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Mozilla The Internet

mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8 615

Posted by timothy from the chatzilla-rocks-hard dept.
asa writes: "Today mozilla.org released the Mozilla 0.9.8 Milestone. New to this release are improved Address Book functionality, page setup(for printing), MNG/JNG support, native-style widgets on winXP and OS X, dynamic theme switching, improved BiDi support, speed, stability and footprint improvements, and much, much more. www.mozilla.org and www.mozillazine.org have the full scoop." The build I'm posting with (2002020305) is a little crashy, but most aspects are shaping up very nicely.
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mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8 More

mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8

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  • For testing or porn, use a nightly build (Score:4, Informative)

    by aufbau ( 517042 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @12:27AM (#2953642) Homepage

    Mozilla 0.9.8 branched Tuesday 1/23, giving it more time to sit on a branch than most milestones get (I don't know if this was intentional). If you think you might report bugs [mozilla.org], you should use a newer build, since 0.9.8 is effectively two weeks old. Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug [mozilla.org] that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.

    Mozilla "nightly" builds always have the latest bug fixes and features, but they also have the latest regressions. For example, build 1/27 could not save files [mozilla.org] and some builds starting with the evening builds on 1/31 did not support cookies [mozilla.org]*. Builds after 1/31 use a new "wyciwyg" scheme to handle document.write(), leading to some problems [mozilla.org] that have not yet been ironed out.

    I've been using a morning build from 1/31 for several days and it seems to be free of major regressions. Here are some of the 1/31 morning builds for various operating systems: Windows [mozilla.org] Mac [mozilla.org] MacOSX [mozilla.org] Linux [mozilla.org].

    * Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

    • its pretty cool that hey broke cookies on my birthday!

    • Disabling cookies (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Arker ( 91948 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @06:18AM (#2954415) Homepage

      * Don't get a broken build just to be free from cookies. You can turn off cookies in any build by selecting "disable cookies" in the security/privacy preferences.

      I haven't tried Mozilla for some months, so this information could be out of date - but I doubt it, it's been this way from when I first used Netscape up until the last Mozilla build I used, maybe 6 months ago.


      Disabling cookies causes the browser to refuse them. This will break many websites, unfortunately. However, there is a little trick that avoids that problem, and still prevents cookie data from ever being saved. Your browser will still accept and return them, satisfying those pushy websites, but will never actually save them, so they all get erased whenever you close the browser, in effect. Well, actually they never even get written.


      Netscape/Mozilla stores cookies in a file named cookies.txt, in plain text format. (I wish opera did that, why they have to store them in some wierdo formatted file I don't know, but I digress.) If you simply make that file a link to /dev/null (in *nix) or delete it and make a directory with the name cookies.txt in the same place (on dos systems, this is a minor hack to overcome the deficiency of not having a /dev/null) then everything works fine, except that the cookies never get saved. Since a copy is kept in memory as long as the session lasts, websites get what they want, but as soon as you close the browser, it's all gone, so you get what you want too.

      • Re:Disabling cookies (Score:5, Informative)

        by orabidoo ( 9806 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @07:49AM (#2954551) Homepage
        This works well, but current mozilla has a better option: in the preferences window, go to "privacy & security", select "cookies", click on "limit maximum lifetime of cookies to", and select "current session".

        This works with all sites, and forbids them from saving permanent info on your hard disk (i.e tracking you across sessions).

  • Mozillazine Build Comments are Killer (Score:5, Informative)

    by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @12:28AM (#2953646)
    About once I week I scan mozillazine's build comments and download the best of the latest nightlies. Helps me stay current to report new bugs, without risking too much. I recommend it for those that like bleeding edge, but still need to get Real Work (TM) done.
  • Of course, you can't have an announcement of Mozilla without a complaint about the slowness of Mozilla development, so here's something one up on that: a link to Joel on Software, so here it is [joelonsoftware.com].

