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.

KMeleon

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.

Code length

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

Give the browser a work out

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+

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:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)

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

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?

PGP support

If you want PGP support in Mozilla, please vote for bug 22687 [mozilla.org].

To quote Eran Tromer from that bug page:

"I'd like to express my personal opinion on the matter. Context: I'm not a Mozilla developer, but I'm well-versed in relevant security issues and I've been following this bug with interest.

"In terms of security, e-mail is currently one of the weakest facilities on the Internet. HTTP/SSL, SSH and SCP provide encrypted and authenticated protocols for the respective needs, but e-mail by and large still relies on plaintext messages passed in the clear by POP3 and SMTP. The implications are obvious and frequently experienced. This is paradoxical, considering the vast popularity of e-mail and its frequent use for sensitive information.

"This grave situation persists mainly because of lack of functionality in common e-mail software. Encrypted e-mail ought to become the *default* format, and it must become trivial to import public keys, to send standard-compliant signed and encrypted messages, and verify their validity upon receipt. None of this is possible without e-mail software support. And Mozilla is in the position to change this situation.

"It is my opinion that in this case, clean architecture should be sacrified for functionality. Yes, providing this functionality in Mozilla 1.0 (i.e., anytime soon) may necessitate unmodular, specialized and hard-to-maintain changes in the codebase. It is not possible to do the Right Thing with the given resources and timeframe. Then go ahead and just do a Working Thing and fix it later, because this one is too important.

"Mozilla.org is spending an inordinate amount of time on building a fantastic infrastructure, to-the-letter compliance with numerous standards and owe-inspriring customizability. But as a practical web user, site administrator, programmer and consultant, I'd rather give up all of these than have my e-mails show up in the wrong hands.

"Hence, I urge you to reconsider your decision."

(end quote)

- Tal Cohen

First 5 Minutes

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

--

Re:KMeleon

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

Re:No right to complain

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:Ok, I have a news flash for you

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:KMeleon

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

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?

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

"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

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

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

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.

Re:Give credit where credit is due

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:Animated Gif anarchy since 0.9 (AAARGH!!)

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.

WARNING:

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?

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...

Mozilla finally arrives!

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:pretty nice

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.

0.9.2

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.

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Loadin