Mozilla 0.9.1 Out

MatriXOracle writes: "mozilla.org released milestone 0.9.1 today. New features include Bi-directional text support, LDAP Autocomplete in mail, new combined taskbar, an overhaul of the Modern skin with all new colors and buttons, and lots of performance and stability fixes, with over 30 of the topcrash bugs fixed." I'm using today's build right now, and it's very pretty, especially with the (brilliant!) modern theme. However, it's also segfaulted repeatedly for me already, so I hope you have better luck.

OS X is Mozilla's last chance for dominance

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that Mac OS X is Mozilla's last big chance for any kind of market share dominance. Right now, there is no single BEST browser for OS X. IE 5.1 preview SUCKS (it stalls every 5 seconds when you go to do something). OmniWeb has a slick interface and decent speed SOMETIMES, but it has a bad tendancy to get bogged down with too many threads when you have only several browser windows open. iCab is wicked fast, and fairly good with compatibility, but it currently lacks Java and mouse scroll wheel support in OS X. Then.... we have Mozilla, or Fizilla, as the Carbon version is called. It currently lacks Java and mouse scroll wheel support, but seems to be WICKED fast compared to other OS X browsers. The "Modern" skin/theme actually looks pretty decent along side Aqua too. If the Mozilla team can hammer down Java support (which should be easy with OS X's excellent support of Java 1.2, and upcoming support for 1.3 later this summer), and of course I NEED scroll wheel support in my primary browser of choice, Mozilla has a really good chance of capturing OS X market share, and with a platform this young, OS X is only going to get bigger in the next year. Mozilla needs to have just these few (but major) things added to the OS X port, and they just might capture a LARGE portion of the OS X browser market.... and with OS X poised to be the only OS that Apple ships in the future, that could really mean big things for Mozilla's future. I think this Fizilla process needs to be junked too. It should be Mach-O and take advantage of more of the hot features in OS X, and they need to get it in the main codebase with nightly builds, just like the ancient Mac OS 9 and Win/Linux versions. Just my $0.02... If you're bored, check out http://wop.mine.nu/ :)

KMeleon

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to point out that KMeleon [kmeleon.org], a free Windows clone using the Gecko engine (similar to Galeon), is advancing nicely. The latest version is surprisingly stable (most bugs are in the UI, not the rendering engine) and uses about half as much RAM as 'zilla.

Oh, and I'm using Opera [opera.com] to post this, which is also an excellent browser for Windows - always fast and usually stable. Its main advantage to all other browsers is its killer UI with mouse gesture recognition, lots of hotkeys, excellent bookmark management etc.

Also, if you filter JavaScripts and animated GIFs using a local proxy like Proxomitron [cjb.net], even Netscape 4.7 becomes rock stable (I can use it for days without a single crash). Really, if you don't want to use IE, don't use it.

Re:Mozilla rocks !

[Micah]

Took you this long? I ditched NS4.7 around Moz0.8. But I use Konqueror too. They both rock. :-)

---

You forgot Opera

[Trepidity]

Let's compare those to Opera [operasoftware.com] now (v5.11):

Startup Speed: IE6. But only because it mostly starts up with Windows. Opera is a fairly close second, and Mozilla takes at least 10x as long.
Winner: IE

Interface: It's a matter of preference. If you like root-level windows for each page, Mozilla is better. If you like MDIs, Opera is better.
Winner: either Mozilla or Opera

Rendering Speed: Definitely Opera. Mozilla beats out IE by a bit, but Opera is much faster.
Winner: Opera

Image Rendering: Opera. It's damn fast.
Winner: Opera

Interface Speed: Opera and IE are tied. They're both win32 native speed. On slow machines (like mine) IE tends to drag resources sometimes though, pausing interface responsiveness for a short period of time. Mozilla is just damn slow on a p266.
Winner: Opera, but not by much

Download & Install: You must be joking. Opera v5.11 is 2.18 megabytes. Neither IE or Mozilla come close.
Winner: Opera, by far

Editable Text Boxes: They're identical in Opera and IE. And yes, Mozilla's suck.
Winner: Opera and IE tie

Stability: Mozilla crashes every once in a while (though much less than it used to), Opera crashes every once in a while (though much less than it used to), and IE is pretty solid.
Winner: IE, by a small amount

Loading Cached Pages: Opera and Mozilla both theoretically load them instantly, but Mozilla takes a bit of time to do so on my machine (i only have 96mb RAM and a p266).
Winner: Opera by a small amount

Sidebar: Sidebars suck. I turn them off in all browsers.
Winner: Tie between all of them, since they can all be turned off

Standards support: Opera supports nearly all standards perfectly, with some of the advanced features of CSS2 being the sole exception. IE does not properly support even CSS1. Mozilla supports standards nearly perfectly with a few CSS2 bugs.
Winner: Mozilla, by a small bit. It's helped by the fact that it also supports non-standard pages better than Opera ("de facto Netscape standards") with its quirks-mode backwards compatibility

Gender Recognition: Opera has it [slashdot.org]. IE and Mozilla don't.
Winner: Opera, by far.

Cost: Opera is free with ad banners, or $30 without. IE and Mozilla are both free.
Winner: IE and Mozilla tie.

Overall Winner: Opera. It's small, fast, and the gesture recognition kicks ass. And in v5.11 Java/JavaScript/Flash/etc. all work properly 99.9% of the time, and CSS rendering is nearly flawless (much better than IE6's CSS anyway). And it's fast on my p266. Did I mention that I like the gesture recognition?

Re:You forgot Opera X-Platform

[Trepidity]

IE is worthless on anything but MS platforms.

Now IE isn't good on as many platforms as Opera and Mozilla are, but it's certainly not worthless on non-MS platforms. The Mac version of IE in particular is even better than the Windows version.

Make it an Internet Explorer Smart Tag!

[DCMonkey]

Every time Mozilla and bug, slow, or sucks are mentioned in the same paragraph, a Smart Tag with links to Bugzilla is displayed.

