Mozilla.org Launches Mozilla 1.3

theBrownfury writes "Mozilla 1.3 is out and about. New to this version are features like image auto sizing, bayesian junk-mail filtering, dynamic profile switching, about:config for a pretty view into all of Mozilla's "secret" settings, an initial version of Midas for rich text editing, and a lot of other fixes for performance, standards compliance and site compatability. Also with 1.3 Mozilla is now applying machine learning to improve the autocomplete feature. Mozilla 1.3 is now the official stable release from mozilla.org. Users of all previous versions should upgrade to 1.3 for the latest in features and stability. More info at the 1.3 release page and discussions at mozillaZine.org."

hmm

[_Shorty-dammit (555739)]

what, no mp3 player?

Nope

[kentyman (568826)]

For a better web browser that does support mp3 playing, go here [emacs.org].

Re:hmm

[andrewm (9862)]

It was moved to "Popup Windows" under the "Privacy & Security" tab in the Preferences.

Re:hmm

[frodo from middle ea (602941)]

yes they do.
kitchen sink [mozilla.org]
There is also a plug-in under work, which displays this sink when you type about:kitchensink

What about phoenix?

[djtrippin (613642)]

Thats fine is you want the bloat. (although the kitchen sink is pretty funny) But when is the phoenix browser project going to release .6?

Phoenix dead at age 1

[by Anonymous Coward]

I just heard this sad bit of news on talk radio; Slashdot browser star Phoenix was found dead in its Seattle home this morning. There weren't any details. Even if you didn't agree with its minimalist style, there's no doubting its contributions to browser culture. Truly an open source icon.

Re:What about phoenix?

[Pxtl (151020)]

Looking at the new features - they got one of the more annoying features from IE in there - I can't stand the frigging image resize feature. If I want too look at pr0n, I want it to fill the screen in all its pixel-by-pixel glory, not some badly-rescaled image

Automatic image resizing

[dbaron (463913)]

Automatic image resizing is off by default in Mozilla (although on by default in Phoenix), and can be toggled by clicking on the image.

I have to say I don't like it much either. For Phoenix users, it can be turned off by adding user_pref("browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing ", false); to user.js in the profile directory, or by manipulating the browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing preference in about:config [about] .

Re:Automatic image resizing

[steveha (103154)]

I've been counting the days until I could have auto image resizing.

I use a 1600x1024 desktop. I have a CSS file that gives me nice large fonts, but I can't do much with images. When I'm viewing web comics, much of the time the text in the speech bubbles is so tiny I have to lean way forwards to read it. I read web comics every day, so I'll be using this feature every day.

P.S. If there were an option to simply scale everything by a factor of 2, I'd turn that on by default. Any web page designed for 800x600 would fit great on my screen. (Okay, it would be a little bit tight vertically, but horizontal is more important.)

steveha

Image auto-sizing

[asa (33102)]

I'm sure the Mozilla gods have blessed us with a config option to disable this "feature."

Actually, you have a preference to _enable_ the feature. It's off by default. Also, once enabled (by going to Edit->Preferences...->Appearance and checking the box titled "Enable automatic image resizing") a simple click on the image will restore it to its original size.

This really is a friendly implementation. I much prefer it to the feature implemented by the other guys.

--Asa

Re:What about phoenix?

[Negatyfus (602326)]

I never understood the smooth scrolling feature in IE. It's so dreadfully annoying! It's simply not very accurate and the page seems to live its own life when using the mouse-wheel. I may be spastic, but I have always been unable to be friends with it. I say: "Go down a bit!" and IE responds with "Sure, let's fucking go down half a screen!" and then it takes its bloody time to do so, too! In the meantime, I have to wait a a whole half seconds before I can undo its over-generous scrolling efforts, upon which it decides I want to see five lines too much from the top of the viewscreen. I-- simply-- get-- the-- urge-- to-- kill when that damn feature's turned on. Who the hell thinks its useful, anyway? Do those people exist?