  • Next in line (Score:2, Informative)

    by archen ( 447353 )
    Isn't .9.8 the point where focus is supposed to shift towards the mail client? Or was that .9.9? Anyway, I'm just happy that shift + left-click isn't crippled anymore...

  • Never fails (Score:2, Redundant)

    by JediTrainer ( 314273 )
    It never fails. I just finished downloading and installing 0.9.7 yesterday :)

    Sigh.

    • Keep This Up! Please!! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lethyos ( 408045 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @12:47AM (#2953718) Journal
      I encourage all who experience this phenomenon to continuously download and install the latest versions of all software so that the next version will become immediately available. Please note that the slower the connection you use, the more likely you'll successfully push out new versions. Imagine how you could help in accellerating open source development! Keep the developers on their toes in their quest to keep your software obsolete!

    • My solution? (Score:4, Informative)

      by dimator ( 71399 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @12:58AM (#2953749) Homepage Journal

      $cat newmoz.sh
      #!/bin/sh
      cd /home/dimator/newmoz/
      rm -rf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz mozilla;
      wget -c -t 0 -T 40 ftp.mozilla.org//pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozill a-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz;
      tar xzf mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz;
      rm -rf mozilla/plugins/
      ln -s /home/dimator/newmoz/plugins mozilla/plugins


      (I keep all my plugins in a seperate dir to make things easier.)
  • Yes, Mozilla rocks.

    I have been using nightly downloads for a while now as my only browser. Every once in a while I'll get one that's unstable, but for the most part it is way stabler than Navigator ever was. Plus it has support for modern web standards and tabbed browsing.

    The point releases are fun, but I really like the excitement of running the nighly builds.

  • Spellchecker (Score:5, Informative)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alex&spamcop,net> on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @12:39AM (#2953683) Homepage

    To save everyone some time in common questions and answers, there's a FAQ on Mozilla's spellchecker [mozilla.org.uk] (or lack thereof).

    However, there's a new development. As you may know, bug 56301 [mozilla.org] tracks the progress on the Mozilla spellchecker. And, for a while, progress had become stagnant. Then, David Einstein stepped up to the plate and started working on a spellchecker for Mozilla. His latest work is available at spellchecker.mozdev.org [mozdev.org].

    I feel that a spellchecker would bring much deserved respect to Mozilla, and I encourage you to lend a hand to David. Or, it would even help if you could vote for bug 56301 [mozilla.org] to show your support (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account [mozilla.org] to vote).
  • dynamic theme switching

    Whoohoo, we're back to where we were several months ago!

  • What's New ... (Score:2, Redundant)

    by ukryule ( 186826 )
    Somehow, I find it hard to get excited about a new release where the first item in What's new in this release [mozilla.org] starts:
    • Hebrew is now supported on Solaris. Hebrew and Arabic now supported on Mac OS ...

    ... and then goes on to mention the 6 new bugs introduced with this.

    Not meant as flamebait, but I think i'll wait for 1.0 all the same.
    • and then goes on to mention the 6 new bugs introduced with this.

      If you look at the bugs in question, they're all bidirectional-text bugs. For example, the "pasting is busted" bug is really "Hebrew text pasted from Mozilla appears as question marks". Hebrew text wasn't supported at all before the change, so I can't see why that made you decide to wait for 1.0.

    • Re:What's New ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tswinzig ( 210999 )
      Not meant as flamebait, but I think i'll wait for 1.0 all the same.

      Which will just lengthen the amount of time until 1.0 is delivered.
  • You have to go to the main ftp site to get the full download for 9.8 - On the Main page the only linked file for Windows is the stub installer.

    The build hasn't made it to a lot of the mirrors yet. I checked about a half dozen before I went back to the main ftp server.

    Fortunately, it is late at night, when nothing important usually happens.

    ;-)

  • I'm the only one in my office using Mozilla 0.9.7 mail. It seems every build of mozilla come close to most outlook express, except the address book maintenance.