Code length

[Sludge]

I happened to have the mozilla 0.9 and linux kernel 2.4.5 sources on my hard drive. I decided to find out how big they are in comparison of each other. The command I used to test was: xargs cat | find -iname *.[ch] I used a slight modification of that for Mozilla which has .cpp sources. This doesn't even count any of that XUL stuff. Here are the results:

• Linux Kernel 2.4.5: 3,255,122 lines of source
• Mozilla 0.9: 3,277,618 lines of source

Mozilla is currently some 22,000 lines of code bigger than the most recent kernel release.

Holy hell that's a large project.

\\\ SLUDGE

No right to complain

[Sanity]

I assume that you went straight to Mozilla's website and reported these bugs to Bugzilla? If not, then you have no right to bitch about them.

I get really sick of people who complain about bugs in Open Source software, yet don't even take the time to report them to the developers.

Grrrr.

--

Re:No right to complain

[Sanity]

Actually I have never submitted a significant bug to Bugzilla that wasn't addressed within days, sometimes even hours. I am simply pointing out that if, rather than "reporting" the bugs to slashdot, it would be much more constructive to spend your time reporting them to the Mozilla developers.

--

Oooh that's better.

[Colin Smith]

*Much* nicer. *Much* faster.

Thanks Mozilla folks.

Re:Give credit where credit is due

[linuxci]

The main thing is that they actually got something accurate about the Mozilla release and not the usual - this in Mozilla 0.x, late as usual, it sucks and lets all use Konquerer or whatever it's called!

The original submitter should have acknowledged the source, but I don't see this as too much of a problem. As long as something positive is written that's what matters.

At this stage mozilla needs all the testers and downloads it can get.

Re:IE6b Vs. Mozilla 0.9.1

[linuxci]

The mozilla one is a lot more intelligent, it can support things like multiple search engines

More info see: http://sherlock.mozdev.org/

Re:a new feature ?

[linuxci]

Netscape 4.x had this, it was called roaming access.

Give the browser a work out

[linuxci]

Download one of the builds with talkback and put the browser through its paces (and mail/news, chatzilla, composer, etc). Because of many people using Talkback in 0.9 a lot of top crasher bugs were discovered and fixed. Here's a few ways of putting the browser through its paces:

• Run the browser buster [mozilla.org]
• Visit any weird and unusual pages you know
• Try running some of Hixie's tests [hixie.ch]
• Explore various options in the preferences and experiement with different settings

Fizzilla - Mozilla for OS/X - already 0.9.1+

[dew]

If any of you have OS/X and want to grab a version, get it fresh and hot from the fizzila page [mozilla.org] on mozilla.org. They've got a binary [mozilla.org] based on a post 0.9.1+ that seems pretty stable and pretty fast. It was taken from the trunk two days ago. Yay!

David E. Weekly [weekly.org]

Re:Seems worse for the normal user

[spitzak]

I agree, this is one thing I really like about IE.

With all this copying of Windows UI, why don't any of the toolkits support such menubars? It looks like this is a native MFC thing and has been around for awhile.

Of course what I would really like to see is the eradication of all these toolbars and a switch to pop-up menus and windows that contain only content, but it is looking hopeless...

Re:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)

[spitzak]

It would be real nice if there was a "play this once" and "play this continuous" and "stop" on the pop-up menu, though. Just in case you want to control the animations individually. And some preference for the intial state of all of them.

Re:About Mozilla's performance

[spitzak]

Huh? I thought the fact that IE rendered as much as possible as it downloaded was one of it's advantages. Though in my experiments it seems to act like Netscape 4.0, it's main advantage is that it is generally faster and it still draws the page if there are missing tags (ie if it is blocked and you hit stop you see something).

If we are going to waste computer time, I think Mozilla should continuously guess at any missing data (ie guess that images are the same size as the last image, add missing close tags, whatever) and continuously redraw the window while it is downloading. Ie if it has got data in memory and is not busy reading more data it should do as much as possible to get it on the screen. Perhaps it does do this?

Good job, lizard wranglers!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I'm using it now and it's very nice. Mozilla has been my primary browser since 0.8, mainly because I conscientiously refuse to touch Microsoft products -- but at this stage of the game I think I can safely say that it really is a world-class browser that can stand on its own merits. It's fast, it's accurate, and it's good looking.
--

Re:IE no longer a clear winner

[johnnyb]

Although I disagree with the content of this post, I still have to give it a +20 Absolutely Hilarious, for characterizing quite adequately the way many of us behave around our favorite toys.

Re:This is Freshmeat stuff. Not Slashdot.

[johnnyb]

Because Mozilla isn't _just_ a browser. It's a testbed for Corporations doing free software. It's a possibility for a free software application to be used in many, many corporations and user desktops.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:How about encrytped SMTP?

[Psiren]

I've been thinking about email encryption a lot lately. Rather than encrypting the mail at the user level, what would be involved in doing it at the mail server? In other words, create an extended SMTP protocol which allows for two mail servers to talk to each other via encypted messages. Then *any* messages sent via these servers, whether encrypted at source or not, will not be easily read in transit. I realise that creating a new mail transfer protocol is not something you can do overnight, but is anyone involved in making SMTP a little more secure?

Re:How about encrytped SMTP?

[Psiren]

Better than nothing though right? And you could always build in support for the extended SMTP into the mail clients themselves. That way everything is encrypted without user intervention.

First 5 Minutes

[IntlHarvester]

Back button doesn't work!! (Now it does?)

Dropping down the bookmarks menu and then clicking in the browser window to pop it up sometimes makes it start scrolling up and down like crazy.

Dragging bookmarks to and from the shell works now. So does IE Favorites.

CPU usage is dramatically lower. Startup time is about the same.

No longer behaves badly on slow loading pages.

Still can't easily sort in threaded mode in the newsreader.

Still doesn't recognize external mailers, probably never will

--

Any screenshots of the updated skin ?

[Augusto]

Thanks (in advance)

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[Idaho]

The -turbo option works great on Windows indeed, but I can't get it to work in Linux.

Is this 'by design' or am making some mistake?

Someone who succeeded in doing this, and how did you get it to work?