Re:What about bloat

[Lord Prox (521892)]

Am I the only one here that is happy Mozilla 1.3 is out? After reading the posts here it sounds like /. would bitch if they were hung with a new rope.

What is wrong with Mozilla? "Bloat" what exactly is "bloat" memory footprint? HDD footprint? Load Time? Compaired to IE I find it to be very compeditive, plus you are not helping lord gates and mount redmond take over the net/world. You are providing them with a serious challenge which is better for everyone.

Sorry, I just work up and I'm a little cranky. I don't meean to bitch at the parent post specificly just people that are complaining about nit picky stuff while overlooking all the time/energy spent giving them a free speech/beer answer to IE and redmond (something /.ers also complain about)

Re:What about bloat

[ianezz (31449)]

What is wrong with Mozilla?

That the idea to use it as a platform to develope portable applications (using ECMAScript + XUL) is catching on slower than some people would expect. This is a pity, because ungodly amounts of effort goes in making this possible, and still people see it just as a web browser (a large one).

Other than that, Mozilla-the-web-browser is fine, Mozilla-the-messaging suite is at least good enough, and Mozilla-the-javascript-debugger shows lots of promises.

I don't include Mozilla-the-IDE (Komodo) in the list, since it deviates too much from the usual distribution (even if it is Gecko Inside(TM)).

Now waiting for Mozilla-the-organizer (thru Calendar, planned for 1.4 ~ 1.5). Perhaps a Mozilla-the-file-manager would be something worth implementing (but Meow [mozdev.org] seems definitively dead).

They dropped the ball

[alexhmit01 (104757)]

We looked into XUL as a solution to our content management system about 12 or 18 months ago, I don't remember, and my concept of time is seriously warped from the dor-com days.

At the time, they CLAIMED that you could do all this cool stuff with XUL, but the documentation (including the 1 ONE official book on XUL, sucked). They all focused on building the GUI inside of the Mozilla browser.

We were working with a potential partner that has a browser based application, whose bain of existance is IE's print feature (they log printing with their print button, but an IE print would trash that). The idea of a "stripped down" browser that would start at their screen would rock. Additionally, using XUL widgets would let them eliminate the frames and other garbage, making their app easier. They liked the idea of using a XUL toolbar instead of a frame with buttons.

Unfortunately, weeks of research through their docs went nowhere, and we worked on a Java solution, and the deal went south over time. Now we have our own Java based solution, and don't want to migrate to XUL.

The XUL + ECMAScript stuff should have been pushed earlier with proper documentation. Instead they pushed it to grab some marketshare when they weren't ready.

I love Camino/Chimera, and the other Gecko browsers (use Phoenix when on a Windows machine), but they missed a lot of time with not getting XUL as an early solution. They should have put out (early) some shells that you could start from then add your other functionality.

Sure, other projects have picked it up since then, but with the XUL + ECMAScript solution being the red-headed stepchild for a while, they lost some steam.

It'll happen, but every year that they wasted will take 2 years to recover, as growth has slowed down and projects chose other tech.

That said, I love Mozilla now, but I think that the shifting of priorities cost them mindshare that will be painful to recover.

Alex

Re:What about bloat

[GreyPoopon (411036)]

IE is quicker, less bloaty and that is it.

Since my computer started getting infected with all kinds of ActiveX exploits, I've switched to browsing the internet only with Mozilla. (I use IE for work stuff that requires ActiveX) Popup management alone would have been a good reason to switch. However, I haven't noticed it being any slower than IE lately. I _HAVE_ noticed that Windows tries to swap Mozilla out of memory the first chance it gets. It's almost uncanny. I'll have a bunch of applications running, and Mozilla is always the first one to get swapped out when I'm working on something else. Obviously, this rarely happens with IE (presumably because 9/10 of it is loaded when you boot Windows). Anybody have any idea why it seems to be so much worse with Mozilla? (Running Windows 2000).

Re:What about phoenix?

[asa (33102)]

"Phoenix authors have quit working on it"

That's not at all accurate. Phoenix developers have checked in changes to thousands of lines of code in hundreds of Phoenix files just this month and Phoenix also picks up almost all of the backend Mozilla changes that happen every day. Just because it's not moving at the pace it did when it was all brand new doesn't mean it's not moving.