    Hopefully, I can replace all my colleages Outlook express mail after Mozilla go 1.0

  • flash plugin (Score:2, Interesting)

    by warrior ( 15708 )
    Does anyone have a solution to this, or should I take this up with Macromedia? Whenever a page with flash attempts to load, it halts mozilla til the flash plugin can get a handle on the audio hardware, regardless of whether or not the plugin is actually going to play sound. I absolutely abhor flash, but the flash virus has spread so much that I can't use certain sites without it (and their admins refuse to present a flash-less page, or even understand that their programmers are using a non-standard method for their site design).

    Michael

    • Re:flash plugin (Wild Hack) (Score:4, Informative)

      by bperkins ( 12056 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @02:19AM (#2953977) Homepage Journal
      So this bug is still around. Well here's something I hacked up. I've been using it for a while and it seems to work.

      flashhack.c [netspace.org]

      I have a script ~/bin/mozilla that I use to run mozilla which has:

      #!/bin/sh

      export LD_PRELOAD=/whereever/it/is/flashhack.so

      /usr/local/bin/mozilla $@

      Compiling instructions are in the file.

      It just makes sure to do a nonblocking open if you open the file /dev/dsp

      Totally hacky, I take no resposibilty for any nasty side effects.

      The printf ("foo!\n") is there purly for aesthetic reasons.:)

  • The most important fix... (Score:4, Informative)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @12:47AM (#2953719) Journal
    When browsing slashdot, if you follow a link from far down in a long list of comments, when you follow the history back, your old scroll position will be remembered... No longer will it force a refresh and throw you back to the top of the thread.
    • That's good, I've noticed that for a while. My workaround has been to just open every link as a new tab and then close it if I'm following a discussion down below my threshold or an external link -- that way I don't lose my place. Do you happen to know if this fix will fix the same behavior in Galeon, or does Galeon have a parallel bug?

    • Re:The most important fix... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by weave ( 48069 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @01:02AM (#2953763) Journal
      Speaking of this "fix", the fix created a lot of controversy. Apparently some sites like ole slashdot set their pages to no-cache, most likely to force a page refresh so as to get another ad impression. Ignoring it was debated for cases of moving back in history but Netscape objected to it because they claimed banks would worry about the security implications of ignoring no-cache directives.

      The compromise was to ignore no-cache for speed purposes on http requests but don't ignore it for https requests.

      The full gritty details is in big 112564 [mozilla.org].

      • Ad counting (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jesser ( 77961 )
        Am I the only person who looks at ads after clicking a link to another page? If a site screws with IE's back button, they get about 50% fewer clicks from me. Also, if I scroll down before leaving the page with the ad (and then hit Back), I won't see the double-counted ad because it is still scrolled off the screen.

        Advertisers should penalize sites that use no-cache to increase ad impression counts. It slows down browsing, doesn't increase the total nubmer of times a user sees ads, and annoys users who are actually interested in the ads. And, now, the double-counting effect is harder for advertisers to account for because some browsers (eg Mozilla) correctly ignore no-cache for the Back button in most situations.
    • Dude, just use the tab browser. Set middle-click to open links in new tabs, have new tabs open in the background, and you can open up links and keep reading the page you're on

  • Good news (Score:5, Informative)

    by pinkpineapple ( 173261 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @01:00AM (#2953756) Homepage
    New to this release is the fact that published APIs are now frozen. Mozilla has been really really annoying at changing their APIs, therefore breaking code from external developers because no backward compatibility and almost no turn around time was given from one release to another. Until 0.9.7 the Plugin API kept changing every time a dot build was made. Well, according to the cvs comments, not anymore. Developers will finally be able to release code which will work for more than 2 releases in a row? Great! This smells like Mozilla is going to be final pretty soon.

    PPA, the girl next door.
  • I *love* Mozilla: I love tabbed browsing, the beautiful rendering, popup control, and all the other goodies that come with it.