Also, (on Win2K) when using -turbo, when I open a new first window it doesn't open maximized, which it does without the -turbo switch. Guess this is a little bug, but does anyone know how to force mozilla into starting fullscreen?

I tried -max, -maximized but that didn't work :-(

----

Re:KMeleon

[Pope Slackman]

even Netscape 4.7 becomes rock stable

That doesn't change the fact that it's rendering engine still sucks sweaty donkey balls.
I can't think of one reason to keep using the dinosaur that is NS4 now that Moz is fairly stable.

C-X C-S

News.com doesn't like this one...

[pointwood]

Try loading news.com - I get their whole page in a small top frame :) I guess they better fix their html... I'm using it on a Win2k box right now. - It's better than 0.9 - New skin rocks! - The turbo feature is really cool - when using that, it loads *faster* than IE! - Java works mostly - it doesn't work with my internet bank, though :( Overall it's really cool!
Greetings Pointwood

Re:News.com doesn't like this one...

[pointwood]

Yearh, it does for me too now - it must be an error in Mozilla. I was using the -turbo switch. I've stopped using that again and since I haven't experienced that problem.
Greetings Pointwood

It's awesome

[Compuser]

Writing this from 0.9.1
With the -turbo option it is all that I want
in a browser. Well, a few glitches but no
showstoppers.
My main grief is with the theming. Both themes
have screwed up alignment of buttons and
drop-down list on the toolbar. Modern theme has
the drop-down list looking horrible (it's border
is misaligned with the list itself) while the
classic theme has the GO button lower than the rest. This is Win95 box at work. YMMV.
Oh, and clicking the icon brings up two windows:
one for the startup page and one with about:blank
location. I think I saw somewhere that this was
fixed in the nightlies though.
But the kicker is the superfast rendering. IE
doesn't hold a candle. Wow.

Re:Better and better

[Compuser]

I have recently looked for multiple or even
singular PGP signatures support and couldn't
find any. Do you know if anything is in the
pipe (maybe already done)?

Re:Java

[Midnight Thunder]

This is normal. I think the users may have their own plug-in directory somewhere in their home folder.

Re:IE no longer a clear winner

[Mike Schiraldi]

It can be done, but it takes a little effort.

Don't leave us hanging! How'd you do it?

--

Re:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)

[Mike Schiraldi]

Awesome idea. You should post it to Bugzilla. It's really easy to do so. I'd do it myself, but i'd like to help get the Slashdot people used to the concept. Once you get used to it, you'll be able to file bugs in less than a minute.

--

Re:About Mozilla's performance

[Mike Schiraldi]

He's talking about doing this stuff while the page is loading .. So that when you load Slashdot and set your thresh to -1 and click a story with 500 comments, you can start reading them as the page downloads. Instead, most browsers wait until they see the closing </table> tag.

--

Re:KMeleon

[Mike Schiraldi]

This is awesome. This is a solid gold example of the power of open source and tight user-developer interaction in getting itches scratched.

Once the dust settles and you developers have Copious Free Time, you might want to consider publishing a Scratch-That-Mozilla-Itch-HOWTO.. Pretend the code that makes the popup preference work didn't exist, and carefully document the steps a person would follow to add the feature.

I'm a good programmer. There are lots of little things i'd like to add to my web browser. But i fear that there is a huge learning curve in a project as large as Moz and that even adding a tiny change like this (i'm guessing the engine patch looked like

< pop_up();

> if (bool)
> pop_up();

) would require a ton of research.

BTW, i think you've set a new record for "Largest Karmic Increase From A Single Story"

--

Re:No right to complain

[Mike Schiraldi]

Yeah, maybe Mozilla should work out a deal with Slashdot, where when someone takes the time to post a bitchy comment about a bug but doesn't bother to report it to the developers, a message pops up that says, "Gotcha! You actually just submitted the bug to Bugzilla! Sucker!"

--

Re:Flash

[The Asmodeus]

I don't know about the release but I've been using the nightly and it run the Flash, Real Player, and Java plugin just great now!

Re:Ok, I have a news flash for you

[ShieldWolf]

He said ORGANIZE an effort to fix it, not write it himself. It is the equivalent of someone not liking a political issue, someone suggesting he organize a political action comittee and you complaining that not everyone is a politician.

Mozilla is open access, everyone gets a shot, if you don't like something, get some people who know what they are doing and agree with you to change it.

-Shieldwolf

Re:java 1.3.1

[jilles]

Works for me, I have the jdk installed and mozilla detects it when I launch it. I have had some trouble getting Java to work with mozilla on linux though (haven't tried recently so maybe things have improved by now).

In any case, jdk1.3.1 has the same changes as jdk1.3.0_1 that enable it to work with mozilla and so will all future versions as far as I can tell. Did someone test with jdk1.4 beta?

Re:This is Freshmeat stuff. Not Slashdot.

[jilles]

Its news for nerds, stuff that matters. The appeal of this site has always been that the editors pick stuff that interests them rather than posting anything that comes along. While I don't always appreciate the articles and, admittedly, information stress occasionally causes the editors to miss out on stuff that IMHO matters, they do a pretty good job overall and have been a primary source of tech news for me for nearly three years now.

Mozilla 0.9.1 is an important build for a few reasons:
- It gets good reviews (just read the replies to the article)
- It is marked in the roadmap as a beta branch point for netscape and others.
- It seems to have dealt with most of the performance issues that have been plagueing mozilla.

Opera on the other hand is also nice but closed source and not that revolutionary compared to the betas and the previous version. I do agree that should've deserved a mention though.

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Hmmmm,

$ grep knowticable /usr/dict/words
$

Doesn't seem to help here.

--

Re:How about encrytped SMTP?

[WNight]

Correct. Removing the links from this wouldn't be a bad thing, but it would probably be next to useless from a POV of stopping most snooping.

There are two threats that I see...

The first is something like Echelon. This is a centralized (sitting on a few backbones) server that records all email that passes. They'd then scan for keywords, etc.

The second is someone who wants to read YOUR email, specifically. They'll tap in at your ISP, to ensure they see all your email.