--Asa

Crap!

[Skyshadow (508)]

Yeah! Got the Linux and Windows versions before the Slashdotting! In your face, Taco!

Re:Addendum: Never Fear

[Huogo (544272)]

You are aware that mozilla is hosted in AOL's datacenter, arn't you? Good luck slashdotting it.

From domainwhitepages.com [domainwhitepages.com]:

OrgName: Netscape Communications Corp.
OrgID: NSCP
Address: 501 E. Middlefield
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

NetRange: 207.200.64.0 - 207.200.127.255
CIDR: 207.200.64.0/18
NetName: NETSCAPE-CIDR
NetHandle: NET-207-200-64-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.NETSCAPE.COM
NameServer: NS2.NETSCAPE.COM
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1996-09-06
Updated: 2001-03-28

TechHandle: AOL-NOC-ARIN
TechName: America Online, Inc.
TechPhone: [phone]
TechEmail: [e-mail]

I think AOL can hold up aginst a slashdotting...

Autocomplete

[by Anonymous Coward]

Autocomplete: the only browser feature that can turn Disney.com into DonkeyHumpingMaidens.com.

Re:Autocomplete

[bill_mcgonigle (4333)]

You mean autocomplete knows about Disney's lobbying efforts in Washington? That machine learning stuff is pretty clever.

Neat feature

[Shawn Baumgartner (632798)]

"Also with 1.3 Mozilla is now applying machine learning to improve the autocomplete feature."

Sounds good. Eventually I can just tell it "porn" and it will go grab all sorts of crazy shit for me to do naughty things to. Of course, I hope it doesn't work like the Tivo's related feature or I'll end up with 30 translations of goatse.cx and a giant pic of Janet Reno in a bikini.

Spam filtering

[kirun (658684)]

If you haven't been using the 1.3 preview releases, and so haven't been running the spam filters yet, remember they take a while to get going. Look at http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html , the results are for around 8000 sorted messages. Just keep correcting it and you'll be fine.

Re:More Importantly!

[terraformer (617565)]

More importantly, you need to train ham (ie; non spam) as well as spam!
"Tools | Mark Selected Messages as *Not* Junk"
There have been a bunch of posts to the newsgroup and this has been the problem.

Unless you tell the filter what is spam *AND NOT* spam then it only has half of the information it needs to make a decision. It's a bimodal decision tree that is used to determine whether a message is spam or not. ie;

for each word {
the probability it is spam is x
and the probability it is ham is y
}

A calculation (Bayes) of those probabilities intersecting usually places the probability that any given message is spam either close to 1 (spam) or 0 (ham). What happens if you don't train ham is the probability of all messages will be around .5 and that is not enough to say anything definitively and defaults to delivery.

One really good thing about this is...

[Dthoma (593797)]

...you can now use a version of Galeon later than 1.2.7 without worrying about a dodgy beta copy of Mozilla. In the past if I'd wanted 1.2.8 I'd have to download and use the possibly unstable Mozilla 1.3 beta.

Get Mozilla 1.3 here [mozilla.org] and here [sourceforge.net].

fuck!

[by Anonymous Coward]

I just barely got done downloading Netscape 4! stupid 1200 baud modem!

How To Build Mozilla w/ Anti-Aliased Font Support

[Bowie J. Poag (16898)]

Everything you need to know, step by step, can be found here [desktop-linux.net].... I've been building AA/TrueType support into Mozilla for a while now, and I have no idea why it's not enabled by default, or why others don't config their builds to do the same. Mozilla looks like absolute shit without smooth fonts.

Additionally, you can find a webcam movie of me eating a donut by clicking the link below.

Re:How To Build Mozilla w/ Anti-Aliased Font Suppo

[dbaron (463913)]

The RPMs for RedHat 8 have the Xft support enabled. (They're not released yet, but they probably will be soon.)

