Debugging code?

[ilikejam]

Are these speed / size / page-load figures accurate for the binaries with the debugging code still in?
If so then these performance gains will be even better once the debugging stuff's taken out for production. Will they not?

Re:noticeable?

[westlake]

I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user.

That takes you back to the larger question of why none of the alternative browsers ever gains significant market share. Mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, etc. just doesn't seem to take you very far. Consider Moz's flat-line performance on the Google Zeitgeist [google.com], for example. You have to wonder if Microsoft's decision to integrate a simple web browser into Windows Explorer isn't closer to the mark, something that has value to ordinary users.

Remove Nuke feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Mozilla developers:

Please adjust the context menu when right clicking on a tab, so that "close other tabs" is further away from "close tab".

I got bit in the ass again by this. I don't know if it is the slowness, or whatever it is, but when right clicking on a tab, the tab/window and menu sometimes move a bit as I'm selecting "close tab" (or I just miss), and I end up closing "other tabs" by mistake. It's not so much a problem on windows, I'm guessing, but on Linux, where I run for weeks at a time without a reboot, I tend to have quite a few tabs open at a time. And going back to the sites is not an option, as some of the tabs contain news, which has changed hours or days later even though the url is the same.

Is it possible to include an option in the preferences menu (under tabbed browsing) to add/eliminate/reconfigure the context menus? I tried looking in the .mozilla directory for individual users, and in the mozilla directory in /etc, and couldn't find any file to edit to change the context menus.

Another request: After going to a web page, if I want to save that page later, the browser goes to the web site to get the page again. This is a problem under two circumstances: If offline, and if the page has changed. I had a news page that I wanted to save, that was sitting on my desktop for a few days and I didn't get a chance for unrelated reasons to save it earlier. When I did save it, it saved the updated page, which carried a different news story at the same url as the old story. While wgetting the page again for saving may have its advantages, there should be an option of saving the page from the temporary file created to view the original page, not getting the page again to save it. Something like "save from cache" (and this needs to work even if cache is set to 0 mb, the file is still temporarily created somewhere if cache is set to 0 mb in the preferences menu) in the same area as "save html only" and "save web page complete" would be the proper place I believe (but still retaining the other choices, not substituting them).

I'm writing this here, instead of submitting it as a feature request or bug because I tried submitting this same feature request and others (and a couple of bugs that someone else fixed anyway) a while back (more than six months), but the submission area is sooo confusing and covers so many areas that I couldn't figure it out, and abandoned the submission the few times I did try. Sorry, but it is too complicated for me.

Thanks for the work on Mozilla to everyone! I use it regularly because Konqueror (my first choice) lacks the "save web page complete" choice, and mangles the tvguide listings (yeah, I'm sure the tvguide page doesn't conform to w3c, but Mozilla works, Konqueror doesn't, on that particular page, so I have no choice), and Konqueror still crashes on me.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[MikeFM]

I can't stand crap like Java or Flash on a site. Javascript is bad enough. If you want a bunch of extra fluff then use a custom client. All that crap just gets in the way for us people trying to get real work done.

Besides, it's rarely plugins that are the issue between browsers. In my experience Mozilla runs Java, Javascript, Flash, etc as well or better than IE. The only problems I have with them come from boneheaded websites that check the browser and then refuse to allow any none IE browser to access the site. How clueless is that.

Other than those things I don't know what you mean by rich content. HTML is HTML in any browser.

Re:MNG?

[Arngautr]

This isn't a troll its funny, oh well, But I wish everybody would just do MNG (and PNG for that matter) right, GIFs are so limiting.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[hixie]

> IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases

What recent releases? WinIE hasn't changed for something like 3 years, and as I understand it Microsoft have said they won't do any more changes to their HTML/DOM/CSS support, ever (even in the IE release that will be in Longhorn). One hopes they are bluffing or will change their mind, but the fact remains that basically, as far as WinIE's rendering engine goes, nothing has changed in years and nothing will have for years to come (no non-security-related changes to be shipped in IE before Longhorn, have said Microsoft officials).

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Curtman]

But how many of those forge their useragent string so that pages render properly? Quite often I have to change mine from

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040308 Firefox/0.7"

to

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

To deal with browser detection on broken sites. More often than not I forget to change it back afterward.

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

[MyHair]

I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage.

If you're comparing to IE, then it's not a fair comparison since IE hides some of its memory footprint in explorer and other places and still takes up 12-25 MB for iexplore.exe.

If you're comparing to Konqueror or another KHTML or Gecko browser, then nevermind.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but if you're using Moz under Windows then the disadvantage is that Moz plays fair. IE, MS Office, Sun Java and Adobe Acrobat Reader I've noticed hang around in RAM a long, long time after you quit using them. I suspect they have settings to stay in memory an extra long time, where I suspect Mozilla plays nice and sets itself to normal and therefore gets squeezed out by the others.