Now, stopping random snooping is a good thing, but it's not most people's biggest concern. They want to stop people from snooping directly, reasoning that if someone snoops randomly they aren't aiming to use the information directly, but if they snoop on you specifically, chances are they're malicious.

So, encrypting between the links is a good idea, and should be done eventually, but isn't IMHO a huge priority.

fortune hasn't smiled on mozilla?

[pangloss]

for some time now, the mozilla roadmap [mozilla.org] has indicated that "if we work hard and fortune smiles on us" mozilla would have gone from 0.9 to a 1.0, skipping the 0.9.1 milestone. oh well. i guess that was the gist of an earlier story [slashdot.org]. but really, is this that bad a thing?

and since i haven't seen it mentioned yet, don't forget to evaluate 0.9.1's improved "threaded pr0n" ;)

Re:Source?

[asa]

"arch thats not supported by the moz team? Like *BSD or anything else"

Not supported?!? Did you look at the builds that were posted for 0.9? Mozilla is a Cross Platform (XP) application. If you've got a platform Mozilla can probably be compiled for it. (feel free to snicker with vic20 and c64 comments)

Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001 (one month ago)

Win32

MacOS 8.5 - 9.0

Linux

AIX

DG/UX

Irix

OpenVMS

OS/2

HPUX

FreeBSD

BSD/OS (bsdi)

Solaris

Tru64 Unix

Re:Source?

[asa]

Yes! BeOS support! [mozilla.org]. I just left it off the lsit. Sorry. --Asa

Re:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)

[asa]

not sure if it's still working (I think I saw a bug recently) but you should be able to put this in your prefs.js file to controll image animations.

// Image animation mode: normal, once, none.
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");

--Asa

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[asa]

"2. new autocomplete widget - now works like a combo of IE and NS 4.x complete, but better than both (uses any site in your history file). Has an option to search for keywords thru Netscape at the bottom of the list, tho i wish this were google instead. "

Edit|Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet Search -> Default Search Engine.

You can select any of the search engines for the autocomplete popup. Mozilla search engined are based on sherlock technology so there are literally hundreds of them available (including Google, which I am using right now).

--Asa

Re:Give it to the Konqueror wishlist.

[asa]

in Mozilla:

Tasks|Privacy and Security|Cookie Manager

there's also |Image Manager for controlling killing those pseky banner ads.

--Asa

Re:KMeleon

[asa]

The UI hasn't been implemented yet (there's a bug on file) but the backend for this has been around for a while. See Configurable Security Policies [mozilla.org] and from the release notes page:

// Use configurable security policies to override popups, see
// http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/component s/configPolicy.html
// Turn window.open off for particular sites:
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowin te rnal.open","noAccess");

// Or turn it off everywhere:
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinter na l.open","noAccess");

// Override popping up new windows on target=anything
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true);

--Asa

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[asa]

The bookmarks problem is actually pretty easy. Bug 71685 [mozilla.org] Bookmarks in Sidebar are blank. This affects you if you have used the sidebar blank bookmarks workaround or your profile was created between early March and late May. If you have a pre ~11 March profile for which you never used the sidebar blank bookmarks workaround or a post ~23 May profile this probably doesn't affect you.

If you have a profile which was created before about March 11 and you used the workaround between about March 11 and May 23 then you will have to use the workaround again. If you have a profile which was created between about March 11 and May 23 then you will have to use the workaround now.

Workaround:

1. open browser
2. view sidebar
3. click "Tabs" button at top right of sidebar
4. select "Customize Sidebar" menuitem
5. select "Bookmarks" from "Tabs in My Sidebar" list
6. click the "Remove" button below the list of "Tabs in My sidebar"
7. click OK
8. click "Tabs" button at top right of sidebar
9. select "Customize Sidebar" menuitem
10 select "Bookmarks" from "Available Tabs" list
11 click the "Add" button below the list of "Available Tabs" list
12 click OK

note: just unchecking the tab from the "Tabs>" menu and rechecking it will not fix the problem. --Asa

Re:Source?

[asa]

Patience. Source tarball should be there in the next 24 hours. It's a lot of work to get it all together and we'd rather give out what we have when we have it then make everyone wait until we have hte last of the 30 or 40 builds we put up each Milestone.

--Asa

Re:First 5 Minutes

[asa]

"Still doesn't recognize external mailers, probably never will"

We're accepting patches. If it matters enough to you to post to slashdot then why not organize an effort to fix it.

--Asa

Give credit where credit is due

[asa]

Slashdot editors posted a comment which was clearly stolen from http://www.mozillazine.org [mozillazine.org] It would be nice to see a little more integrity from the slashdot editorial staff. Checkin sources, reading referenced links, etc. would go a long way to improving the value this site brings to it's users and the Web in general.

--Asa

Re:The Mozilla Bug that Bugs Me

[asa]

I suspect that your problem was attempting to load sites with TLS (SSL 3.1) enabled where the site didn't support TLS. Mozilla nightly builds now gracefully downgrade to SSL3 when they encounter these misconfigured or out of date servers. The fix didn't make it into the Milestone but we did set the pref for TLS to off (you can reenable it Edit|Preferences Privacy and Security -> SSL -> Enable TLS) as the Milestone default so you should have better luck visiting SSL sites.

--Asa

--Asa

Re:IE6b Vs. Mozilla 0.9.1

[macpeep]

A couple of comments..

You say that for rendering speed, Mozilla 0.9.1 would beat IE 6. That's not what the Mozilla developers are saying tho. For network loading, I don't know, but pure rendering speed should still be faster in IE.

Interface speed.. IE is *WAY* faster than Mozilla. On a fast computer, you may not notice much difference but on a slower one like some laptops, the difference is huge.

Sidebar. IE ripped Mozilla? Hello? The sidebar in Mozilla is based on the sidebar that appeared in IE 4. It has gone through several iterations of development, first being called Aurora, then having these "flash notification" thingies that would show you that you have a new email etc., and now finally, the version we see in Mozilla now. Microsoft has said that it will drop the content-panes (news, media player etc.) for the release of IE6 because the public didn't like it in usuability testing. But to say that Microsoft ripped the idea from Mozilla is just wrong as Mozilla really ripped the idea from IE4.

