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Mozilla Software The Internet

Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 5 Out And About 57

Posted by timothy from the to-shout-about-and-tout dept.
asa writes "Today we've shipped the latest Alpha release on the road to Mozilla 1.8. With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work. You can help the Mozilla team as we drive toward 1.8 by downloading and testing this release. Get the release builds and notes at mozilla.org."
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Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 5 Out And About More

Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 5 Out And About

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  • Who uses this anymore ?. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @01:39AM (#10895917) Homepage Journal
    I realized that all I need is a Browser [spreadfirefox.com]....

    I read my mail in mutt and I like that (*hint* , it lets me use vim to compose) , chat with xchat etc.. Mozilla Suite might have been overshadowed by it's leaner sibling :)

    But Gecko improvements are GOOD (TM)
    • Mozilla Suite might have been overshadowed by it's leaner sibling :)

      It certainly has in this household... Some time ago I thought the intention was to cease further development of Mozilla as Firefox matured. Looks like that's gone by the board.

    • Re:Who uses this anymore ?. (Score:4, Informative)

      by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @09:31AM (#10897730)

      Mozilla is still the testbed for new functionality that may make its way into Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. A sort of Debian testing of the browser world.

    • I do (Score:3, Informative)

      by thelexx ( 237096 )
      And so do many others who:

      1 - Find Mozilla more mature and stable
      2 - Aren't driven to use the newest thing just "because"
      3 - Use MozMail as their main client and don't feel like switching
      4 - Don't want to keep separate apps updated/tinkered with
    • My father-in-law for one... He loves how everything he needs is in one app and is fast (/.'s opinions aside, this is what he thinks- and that is what is important). After cleaning up his windows box a year ago, I suggested Mozilla. He hasn't looked back since.
    • Off the top of my head, here's a few of the reasons I'm thinking of switching back to mozilla from firefox.
      • More consistant keyboard shortcuts. For example, in firefox, if you are typing in the address bar and you want the page to open in a new tab you use ALT-ENTER. If you've highlighted a link with type-ahead-find and you want a new tab, you have to hit CTRL-ENTER. (mozilla is consistant in both cases)
      • I seem to prefer doing searches from the address bar, and not a separate (tiny) search box
      • Type-ahe
    • Who uses this anymore ?.

      I, for one, do. I prefer Mozilla's mail/news client, and I use Chatzilla and Moz Calendar as well. For me, the Mozilla Suite is exactly what I need.

      Additionally, despite the constant whining about 'bloat' from certain Mozilla developers, I find the Moz Suite to be perfectly fine performance wise, on modern hardware. The slowest machine I run it on is 700 mhz Celeron, and it's fine on there.

      Not to mention I hate the fact that Firefox doesn't support the same "search in the url

    • While I laud the goals of firefox, I like the UI and integrated applications in Mozilla Suite. I would be interested in using something like firefox/thunderbird/etc. if they cloned the Moz Suite UI and simply split out the applications. In fact, I thought that was the original plan and I wish it still was.
    • And what if you use Mozilla Mail to read your emails?

      I would replace one app by two, I'm not sure where is the gain..

  • Roaming Profiles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <[moc.oohay] [ta] [45ttam.yrrep]> on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @01:47AM (#10895945)
    This release is supposed to have roaming profile support like hte old Netscape 4 had. If you've been waiting for that, give it a try to help shake out any bugs.

  • Correction (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @02:30AM (#10896065) Homepage Journal
    With nearly 600 bug fixes since Alpha 5, A6 contains some exciting new Gecko work.

    This should read "...since Alpha 4, A5 contains some..."

    I don't use the Mozilla suite anymore (moved to Firefox), but the Gecko improvements will of course end up in Firefox as well, so it's all good. Time to browse over to the roadmap to figure out how that development path actually works nowadays...

  • Seamonkey over Firefox (Score:4, Informative)

    by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 ( 812236 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @03:00AM (#10896181) Journal
    I probably belong to the minority of people who prefer SeaMonkey over Firefox, even though I've tried Firefox 1.0 final.

    I sincerely hope that Mozilla.org does not stop supporting the suite, as most of the users of the suite have been Mozilla supporters far longer than the current influx of Firefox fans. Hopefully, our dedication in testing would convince them that seamonkey is just as important as Firefox.