    BUT I don't think I'll ever be able to use Mozilla as my primary browser. I tried multiple times to migrate to it, yet every single time my humble computer kindly let me know that it can't keep up.

    I'm not trying to start a flamewar, I think Netscape is bloated as much as the next person, but at the same time I can't see why Mozilla is so slow and resource crazy either.

    All in all, if Mozilla doesn't get *much* faster by 1.0, I won't be using it for a while.

    ---

    • Re:A bit of realism... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Sivar ( 316343 )
      Mozilla has been in beta, where developers traditionally work on features and bugfixes, and performance isn't even an afterthought.
      They are just now beginning to work on performance, and they are doing a pretty good job if you read the comments above hear, such as this comment by PlaysWithMatches:
      "Everything in the GUI seems to be noticeably faster though, in 0.9.8. This alone makes it worth the upgrade. :)"

      One can hope that its performance will improve at the same pace, but it is unlikely to ever be as fast as the minimalist Opera browser.
      It is, however, open source and much more functional than Opera.
  • It seems to me that recently mozilla has been making less and less progress towards a really useable release. It seemed to make good progress up until 0.9.4 or so, but is now languishing.

    Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.

    The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them [mozilla.org]) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.

    As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

    Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?

    Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout [mozilla.org] (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget [mozilla.org] that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail [mozilla.org] with an editor that works.

    In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.

    So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management [mozilla.org]. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto [mozilla.org], they've been saying the right words for a long time now:

    As we've said often, we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.

    Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.

    But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.

    Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:

    1. Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized development. People are scratching an itch.
    2. Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to release a product

    1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.

    2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.

    So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.

    • Re:Mozilla needs to focus on correctness, not feat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @01:14AM (#2953799) Homepage
      As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.

      I think the favicon in the url is aesthetically pleasing only, but the favicons in tabs becomes really usefull when you have lots of the open. Almost to the point where I can't live without them.

      And with favicons in the personal toolbar, you can rename your bookmarks to nothing, and you can cram about 30 or so of your favorite sites on one toolbar, each with their own icon. It makes my browsing easier, and it looks damn cool.
      • I know exactly what you mean. Most people have 10-15 sites that they visit, and thats it. Me included. The icons are great and really make my 'style' of browsing a bit easier.

        Thats also my biggest grief with IE 6.0, it's favorites icons bar is so damn buggy. Half the time the status bar in the bottum disapears, and I keep having to re-turn it on, and the links bar will never stay open, ends up stuffing them by default into a little links dropdown next to the URL bar which is only visible from a pull down. *ugg*.

        On OSX IE , it's not quite so bad.. but not wonderful.

        It's little things like that can make the browsing experience better. I hope that the Moz team can continue to innovate new ways to make my navigation experience better and more efficient.
    • What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze ... Tabbed browsing [is an unnecessary feature that should not have been added to Mozilla at this time] ... In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9.

      One man's gold is another man's crap. A spell checker is completely worthless to me, along with the entire Mail/News package. On the other hand, tabbed browsing is my life, my love, and my passion.

  • remove IE from Windoze forever!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Herr_Nightingale ( 556106 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @01:16AM (#2953803) Homepage
    Think Mozilla's bloated? check out how much space you can save by wiping out IE 6.
    There's a tiny and FREE FREE utility called the IEradicator can wipe out internet explorer from Win98/NT and 2000 if you run pre-SP2 ...
    Use Mozilla as your only browser (or, like me, use Opera too) if you like.
    check out http://www.98lite.net/ieradicator.html
  • I'm loving mozilla more and more with each milestone release... but I'm beginning to wonder if some of the promised performance tweaks will make it into 1.0...

    On all of my machines (Linux/x86, Solaris/SPARC, and IRIX/MIPS) Mozilla seems to be significantly more sluggish than Communicator 4.79 in all areas, with the exception of actual rendering. I realize there are alternative GUIs to the gekko engine, but it would be nice to have one end-all app and engine bundle.

    Any word on future (significant) speedups planned for 0.99 and 1.00?