LDAP is a very good thing

[chrysalis]

While Active Directory and NDS are widely used in the Microsoft and Novell worlds, LDAP has never been very popular in the Unix world. Most people even never heard about it.
LDAP is a standard protocol to access very modular hierarchical databases (called "directories" but anything can be stored in a LDAP directory, not only addresses) . It's way more flexible than SQL. You can redefine your own types and constraints (schema), all objects are extensible, all instances can belong to several classes, and anything that can fit in a tree can fit in a LDAP directory.
The first steps into LDAP aren't trivial. The syntax of LDIF files is a bit difficult to learn, but it's worth learning it.
There's an excellent open source LDAP server called OpenLDAP [openldap.org]. It has support for LDAP version 3, SSL, IPv6, and everything you need to use LDAP. I've successfully installed it on large production servers. It's stable, and fast (if add your own indexes) .
Just like IPv6, LDAP for Unix is here for a long time (thanks, iPlanet), but it needs better integration with common software. If LDAP was implemented in all daemons and client software, it would ease a lot network administration. You can then configure all servers from a single workstation, in a coherent, unified database.
And for programmers, adding LDAP support is not a hell. Have a look at some OpenLDAP samples. I implemented LDAP support in Pure FTPd [pureftpd.org] in less than one hour with no previous knowledge of the OpenLDAP API. The src/log_ldap.c is a simple getpwnam() wrapper and it can be reused by any program that use this library call to read /etc/passwd. It's a GPL package, so feel free to merge it to any piece of free software.
Also, Unix lacks good visual XML and LDAP editors. The recently announced Ganimede looks promizing, though. But if you are starting to learn LDAP, also give a try to GQ (sorry, I can't remember the URL, check it on Freshmeat [freshmeat.net]) . It's a simple GTK tool to browse and edit LDAP directories and schemas.

Re:KMeleon

[MustardMan]

block javascript popups on page open and close.
...
click on an image to examine it

Mozilla, browser for the next generation in pr0n... heh

Re:Give credit where credit is due

[vectro]

Actually, you should blame MatriXOracle. He submitted the plagarized blurb without attributing it, and the slashdot editors merely posted it. They had no way of knowing it was from mozillazine.

Re:KMeleon

[cobar]

Would it be possible to change it so it only blocks annoying javascript popups, say block javascript popups on page open and close. Automatic popups are the ones that are ads, whereas target= is often useful (as are the popups that a lot of sites use when you click on an image to examine it).

Re:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)

[cobar]

It is working, the secret is to put that line in user.js (which you'll probably have to create) instead of prefs.js, if you put it in prefs.js it'll get erased.

The best setting is:
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "none");
since that way it only will show you the starting frame and not even loop once

This should really have a pref, because it's darn useful. It's the next best thing to installing junkbuster, and doesn't make you feel guilty of depriving sites of money.

Re:Seems worse for the normal user

[radja]

>It looks like this is a native MFC thing and has been around for awhile.

yes, it's native. yes, it's been around for some time. but MFC is hardly XP (that's cross platform, not office or windows..)

//rdj

Re:Finally

[be-fan]

Umm, what are you running this on? IE starts up in a second or two. Hell, Photoshop starts up in less than 40 seconds (on my PII-300). How can you POSSIBLY be happy with a 40/sec startup time for a web brower?

Re:Still a Memory Hog

[be-fan]

Umm, well written C++ code (BeOS usespace) can be a lot more sevlte than poorly written C code (X11, GNOME et all)

>>>>
Disclaimer: All I mean by this is that the BeOS userspace is C++ yet takes up less than 10MB, while GNOME does less (it is simply a desktop environment) and takes up a good deal more space. Comments about BeOS's deadness are irrelvant to this post. Sheesh, it's sad that I even have to bother to make this point clear. Apparently "on-topic" doesn't ring a bell with a lot of people.

WARNING:

[daveman_1]

The default installation of Mandrake 8.0 places mozilla in /usr/bin. If you install 0.9.1, it will detect the old installation and ask you to delete it. If you delete it, it will erase EVERYTHING in /usr/bin! This leaves the system in a fairly unuseable state. Just thought ya'll might like to know.

Auto complete email?

[underbider]

LDAP Autocomplete in mail, new combined taskbar,

Does this mean I don't have to write my email anymore?
I knew if Slashdot kept on talking about it, it'd be smart enough to do something useful for me...

Re:First 5 Minutes

[stevey]

A biggy thats bitten me .. if you setup a proxy - I've just set the http proxy to be "localhost | 8000".

Suddenly attempting to open a URL, (eg. Click on Home, or use the "Search the Web" option), I get a popup box:

You have chosen to download a file of type: "#1" [#2] from #3. What should Mozilla do with this file? [ ] Use default action for this type of file. [ ] Use a different action for this file. [ ] Save this file to disk [ ] Open with application: [ ]

Nothing I choose seems to allow me to actually open the page within Mozilla..

I know this isn't the place to submit bugs, so I'll file an bug report - but its frustrating, cos it stops me from using Junkbuster [junkbuster.com]

Steve
---

Mozilla finally arrives!

[WombatControl]

First of all, a confession. I've been using IE5.x for quite some time now. It's always been faster than Netscape by far and more standards-compliant. (Even if tainted by embrace-and-extend.) Mozilla's never been fast or stable enough to compete.

.9.1 changes all of that.

This baby is *fast*, and I mean extremely fast. Pages pop right up on broadband, even those damned table layouts from the dark days of the 4.0 browsers, broken CSS, and terrible DOMs. Not only that, but it appears as stable as .9 was, which was far more stable than any previous Netscape release since it was called Mosaic.

First of all, a big thanks to the developers who finally proved that Open Source can deliver. It's been a massive undertaking, several years in the making, but Mozilla's OSS development model have kept it at the cutting edge.

Second of all, download this sucker right now. Make sure all your friends do as well. The faster we get standards-compliant browsers the quicker web developers can leverage CSS to make cool sites faster. Believe me, I'm sick of coding for Netscape 4.x and the steaming pile of feces that is it's CSS support. Perhaps this won't be enough to keep Netscape's market share, but the 7% or so of us that use Netscape should upgrade ASAP.