    • Re:Seamonkey over Firefox (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Only feature firefox has which I feel is lacking in Mozilla is the ability to right & middle click bookmark menu entries to change or open in a new tab. Of course, for all I know, that's in the 1.8 series, since I stopped updating to every alpha and beta back around Moz 1.4...
    • I agree. I used Firefox back when it was called Phoenix from 0.2 - 0.5, but when to the suite, and I simply can't stand Firefox.
    • I completely agree. I really don't get on with firefox. Besides, I use the browser, mail client and the calendar so getting the suite would make sense even if it wasn't better.

      I would be mortified if they did stop supporting the suite.

      > Hopefully, our dedication in testing would
      > convince them that seamonkey is just as
      > important as Firefox.

      Hopefully so.

      Cheers,

      Roger
      • What about Thunderbird and Mozilla's calendar extensions for either one? The calendar [mozilla.org]
        • Well I already use Mozilla the browser, so I already have the mail client (ie. the integrated one) as part of the suite. I use the calendar extension that you link to as well.

          It's all good.

          Cheers,

          Roger
      • Not to troll, this is just out of curiosity ... Why do you say it's better? I stopped using Mozilla at around 1.4 or so when I started using Fire(bird|fox) exclusively, and I always found the latter to be at least as good. Faster startup times, cleaner interface, more responsive. What does the full suite currently offer over that?
        • " Not to troll, this is just out of curiosity ... Why do you say it's better?"

          Maybe some people think that mozilla provides better integration between browsing, mail, news, organization, and even HTML page creation as opposed to having different apps like Firefox and Thunderfox to do the same thing.

          Choice of course - some people may prefer links/w3m/lynx/surfraw, vim, tin/slrn, and mutt to do the same thing as well.

          Perceived benefits are what makes the determination of what makes something better because
        • In MozMail, when I middle-click a link in an email, it opens the link in a new tab in the browser. In Thunderbird, it tries to open Konquerer. In general, the Mozilla suite works together, and the Firebird/Thunderfox duo don't, quite.

          Then, there's the UI differences: the teeny-tiny search bar instead of typing searches into the big URL bar, slightly different handling of middle clicks and searching, and so on. I haven't used anything but Moz for a while, so can't tell you more specifics. These are mat

        • I've been using the suite for years now. A few weeks ago I decided I'd use FireFox and ThunderBird at work to give them a chance. I'm still using the suite at home though. I'm currently still prefering the suite over the FF/TB combo, altho it's much closer now than it was even a few months ago.

          Here's a few things I like better in the suite:

          1) Type ahead find is nicer in the suite. I prefer it to only search links if I start typing. Even messing with about:config, I haven't gotten FireFox to work like that
          • FYI:

            2) In the suite, type-ahead find works everywhere. That includes the View Source window and email messages. In the seperate apps, it only works in the main browser window.

            This works fine for me in Firefox 1.0's view source windows. I use it all the time on both OS X and Windows.
        • Well I guess I was trolling a bit myself... :)

          I mostly prefer the way it works for what I do. I guess a large part of that is the fact that I'm so used to it that any change is a pain.

          I can't really tell much difference over startup times or responsivity (this is on Windows with the quick start enabled), I think the firefox interface is messier - too much candy. I prefer the way I have moz set up with text only buttons and as few of them as possible.

          The real gripe for me is the search bar. Why have a who
          • For some reason they haven't moved the Slashdot fix from the trunk to Firefox yet, but that should be coming over soon. I guess they waited on it because they froze for the 1.0 release.

            I've been using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since 0.4 or 0.5, and I've had very few stability problems. I leave my browser running all the time, rarely with fewer than 10 tabs, and it just about never crashes. When it does, as you say, it's a shock. Which isn't surprising in either case, because they're almost the same program.
    • I prefer Mozilla Suite over Firefox for one reason: I can't turn off autocompleting URLs in Firefox. I want to keep a history of where I've been, but I wish to turn off autocomplete. I know of no way to accomplish this in Firefox, but it is quite easy to do in the Mozilla Suite. Every extension I use has been written for Firefox, Firefox does some things a little differently but not so much that I can't get used to the Firefox way of doing them. However, I view the autocomplete issue as a security probl

      • I can't turn off autocompleting URLs in Firefox

        What about :

        user_pref("browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled", false);

        or adding the same key in about:config?

        On a side note, you also have the very useful option:

        user_pref("browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped", true);

        in order to list only addresses you've typed in the address bar autocomplete.

        Most of these advanced options can't be changed through the GUI, but they are still there in Firefox.
        HTH :-)

        • This brings up my one major complaint about Firefox, and that's the dumbing-down of the options. It's fine that the options are simplified for those that don't like to tinker, but how about an Advanced button for those of us who do like to tweak things?
        • Yeah, that was easy and intuitive. [rolls eyes] How about a button that I can click like in Mozilla's preferences instead of having to enter a URL to get a spreadsheet of options? This is my main gripe with Firefox. The UI for setting a lot of useful options has been removed. One is left to google around for information on an option.