It's not enabled by default because it requires libraries (Xft2, fontconfig) that many users don't have. At some point someone might modify the code so that it tests for the presence of the library and loads all the required function pointers manually, but that's a bit of work. What's available now is good enough for distributors and good enough for people who know to get the RH8 RPMs.

Re:How To Build Mozilla w/ Anti-Aliased Font Suppo

[cymen (8178)]

The nightly builds support AA but it isn't enabled by default. I'm using this in my user.js:

pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", false);
pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
pref("font.antialias.min", 0);

Looks good to me!

Unicode in the titlebar!

[Psx29 (538840)]

Finally mozilla supports unicode in the titlebar properly and also the address bar! Not the most important feature but it certaintly made things ugly to look at when you look at sites in different character sets. (This is reffering to Windows rels. btw)

IEZilla

[by Anonymous Coward]

Make Moz1.3 look just like IE... with the IE skin. [mozdev.org]

Force-upgrade people without them noticing.

Machine Learning in Autocomplete not in 1.3

[dbaron (463913)]

Autocomplete doesn't use machine learning in 1.3. It was an experimental, disabled-by-default, feature in 1.3beta for data-collection [mozilla.org].

Machine Learning autocomplete is NOT implemented

[jnik (1733)]

If you read the ML autocomplete page, the main "feature" in 1.3 is logging what entry people tend to pick from the autocomplete list; this will be fed into development of the ML autocomplete. They have a super-alpha version of the engine in there, sure, but really what you should be doing with 1.3 is feeding them the info. Don't expect intelligent autocompletion.

No NTLM?

[mkelley (411060)]

Unfortunately they still haven't added NTLM support. If you're in a total Microsoft shop with a MS proxy, if the admin has it totally secured, nothing other than IE can be used. Having this feature in Mozilla will help reestablish it as a corporate browser....and help some of us who can only use IE.

Oh and the bug is 3 years old. I know some work is being done on the Windows Mozilla, but damn. Three years?

Re:No NTLM?

[pohl (872)]

It's true this bug has been idle for a long time, but there's been a lot of activity on it in just the last few days. I would expect a windows-only implementation to be available in the next release, judging from the recent activity of Bug 159015.

Don't hold your breath for a cross-platform solution that will allow Linux user to work in such an environment, though. (Which is a bummer for me, because that's why I'm following the bug.)

Re:No NTLM?

[D'Arque Bishop (84624)]

There's no NTLM authentication in Squid proxy either, and it makes no sense. I guarantee it would find much more use in the real world with NTLM.

Huh?

We have a Squid proxy server running right now using NTLM authentication with help from Winbind. The Squid FAQ has an entry here [squid-cache.org] which explains how to implement it.

Hope this helps...

*grrr* WTF?!?

[sielwolf (246764)]

Mac OS and Windows: Using ATI video drivers will lead to random crashes on many sites. Mac OS ATI driver versions affected: All (?) Windows ATI driver versions affected: 5.13.1.6118 (Mac OS) Workaround: set your screen to 'Thousands of colors' rather than 'Millions'. (Windows) Possible Workaround: Revert to an older driver (6094?)-- Untested (Bug 101055)

This is probably one of the worst bugs, has been around for several iterations of the app and there seems to be no headway! And considering it related to all ATI video cards it isn't like it's some uncommon HW combination. Frustrating since I love the rest of the Moz product...

Re:*grrr* WTF?!?

[BZ (40346)]

> Maybe it's a Mozilla bug and not an ATI bug?

If you look at ATI's release notes for their newest drivers, they explicitly list this as an ATI bug.

> why is Mozilla the only application affected by
> this bug

Because Mozilla happens to tbe the only app you have that uses the particular functionality that's buggy in the driver, whatever that is? How many apps do you use that do transparency, translucency (fast, mind you), background tiling in hardware, etc?

Mozilla is fantastic :-) :-)

[AtomicX (616545)]

Nice OS, all it needs now is an internet browser. [SlashCompo: Fastest Post to Get a Troll Mod]

Mozilla usage is rising!