Re:On track to be a bright shining star

[MoiTominator]

I don't think anything JWZ said after he left, which really wasn't much, was unfounded. Mistakes were made, the browser project got incredibly behind schedule, etc. Here it is, over two years since Zawinski left and Netscape/Mozilla still doesn't have a decent final product to show. If you read his web site, you see that he supports the idea of Mozilla and plans to use the product when it's finalized. He was just disgusted with the way the organization was operating.

windowinternal.open should be Window.open

[jesser]

That documentation is slightly out of date.

capability.policy.default.windowinternal.open
should be
capability.policy.default.Window.open (note the captialization).

There's already a bug [mozilla.org] to update the documentation, which I plan to fix next week.

Re:Anyone have a problem with Mozilla and GIF imag

[jesser]

I haven't noticed this problem, but I searched bugzilla [mozilla.org] and found two bug reports that might be the same problem:

bug 83289 [mozilla.org] Scrolling page with images (jpg) causes white lines in the images.

bug 74358 [mozilla.org] Images rendering with thin horizontal white lines (both GIF and JPEG): supposedly fixed April 11.

Do you still see the problem in Mozilla 0.9.1? What operating system are you using?

Re:My Taskbar pop open "feature"

[jesser]

bug 56969 [mozilla.org]: Sidebar should not appear when I use a Web search site.

You can vote for that bug if you want. Voting has a small but nonzero influence on how quickly the bug is fixed, and you'll automatically find out when the bug is fixed if you vote for it.

By the way, bugzilla [mozilla.org] is now much easier to search than it was before. I was able to find that bug by typing "search sidebar" (without quotes) into the bugzilla front page.

Re:pretty nice

[jesser]

For some reason i expected a different look than netscape, but i'll live.

Mozilla is distributed with two themes, Classic and Modern. The Classic theme, which is the default, is designed to look like 4.x. You can switch themes from the View menu or from preferences.

Re:Mozilla rocks !

[big_hairy_mama]

Yeah it rocks, especially with their strict support of new w3c standards that IE can't even touch. But there are still some major bugs, and, although this latest version crashes *much* less than previous ones, some of the big features aren't there or aren't working yet. For example, mail is almost unusable because of a few nasty show stoppers.

If you ask me, there are some priority issues with the mozilla team. Bug 4033 [mozilla.org] has been open for I don't know how long, and yet it seems like this could create quite a problem.

Re:KMeleon

[Eil]

I still keep 4.7x around for a few reasons...

It's still much faster overall on my K7 750... this might change someday, though, once they do less bugfixing and more optimizing

Some sites still don't work correctly with Mozilla (and vice versa). Some sites claim that I don't have [cookie, javascript, frame] support when I obviously do. Even after I disable junkbuster.

But since 0.8 I've used Mozilla as my primary browser without much disappointment.

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[Eil]

Wow, just tried that out. I love it! :)

Guess I'll never set eyes on Google's front page again...

Re:Incompatible with Slashdot!

[Eil]

Heh. About a week ago, (with 0.9) Mozilla would crash every single time I loaded Slashdot. I found that it wouldn't crash if I went to another page first and then reloaded slashdot so that was my workaround until yeserday's milestone.

Weird eh? :)

Re:News.com doesn't like this one...

[Eil]

Works For Me(tm).

In fact, renders the page very nicely.

Re:Flash

[Vyyper]

I have been using Flash and Quicktime within Mozilla for a while now and I remember having to load IE to view some movies (either QT or Flash).. now I can view all of them within Mozilla.

Re:Why

[kevin805]

Hmm...with Microsoft trying to sell a half way decent operating system to home users, and AOL having a browser that could be used to build a complete GUI, when should we expect AOL to start shipping a "consumer" operating system?

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[passion]

2nd on the list of most knowticable(sp?) is the Modern theme

Ouch.... late night? I can understand, I get that way sometimes too.

FYI - it's noticeable, as in "did you notice a difference?" This, as well as many other fine words can be found using our dear friend "grep" in /usr/dict/words

Re:First 5 Minutes

[kevinank]

You should be able to fix that from the helper application preferences. Just select the check mark for that file type that says: 'Display internally in Mozilla'

Re:IE6b Vs. Mozilla 0.9.1

[frankie]

I don't really hate MS that much as I use MS Office 6 on my Power Mac 6100 and I like it.

I have to say, it's very difficult to trust a review written by someone who actually likes Word 6 for Mac [google.com]. It is widely considered one of the worst kludgy ports ever made, and was a key factor in the creation of the independent Mac business unit [microsoft.com] within Microsoft.

To bring this back on topic ... I really want to see Mozilla succeed, and I'm glad it's about equally compliant [webreview.com] as IE 5 for Mac (which is what IE 6 is based on). But so far the XUL interface is way too slow and too buggy.

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[Andrew Dvorak]

Don't forget about the much-improved URL auto-completion, where a drop-down list displays a list more neatly than the former menu-list when you type into the url bar! :-)

Solaris bin or source tarball?

[4of12]

Yesterday I was disappointed by netscape-6.01A for Solaris 8 interminably rendering only a gray box for all my efforts to install it.

So, given the steadily improving reviews (I know - early slothfulness was a deliberate strategy to catch more bugs) of mozilla, I'd like to give it a try as a replacement for Netscrape-4.77

I'm behind a firewall that won't let CVS do its network checkout, so can anyone give a URL to a source (.tar.bz2) distribution of 0.9.1?

0.9.2

[Khopesh]

Because of the hype that a few of the Mozilla [mozilla.org] developers put on talkback here on Slashdot and on MozillaZine [mozillazine.org], Mozilla has seen lots of recent improvements (see the bottom of this [mozilla.org] page). Now that 0.9.1 is out, the Drivers team at Mozilla will take a large bit of control over the management of submisssions for 0.9.2 in an effort to brush up the code in preparation for 1.0. It looks like we'll see 0.9.2 released after only two to three weeks (see this roadmap sneak-peek [mozillazine.org]); half the current expected milestone lifetime. In addition, Netscape is being encouraged to take the next NS6 from the Mozilla branch this time, meaning that much of the Netscape team's work will be applicable to Mozilla.