    • Re:performance (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cgleba ( 521624 )
      http://www.mozilla.org/performance/Performance_Pro ject.html

      This is a complete list of performance stuff that they're working on.

      I've been watching it for a while because I like Mozilla but just can't use it because the GUI is so damn slow it feels like I'm browsing drunk.
  • I'm still waiting for CTRL+Enter.

    Type yahoo in IE then hit CTRL+Enter and you will understand. Saves a lot of typing.
    • Actually, typing y, down-arrow, enter gets me to yahoo.com in just three keystrokes in Mozilla. But if you really want the Ctrl+Enter feature you describe, just vote for bug 37867 [mozilla.org].

    • do you feel lucky? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tweakt ( 325224 )
      What I do is set my keyword search url to Google's "I'm feeling lucky", and enable keyword searching.

      ..so typing any one word, product name, etc, will 75-80% of the time get me to the website I want. If not,I go back and do a regular google search. I wish there was a way to go to the highest rank result *AND* still show the list in sidebar. (that way if the top ranked site isnt quite what you wanted you could just look at the next few really quickly.

      The 'y'-down thing only works if you've typed it before ;-)

    • Hmm...when I type a word without the .com or www., Moz tries to resolve word, and then automatically tries www.word.com if word doesn't resolve. And you don't even have to hold down a key... ;-D

      DennyK
  • Geez, I wish it didn't take so long between the release of the new version and the .deb package update.
  • YYMV, but going from .9.7 -> .9.8, my startup times have gone from in the neighborhood of 10-15 seconds to 3-5 seconds. Also Flash seems to work without problems for the first time. I used to have strange audio problems, annoying clicking sounds. Not sure if this improvement is due to improvements in mozilla or in the emu10k1 driver though, either way I'm very happy with it.

    The java plugin install did crash, but java works now, so it must have gotten far enough :).

    Anyway, seems like a worthy upgrade. Once the spellchecker is up to snuff, I can't think of anything mozilla will be missing. Java/Flash/Real all work. Browser and Mail are are fast and stable and getting better all the time. I'll have to wait a bit to see how much the footprint has improved. This is one area that could stand to see some more work. It has come down about 40meg in the last couple releases, but 50 Meg is still a lot.

    Well, maybe after a couple week use I'll find something really bad to say about it :P For now I'm quite content though.

  • See www.libpng.org for testing (Score:3, Informative)

    by konmaskisin ( 213498 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @01:49AM (#2953896) Journal
    ... the MNG and JNG support.

    MNG seems more complete and it certinaly nicer than animated GIFs for quality.

    http://www.libmng.com/MNGsuite/

  • When to deploy... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vex24 ( 126288 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @01:59AM (#2953925) Homepage
    I'm a sysadmin (yes, Windows :P ) and I've actually started rolling out Mozilla with new workstations instead of our standard Netscape 4.7x (I will never encourage our users to use I.E. for political and security reasons). I'm finding that Netscape 4.x is becoming a hassle to many users as they're often finding sites that it can no longer handle. Rather than drift into I.E., I'm trying to give them a solid alternative.

    I've been impressed by the reception so far... only one user has rejected it wholesale, but the first question after I loaded on Netscape for him was, "Now how do I turn off pop-up ads in this one?". That seems to be the most-loved feature so far, as many websites now have pop-up ads (I wouldn't know, as I turned them off at 0.9.4!).

    IMHO Netscape has made a very bad name for itself by releasing 6.x too early from buggy Mozilla builds, and loading them up with advertising and AOL stuff to boot. I've found that telling clients that Mozilla is a new browser based on Netscape is a good way to go.

    I've actually found that the few problems users have had have been minor, and the mozilla bug tracking site almost always has workarounds for those show-stopper bugs...

    Anyhow, just something to think about; this is a nice foothold that open source software can make in your office workplace. It's kind of the Apache of desktop software I suppose...
  • "The build I'm posting with (2002020305) is a little crashy, but most aspects are shaping up very nicely"

    If only Microsoft was as open an honest about such things on windowsupdate.com...