If you're talking about an X / POSIX platform, then nevermind.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[jovlinger]

Does anyone else see the same behavior I do; that while it starts out snappy, Mozilla gets slower and slower. This is most noticable when rendering tabs in the background; this goes from instantaneous to taking the better part of a minute.

The slowdown from snappy to slow takes a day or two of use, and requires a restart of the browser to fix.

This happens both in mozilla and fire-fox, so it must be some internal resource leak, I guessing.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[ManxStef]

Mod parent up, he speaks the truth :)

BTW Greg, the PNH toolbar might be of interest to you? I find it damn handy myself:
http://placenamehere.com/pnhtoolbar/

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Selecter]

Yes, it is really active X that makes IE such a magnet for bullshit and ad/spyware. That and the fect that most windows users dont know how to configure the browser via the security and privacy tabs in prefs to even set the thing up. I believe if you leave these settings alone out of the chute IE has no protection at all from anything, tho I could be wrong. If I am somebody correct me please.

Re:5% to 9% is "dramatic"?

[Mia'cova]

It is a dramatic increase. Just remember that every 0.1 increment in mozilla isn't some huge major revision. It's an evolution. 5-9% is a dramatic increase for a +0.1 release. It's all relative to the time spent since the last release.

We don't expect a 50% cut in speed every few months after all. It all adds up over time though.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[coats]

The only problems I have with them come from boneheaded websites that check the browser and then refuse to allow any none IE browser to access the site. How clueless is that.

Not as clueless as the ones that claim to do such a check, and then reject you for not having the very browser that in fact you are using. (They claimed to support IE and Mozilla, then rejected Mozilla 1.6 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113)

I ran into one of those yesterday on a sporting goods sales site... wrote them a nastygram quoting their rejection-page back to them, together with my browser identity, then asking whether I should expect the same kind of bullshit from their merchandise that I find in their web site design.

idiot bastards!

Re:MNG?

[Trejkaz]

Part of the problem there is that animated GIFs are still considered images, whereas MNG is probably considered video (since its mime type is... video/mng? Or is it video/x-mng?.) Therefore any site which only permits images to be displayed on it (various bulletin board sites are the main culprits, I suspect) might still cripple MNG supporters.

Unless you really can have <img> tags which contain MNGs, in which case I'll STFU.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems odd to see the words "preserve" and "innovation" in the same sentence.

Mozilla Marketshare is Growing

[f0rt0r]

With a little help from me, I have gotten 10 or so Windows users at work to start using Mozilla, and one of them even tried out Firefox before I did! However, on the down side, I haven't gotten any of them to try Linux, though several have said "they should". I might just burn Knoppix to CD for them and hand it out.

Anyway, IE does have greater "marketshare", but all it took me was a few nudges to get Windows users to switch. Now if I can just get them to change their homepage to ./ , then it can do the rest of the work ( converting )for me. :)

All this from a former MCSE who though Microsoft was the end-all be all and Linux was just a flash in the pan...

Re:In other news...

[fm6]

Yeah, I'm underwealmed by this announcement too. But your comparison is off-target, since this improvement in performance appears to have been done by improving the code, not by stripping out features. What's sad is that performance wasn't a priority from day one. Mozilla's bloated code base have pretty much destroyed its credibility outside its community of fanatical true-believers.

Ironically enough, I'm writing this using Firefox, 'cause my copy of IE is infested with some weird stealth popup engine that neither Ad-Aware nore Spybot can seem to corner. I'm very close to abandoning IE, going back to Mozilla permanently.

But I'm not quite there. Now might seem the right time to abandon IE, with its stupid security holes and lack of standards compliance. But Firefox still takes too long to download graphics and render complicated web pages. And the Mozilla version of the Google toolbar has a really stupid bug (actually more a case of overdesign [mozdev.org]) that makes search term buttons totally useless. I can't live without search term buttons!

Re:MNG?

[Trejkaz]

Well I for one welcome our new MNG overlords, but I just don't see anything happening unless people get enough impulse to stop using GIF. And there's also that slight problem of the other, more broken browser which can't implement many other standards well, including PNG, and has even less chance of getting MNG right.

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

[mysticalreaper]

Heh. Sorry to break it to you, but Moz is not at fault here, it's XP. Now, investingating why it gets swapped out is still an interesting question, but XP does the swapping, not Moz. Which is demonstrates yet another reason i use linux. MUCH better memory management. The only time i remember Moz getting swapped out was when i left my computer compiling for 24 hours, and came back to it. Took about 2 seconds to pull it back. On a p3-700 with 512 MB RAM. just my two cents.

Re:Get an optimized build

[1001011010110101]

I'm using the Firefox now, but u should be able to find custom builds for the big zilla in the this forum [mozillazine.org]

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

[CTachyon]

It's not a secret API. It's MSHTML.DLL, which EXPLORER.EXE (since Win95+IE4 or Win98) and IEXPLORE.EXE both use. It probably uses (documented, non-secret) APIs to create shared r/w data pages for an interprocess in-memory cache. (And, to be fair, if you were writing an embeddable shared-object web browser control meant to be part of 20 apps at once, all owned by the same user, why wouldn't you?)