      • I checked about:config [about] on an old version of Firefox I had lying around and saw that, indeed, browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled no longer existed (neither did browser.urlbar.autofill, but it appears that the behavior for that it is now fixed to its default "false"). So the answer to this is, it's possible, but you would have to play with XUL. If someone would care to make a plugin to do this, you could get the feature that way.

        Short of that, you can reduce the annoyance by setting browser.urlbar.match

  • I wasn't using the full mozilla suite for a long while. It was too slow for me. I went back and forth between Galeon and Konqueror because I didn't like either enough. Since firefox has been out, I've been happy. Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix. Whatev it was called along the way...

  • future roadmap (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For those who complain about losing support for the Mozilla suite - the plan is that all separate apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, NVu) will use the same shared libraries (currently these libs are staticaly linked and running firebird+thunderbird will result in having gecko to be loaded twice).
    So installing compartible versions of Thunderbird+Firebird+Nvu, etc will be the same as installing the whole suite.

    • I hope they do this carefully and with lots of planning, because it's so easy to end up in "DLL hell" (or "shared library hell") if you don't. It would be nice to keep the option to install these apps completely separately so that you can upgrade one without affecting the other. Sure, more disk and more memory, but these things are cheap today and continue to get cheaper.

      Eric
      How to detect Internet Explorer [ericgiguere.com]

      • Your signature line:

        For those who are browser agnostic and simply wish for a browser to work on their web pages, it's more useful to check for the existence of a feature. Since Javascript allows you to check whether a function or object is defined without causing an error, one can gracefully fail -- simply don't use a feature if it's not available -- instead of trying to respond properly to innumerable browser versions. Feel free to read more on this from Quirks Mode [quirksmode.org]

        • All I'm doing is showing how you can do a little server-side scripting to decide whether or not to show a "Get Firefox!" image or link to encourage IE users to switch to Firefox. (Just do it gently and politely.) Yes, you can also do this in JavaScript, but my little article doesn't deal with client-side detection at all.

          Eric

          • I'm not sure you read my second paragraph in its entirety. I was not suggesting Javascript. I was suggesting a better method to do exactly what you say you claim you are trying to do -- "show a 'Get Firefox!' image or link to...IE users." You might check it again.

            • Sorry, you're right, I missed that bit about the conditional comments. Yeesh, what a kludge! Anyhow, my original intent was to show people how to detect if Firefox [ericgiguere.com] was being used and to show a "Spread Firefox!" button instead of a "Get Firefox!" button but some non-IE users took offense at the implication that they should be getting Firefox too. Can't please everyone, I guess!

              Hopefully some viewers learn something new when they read the article (and the HTTP header viewer).

              Eric

  • Some of the change log entries mention SVG. Does that mean that SVG support is going to be built-in or will we still be required to use a plug-in?

  • Broken edit:proferences ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nri ( 149893 ) on Tuesday November 23, 2004 @04:04PM (#10902977)
    This has happened to me before. When I upgrade the Edit:Preferences window is totally blank. Everything else works fine. All my profiles are intact, themes remain installed (pinball), extensions are there (prefbar). I can still get to my pregerences via about:config.

    Anyone else have their preferences dialog box broken with this release ? I haven't seen a bug report for this version. Older versions bug reports have 'apparently' been fixed.

    FYI, for those who do install the tar files. I wrote a little shell script that I called mozbak, that I always run before installing any theme or extension or upgrade. So I can always roll back :-)

    [07:58] [nri@sammy:bin] $ cat mozbak

    date=`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`

    cd /usr/local
    echo tar cvhfz mozilla_$date.tgz /usr/local/mozilla
    tar cvhfz mozilla_`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`.tgz mozilla
    use
    cd /home/nri
    echo tar cvfz mozilla_$date.tgz .mozilla
    tar cvfz mozilla_$date.tgz .mozilla

  • I could have sworn that I had read when firefox was still back at .7 or .8 that Mozilla.org had decided that the new 1.7 branch of Mozilla suite would be based on the current firefox development.

    Now most of the replies seem to indicate a reverse course, that the 1.8 suite development will make its way into firefox.

    I don't really care either way as long as they keep up the great work.

    I had also begun to think that I would never use a "suite" again due to all that bloat, but since I love firefox so

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