    "This Version of Internet Exploder (6.0) is extremely buggy, has many features you won't like, and makes browsing the internet feel more like browsing the 2002 Toys R Us Christmas Catalog"

    "This version of Windows (aka MacOS knockoff) is called WindowsXP. It stands for eXtremely Pissed off, which you'll be when you see that most of your software no longer works, but the boys in marketing thought up something about an experience or something."

  • To the naysayers... (Score:5, Informative)

    by vex24 ( 126288 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @02:07AM (#2953948) Homepage
    I don't mean this in a rude way, but if you're really concerned about how bad Mozilla is, get yourself a bugzilla account and try helping out a little! Just using Mozilla and posting your comments or problems to the appropriate bug page can help out a lot, and who knows, you might even find the answer to your question!

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]

    It's no use for us to stand around leaning on our shovels cursing that the hole isn't being dug fast enough. :)

  • Stability, people, stability (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @03:18AM (#2954100) Homepage
    "A little crashey" is totally unacceptable.

    Mozilla suffers from excessive featurism. For example, putting in "themes", let alone dynamic theme switching, before achieving stability is truly lame. Mozilla should have been at 1.0 years ago, but with a smaller feature set.

    And the thing is so slow. Huge performance degradation since Netscape 4. There are sometimes noticeable waits for pop-up menus, opening a blank page can be sluggish, and you can watch the windows close one by one on exit. This on a 1.3GHz machine with half a gig of RAM.

  • I mean the part:

    Cards with addresses in the USA have a new Get Map button in the card preview pane which creates a map for that address at mapquest.com

    Well, i'm not shure if i'm extremly lucky, but mapquest is doing just fine with any european address i can come up with!

  • I just tried it for the first time... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2002 @04:01AM (#2954150) Homepage
    I have to say I am very impressed - I have been meaning to try it, never getting around to it - then saying "Well, maybe at 1.0". But, I kept hearing and reading good things about it, and so I decided, after seeing how simple the install was, to go ahead and give it a shot.

    I love it - I suppose it will "compete" with my Netscape install now. I think I might install it on my Winders box at work (yeah, it sucks).

    Wow - a new set of fun!
  • Who still uses Navigator 4.08 to browse? Call me old school, but I don't like lots of features in my browser, just something that won't crash too often and is not named *explorer. Oh, yeah I still use pine for mail too. Seriously, I'll never get a virus that way!
  • The following is provided for you're amusement - I wouldn't get too hung up over it.

    Release dates of previous versions:

    Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
    Mozilla 0.7 - Completed January 9, 2001
    Mozilla 0.8 - Completed February 14, 2001
    Mozilla 0.8.1 - Completed March 26, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.1 - Completed June 7, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.2 - Completed June 28, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.3 - Completed August 2, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.4 - Completed September 14, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.5 - Completed October 12, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.6 - Completed November 20, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.7 - Completed December 21, 2001
    Mozilla 0.9.8 - Completed February 4, 2002

    I took the release dates of Mozilla and made a list
    of version numbers in number form, and months where
    the length of each month is averaged to 30 days.

    Mth Ver
    0.2 0.6
    1.3 0.7
    2.5 0.8
    3.9 0.81
    5.2 0.9
    6.2 0.91
    6.9 0.92
    8.2 0.93
    8.5 0.94
    10.5 0.95
    11.6 0.96
    12.8 0.97
    14.1 0.98

    I graphed it and got what looks to be almost a logarithmic
    curve (besides the large dip around month 4) with an asymptote
    around 1.0 - Available at:

    Graph Here [netdemonz.com]
    I'll try to remember not to get rid of this image or move it.

    What does this graph mean about the release date of Mozilla? I'll
    let you draw you're own conclusions.FWIW, I wouldn't take the implications of the numbers
    too seriously, but thought you might be interested. ;-)

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