Also of note, the Mozilla main page [mozilla.org] doesn't reflect the new milestone and the roadmap [mozilla.org] also fails to mention the release or the news about 0.9.2.

Version 0.9.9.9..., or priority problems.

[Animats]

"New features include Bi-directional text support, LDAP Autocomplete in mail, new combined taskbar, an overhaul of the Modern skin with all new colors and buttons, and lots of performance and stability fixes, with over 30 of the topcrash bugs fixed. ... it's also segfaulted repeatedly for me already... "

Why are new features going in when it's not stable? When will there be a feature freeze? There really needs to be a "stable" release of this thing.

DDE? That's dead for ages on win32.

[Otis_INF]

4th: THe DDE bug was fixed (yeah!) meaning that if your on Winblows and Mozilla never did anything after you double clicked on it before with this release it should start.

Erm... since a year or 3 people use 'automation' with COM on win32 instead of DDE/OLE. I don't think it's really 'visionary' to include DDE code in an application TODAY. To say the least.

Personally I think including an own 'COM' variant in an application for win32 is a bad decision. If they had, the win32 version whould have been finished by now.
--

Re:IE no longer a clear winner

[bellings]

At work, I have a Linux workstation and a Windows desktop running side by side. Visitors to my office always comment on how much more crisp and readable and faster Mozilla 0.9 is on Linux versus Explorer 5.0 on Windows. It can be done, but it takes a little effort.

Yes, this happens in my office also. The machine running Windos is a 386sx16, with 8 mb of RAM and a 240 mb MFM hard drive, running W2K and an IE 6 pre-alpha build I snagged from my latest 'leet hack of hotmail. Since the powersupply gave out on this machine three years ago, I forced to allow an autistic four year old child draw on the 10-year old 14" monitor, in crayon, what he thinks a webpage might look. I only give him brown and green crayons.

The other machine is a screaming fast dual athalon running linux, with the latest nightly build of mozilla (you have to get the nightly builds, every night). It still loads much slower than I'd like, and doesn't render tables quite as fast as the four year old child, but my soft and fragile ego as a wanna-be geek forces me to point out to everyone who comes by my office just how 'leet and skinnable and cool mozilla is, and how much more featureful it is than IE. They always pretend to be impressed, just before they leave.

I'm going to submit a story to ask Slashdot: "Why doesn't anyone ever vist my cube anymore?"

Re:About Mozilla's performance

[sakari]

No, no and no. Browsers should not work with invalid HTML! IE works with some broken HTML, and this has lead to some group of multimedia hippies starting to write invalid HTML, thus making these sites not work with other browsers.

Re:Code length

[tswinzig]

Mozilla is currently some 22,000 lines of code bigger than the most recent kernel release.

Holy hell that's a large project.


Are you referring to the Linux Kernel or Mozilla?

In other news, the Linux Kernel is being renamed to "the Linux Corncob."

IE6b Vs. Mozilla 0.9.1

[V50]

I have been using Microsoft's IE6 Beta on my parent's PC (my Mac doesn't have a modem) for the past while for my browsing. I just downloaded Mozilla 0.9.1 and I'll do a quick comparison:

Disclaimer: IE6 is in Beta. But so is Mozilla.

Startup Speed: IE6. But IE Programmers probably know a bit more about Windows than Moz Developers... And someone else said Moz now has an IE like always on mode now.
Winner: IE6

Interface: I used to hate the Old Modern theme. The new one is 10x better. I can say Moz wins by a long shot.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1

Rendering Speed: When I downloaded IE6 I thought nothing could get faster than it. There was next to no waiting for a page to render. Even my copy of Moz at the time (I think 0.8.1) wasn't as fast. This new copy of Moz is just a tiny bit faster, but it is faster.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1 but not by much

Image Rendering: With Moz's new libpr0n it beat's IE6 by a small->meduim amount.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1

Interface Speed: I no longer notice the "XUL Lag" I did with older Mozillas. But as IE6 is Win32 native it is a little faster.
Winner: IE6 but not by much

Download & Install: I have a 56k modem because I live in the middle of nowhere, so I can tell you that downloading big stuff sucks. IE6 brings up this smart installer like NS6 so you can select what more Microsoft software you want. I chose Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. Rougly what is included in the Mozilla .EXE installer. Moz is about 9MB while IE6+OE6 was something like 13MB. Plus IE rebooted my PC and updated a bunch of stuff which took like 10 minutes alltogether. Moz installed easily and with out a reboot.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1

Editable Text Boxes: About the only thing that I hate about Mozilla is the Slashdot comment box type thing. IE6 uses a native embedded notepad type thing while Moz uses the horrible XUL Text Box. The XUL Box sometimes doesn't catch my keystrokes and it is horrible for navigating with the mouse. It take me about three trys to get where I want it the XUL box.
Winner: IE6 by a long, long shot.

Stability: I haven't used Moz 0.9.1 long enough to get an opinion, but the IE6 beta has only crashed about 4 times in about 3 months of heavy use.
Winner: Probably IE6

Loading Cached Pages: Mozilla loads and renders cached pages instantly or near instanly. IE6 takes a second to load it from my disk.
Winner: Moz 0.9.1

Sidebar: IE6 ripped off Moz's sidebar. There are more stuff for the Moz sidebar but for the two things I look at the most (stocks & weather (no I don't own any stocks, I'm 13...)) Moz always want's me to log back into NS's Server. Yes I know this is NS's Fault but I have to count it. Plus when the Browser-With-90%-Market-Share(tm) debuts in non-beta for with sidebars everyone will make an IE6 sidebar, mark my words...
Winner: Tie For Now

Overall Winner: Moz 0.9.1! But IE6 has some yet unimplemented features such as privacy protection (gasp!) and a bunch of other stuff. I will try to give a Browser comparison every few browser releases to keep up.