[The Dev (19322)]

I just check my weblog stats and non IE browsers accounted for 12% of hits so far today (out of 1.1million). About two months ago it was only 7%. Mozilla itself is at about 6.2%. Let's hope this trend continues.

How *I* want completion to work

[Qzukk (229616)]

The way I think completion should work is to match the shortest matching non-unique segment.
If I type "www.moz" and I've been to "www.mozilla.com" (and various subdirectories) and "www.mozone.com" (and various subdirectories), it should show just those two matches, without the subdirectories. I should then be able to hit tab to choose one or the other, and then continue to type. Say I choose www.mozilla.com and type /info.
Now, if the only pages matching this is "/info/win32/editor.html" "info/win32/browser.html" "/info/linux/browser.html" then I should get to choose between "/info/linux/" and "/info/win32/".

This way I can type "sl" and see all the individual sites starting with sl, before looking through thousands of lines like
"http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/13 /20282 09&mode=nested&tid=95&tid=185&tid=154"

Also, if there are no matches, the window shouldn't come up at all. It's a pain to have to click repeatedly to get out of the URL entry if the url you are entering doesn't match anything. (at least on the Linux version)

But why (redux)?

[haeger (85819)]

I'm just whining here, but why does a new install have to remove all my gestures, autoscroll and other nice addons that I've collected? Every time I upgrade I have to hit Mozdev [mozdev.org] to get those again. Quite annoying.
Yes, I know I can save some folders and do other weird stuff to make sure this doesn't happen, but by god, think of the newbies. (Ok, so the last part was a bit over the top, but still...)

Oh, and with the new spam-filtering-rules Mozilla has now become my fav mailclient. Combined with IMAP it just rocks.

Thank You to all developers. Perhaps I should go file that bug now. The annoying one.

.haeger

Re:But why (redux)?

[asa (33102)]

1.4 nightly builds have support for profile chrome. That means that extension developers can make extensions that install to your profile and won't get erased when you upgrade your Mozilla binary.

--Asa

Re:But why (redux)?

[mykmelez (6506)]

Until recently add-ons could only be installed in the Mozilla application directory, where they get deleted every time you upgrade to a newer version.

A bug was recently fixed that makes it possible to install add-ons into the user profile directory, where they persist through upgrades.

Note that until 1.4alpha comes out, this fix will only be available on the nightly builds [mozilla.org]. Also, add-on authors have to modify their add-ons to install into the profile directory. If you are an add-on author, see the bug for an example of how to do this:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162960

and still no fix for horrible DNS caching bug

[treat (84622)]

Unfortunately Mozilla still has a horrible usability flaw that the developers refuse to address. It caches DNS lookups forever, and does not honor the TTL on the record - there is no way to turn this off. This means that any site that uses changing DNS records with a short TTL for failover or load balancing will be broken for Mozilla users. IE works fine. This issue makes Mozilla look really pathetic in a corporate environment.

Search bugzilla for "dns cache".

Re:How do you spell 'bloat' -- M-O-Z-I-L-L-A

[the_other_one (178565)]

At least it doesn't have an operating system built into it like IE.

not to mention...

[Ender Ryan (79406)]

And not to mention... Mozilla is only as bloated as you want it. Either use the installer and don't install anything but the browser, or use the source and do the same.

Aren't we supposed to be nerds here? Doesn't that mean we should all be capable of installing a fucking browser properly?

Re:Already installed

[artemis67 (93453)]

This is the quickest I ever installed software... hot off the press.
I LOVE mozilla... too bad more users don't have this expirience.

Just installed it on OS X. Installation was literally "dragon-drop" (ba dum bum).

Re:Bad import feature! Bad!

[bunratty (545641)]

It's bug 176715 and should be fixed by Mozilla 1.4: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176715

Re:Midas

[sconest (188729)]

How about this [mozilla.org] ?

Re:So... what should we expect for 1.4?

[mykmelez (6506)]

Check out the Progress and Future of Mozilla-the-application-suite [mozilla.org] for information on what's coming up in the next few months.