JS difference between Mozilla and MSIE

[solprovider]

Javascript with timers. The way things are right now [in Mozilla], using even one, unless it's VERY tightly coded, will drive CPU utilization up to 100% and just keep it there. Even when tightly coded, it still eats a massive amount of CPU time.

Be careful when using setInterval() and setTimeout(). Mozilla 1.3 cannot use setTimeout() recursively to create the effect of setInterval() without maxing CPU usage. setInterval() works fine. If you want something to happen at regular intervals, use setInterval() to make all browsers happy.

---
One issue where the browsers are different is capturing key events:

MSIE6 requires:

function inputIE(){
addchar(window.event.keyCode);
}
document.captur eEvents(Event.KEYPRESS);
<BODY ONKEYPRESS="inputIE()">

Mozilla1.3 works with:

function input(e){
addchar(e.which);
}
document.onkeypress = input;

[addchar() is a generic function to handle the processing of each key regardless of the browser.]
[Why did Slashcode add a space within the ECODE tags?]

Luckily both sets of code can be on the same page with the KeyPress event being set correctly without testing for the browser names. I prefer the second method because it allows the code to be contained in a .JS file without modifying the BODY tag. This may have been due to misunderstanding MSDN. There is something called a "named script" (<SCRIPT FOR = object EVENT = onkeypress>) that looks awful and is specific to MSIE. Maybe I just did not find the correct object in MS's DOM to set the onkeypress function for the entire page (maybe document.all.onkeypress?) I stopped researching it once the page worked correctly with both browsers.

To be on-topic:
Does Mozilla1.7 allow for the awful event model of MSIE? Will this code still work?

my Book of Mozilla entry.

[burtonator]

And so the beast became agile. The unbelievers fell silent and the followers of
Mammon were left behind. The beast had been improved and awaited the release of
the great FireFox.

from The Book of Mozilla, 1:7b
(Red Letter Edition)

Firefox

[bonch]

Does this have anything to do with Firefox's string changes which reduced the code and increased speed by about 5%?

Re:Why Thunderbird at all?

[edwdig]

The big advantage is if your browser or email app crashes, it doesn't take the other one down with it.

The disadvantage of splitting the apps is greatly increased memory usage. There is some performance increase and memory usage reduction due to the simplification of the user interfaces, but that's greatly outweighed by each app using it's own copy of the Gecko libraries. (To those who want to complain about Mozilla having an IRC client and the like, that stuff has always been an optional part of the install) The development of Firefox and Thunderbird aren't syncronized at all, so there isn't any chance of that getting changed anytime soon.

Mozilla IS getting faster

[georgevulov]

You all might snicker at the single-digit speed improvements in the latest release, but I just upgraded from 1.2 to 1.7 and the difference is not only noticable, it's unbelievable! Especially the startup time, must be a quarter of what it previously was (no preloading in memory under linux, startup times for mozilla used to be awful)
The GUI is also much snappier.

I see good days ahead for Mozilla. A few days ago, a non-techie friend of mine saw me using Firefox and inquired about it. Once he installed it and saw the tabbing, pop-up blocking, speed, and skinnability, he immediately set it as his default browser. Though IE is the most common right now, people will find about the quality of Mozilla sooner or later. Actually, who cares? Even if they don't, I and all my friends still get to use a superb browser

Mozilla@linux + Macromedia (flash/shockwave)

[boaworm]

That sounds very interesting, gotta try it out (PowerBook + G5 DP). Although I have another issue with Mozilla on Linux though.

When accessing shockwave/flash pages, Mozilla (and Netscape, and Opera) crashes on me rather frequently. It happens atleast a couple of time every business day. I just copied the plugins from the standard Netscape 7.1 distribution.

Are there any other shockwave/flash plugins that I can use that dont bring my browser down all the time ? Any hints/tricks/tips greatly appreciated! (Apart from trying out Mozilla 1.7 :-)

Re:Why Thunderbird at all?

[TiggsPanther]

Maybe 'cos some non-IE people use Browsers other than Mozilla?

It means you can mix-and-match. You can use Opera, or Konqueror or even Internet Explorer, but without being tied to their particular mail-client. And then use a Moz-based e-mail/news client without being tied to the Browser.

Personally I mainly use the Mozilla suite. Although Firefox is fast reaching the point where I'll want to use it at work - where I need a standalone browser. But just 'cos I always use the browser and mail client together doesn't mean I don't know that some people want/use them seperately.

Plus if they do develop Thunderbird seperately, it's still based on the Mozilla codebase IIRC. So if they suddenly find some major optimisations for the mail/news side of things, they can probably be ported across to the full suite.

Tiggs

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Alzheimers]

My biggest problem with LYNX is how it formats headers and sidebars into long lists at the top of the pages. Almost every webpage these days has a list of links at the top of the screen and a newspaper column style sidebar. Both of which force a LYNX user to page down past all those links before getting to any useful content.

I haven't played with Links yet, but if it avoids this problem I'm all for it.