I've Tried to give an unbiased opinion. I don't really hate MS that much as I use MS Office 6 on my Power Mac 6100 and I like it. And I can say that IE6 is very good. But Moz just tied/exceeded IE6 for now. But any new features will be assimilated, see My SideBar.

--Volrath50

IE no longer a clear winner

[r_j_prahad]

At work, I have a Linux workstation and a Windows desktop running side by side. Visitors to my office always comment on how much more crisp and readable and faster Mozilla 0.9 is on Linux versus Explorer 5.0 on Windows. It can be done, but it takes a little effort.

My only complaint so far is that Mozilla has a tendency to barf and die on sites with a lot of Javascript or large PDFs; invariably I end up with an orphaned runaway mozilla-bin process that needs killing after that happens. It's a gripe, sure, but not any more of a problem really than IE when it hopelessly locks up. Both instances are rare, thankfully.

As soon as I can get the chance, I'll see if 0.91 fixes any of this. It's been a really good product lately, much better than any Netscape I've ever had to use on my UNIX workstations. Thanks, Moz-dev-guys. I appreciate it. Lots.

Ok, I have a news flash for you

[Sycraft-fu]

Most of the people in the world are not programmers! Now I know that may supprise you, but it's the truth. Also, even the majority of technical computer users aren't programmers either. Take someone like me (A network administrator). I'm quite technically competent, work comfortably with computers all the time, and I even know how to program. But I'm not a programmer. I can write programs as they pertian to my work, which is to say simple script type programs usually less than a thousand lines. If I tried to tackle a project as large as Mozilla, I'd be lost. I'd just end up wasting a huge amount of time and probably not acheive what I wanted. What's more, I don't like programming. I like fixing networks. If I liked to program, I would have stayed in CS and become a programmer. I want other people to do it for me. I am not alone in this mindset.

Free software's biggest advantage is that anyone can nab the code, sit down, and turn an existing project into whatever they want. However this also proves to be a weakness in that many free software authors have the mindset that people SHOULD do this. When J. Random User bugs you about a feature your program doesn't have he wants you to think about adding it. If you tell him "add it yourse;f" he'll probably just wander off and find other software that does what he wants. Kind of like if you go to a restraunt and wnat to order a slight modification on a meal. You expect the cook to do that and if you got told "do it yourself" you'd probably leave.

Now, this is not to say that programmers are obliged to act on every suggestion that comes their way. Just as commerical companies make decisions about what and what not to include, so can free software authors. However telling the person to do it themselves is a very bad idea. Simply acknowledge their suggestion and act on it if you want to.

Re:Good brower

[berzerke]

I've had good luck with the automatic installation only when running the browser as root.

To get java working (in Linux at least) manually:

1. Download the jre.xpi file.
2. Move (or copy) it to the plugins directory.
3. Unzip it. Yes it is a zip file.
4. When unzipped, it will create a directory called jre-image-i386 . Rename (via the mv command) the directory to java2 .
5. Create a symbolic link called libjavaplugin_oji.so to java2/plugin/i386/ns600/libjavaplugin_oji.so
6. Restart Mozilla.

Re:Whats New & Why you should get it

[dhamsaic]

I had java problems under mozilla for the longest time, but I finally got it working under .8 (disclaimer - I use Linux *only*, so I don't know anything about getting it to work under Windows). I'm at work right now, but if you want me to email you when I get home with instructions on how I got it done and where all the files go, I will - reply to this and post your email address in some convoluted form so the spambots can't get it, and let me know how to figure it out. As far as with .9.1, when I installed it, here's how I got java working:

• install it into your home directory (i installed mine in /dave/mozilla9)
• go to some page that requires java (games.yahoo.com is a good one, once you sign in and go to play a game - this is my test page for java plugins)
• click "ok" when it says that it needs to download the plugin. click "java for linux" when it pops up, and let it download.
• restart the browser

getting it to work in linux with .9.1 was much easier than it was with .8, but i'm still sure you can do it manually if you can't get the automatic install to work. just make sure it's in your home directory - this will solve a lot of problems for you.

let me know if you need any help.

by the way, ssl connections work fine for me - i use mozilla to check my work email through our web-based email system, and i can only connect through ssl - and it works great.

Whats New & Why you should get it

[tk422]

Don't be fooled by the fact this is only a point .1 release, the improvement is vast compared with 0.9.

First up and the one most people will knowtice right away is Page Loading, the load time was cut in half at least by a checkin that occuried right after 0.9, branched.

2nd on the list of most knowticable(sp?) is the Modern theme, its great the improvement is substantial over the old one and personally I use it as my default skin now.

3rd a huge effort was put into fixing a lot of the crashers that effected 0.9 so it should crash much less (your milage may vary however)

4th: THe DDE bug was fixed (yeah!) meaning that if your on Winblows and Mozilla never did anything after you double clicked on it before with this release it should start.

5th: On Winblows you can turn on the preloader for mozilla by specifying the -turbo option. Which means that it will stay in memory like IE does thus giving you nearly instantious opening speed. (And no we havent given up on cutting down startup speed this just to get people off our back who complain that IE loads so fast and why cant Mozilla...well now you have it so stop bitching :)

Finally there is the other good stuff like LDAP support and Bidi support (multidirectional text support) (contributed by IBM btw) which makes Mozilla even more usuable and expandable.

We need help please please come to #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org and ask for some help on how to get involved. I (nick Ksosez) or the other people on there will be glad to help you. We especially need C++ coders and or Linux coders.


Enjoy the release
-Ksosez

Here's one of the actual release...

[factorial_nine]

http://members.home.net/factorialnine/moz91.png

Re:what?

[klui]

It does matter because 0.9 prevented me from using it on a regular basis because it: didn't support LDAP autocomplete, and choked on sites like www.amdmb.com [amdmb.com] and other sites that I visit on a regular basis. The nightly on June 6 fixed these problems and is faster. I expect 0.9.1 to be just as fast as the June 6 nightly along with probably some extra fixes.

Sure there are come cosmetic issues, but it's quite usable. Even Wells Fargo online banking works without requiring me to override the useragent string.

Only issue now is lack of JVM being distributed. But I know it can be added. Can someone post a procedure for FreeBSD?