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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 1.2 Beta Released 467

nberardi writes "Mozilla 1.2 Beta is out. Typeahead now works on Mac and Java now works on Jaguar. On Linux, the classic theme now picks up GTK native theme. See the release notes for more info."
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Mozilla 1.2 Beta Released

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  • If only... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sl3xd ( 111641 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:11AM (#4469449) Journal
    If only there was a theme that used the OS native widgets, without the ugly 'classic' icons...
    • Re:If only... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:15AM (#4469489)
      Help yourself. Unpack the classic theme (classic.jar is a zip archive) and replace the icons with your own.
    • Re:If only... (Score:5, Informative)

      by unixmaster ( 573907 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:24AM (#4469601) Journal
      It does actually , uses GTK on Linux and native widgets on Mac/Windows when classic theme is selected.
      • Re:If only... (Score:5, Informative)

        by ichimunki ( 194887 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:53AM (#4469916)
        Personally, I'm anxious for the day it uses gtk-2.0 instead of gtk-1.4. I tried it with gtk2 and couldn't do any cutting/pasting (known bug, already in Bugzilla, I believe). Other than that it was great-- they're very close. Even better: once it is stable on gtk2, then Galeon 2 is ready to go. Either way, hats off to all Mozilla coders, Mozilla is a great browser and gets better all the time.
      • Re:If only... (Score:4, Informative)

        by uhoreg ( 583723 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @01:10PM (#4470614) Homepage
        It only uses GTK/etc. to *draw* the widgets. It doesn't use actual GTK/etc. widgets.
    • Re:If only... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by evbergen ( 31483 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:28AM (#4469634) Homepage
      Sadly, there isn't even any such thing as OS native widgets on Unix. Every toolkit has its own, and every application gets to choose its own toolkit.

      We need an X protocol that works at widget level instead of pixel level. It'd be great if we could design /that/, together with a good widget definition language, and to stop reinventing the OS in huge toolkits that even provide timers and I/O and mistreat X as a dumb framebuffer backend.

      Client-side rendering, high-level application frameworks, *yuck*. Provide your high-level GUI stuff through an IPC channel and get out of the way. Let me have my own main loop back. Thank you.
      • Not a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)

        by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:41PM (#4470355) Homepage
        This is a very very bad idea. You seriously underestimate the enormous complexity of the communication to a "toolkit". Also there is a little thing called "innovation" where people invent new methods of GUI interaction. This would be stopped by such a design, or would force people to write a parallel toolkit anyway (as many (most?) Windows applications are forced to).

        If you don't believe GUI innovation happens, imagine if X had an enforced toolkit. It would be Athena, in black and white, with this 1-bit color so written into it that it would be impossible to remove, and everybody would marvel at the fact that you could set it to inverse video and all applications would agree. And defenders would claim that the fact that only the middle mouse button makes the scrollbars move was a *feature*. And any intelligent people would be laughing X off the planet!

        Meanwhile, despite it's problems and pretty stupid design even for when it was invented, X is able to replicate interfaces designed 15 or more years after it was invented. This is because of the one intelligent decision they made, which was to keep the GUI widgets out of it!

        Now X has problems. There really should be high-level graphics, at least similar to PostScript. Though also complex, it is far less complex than toolkit interfaces, and perhaps more importantly the set of graphics calls needed has been pretty stable for about 20 years. It may even make sense to add calls to "draw a nice raised box" or "clear this to the flat background color" which would do about 99% of what people want "themes" to do.

        Also there is a bit of "toolkit" inside X: the "window manager" (even though a seperate process, but the communication protocols are there, and I know for a fact that it takes more code to communicate with the window manager than it would take to draw the window borders and handle moving and raising the windows myself). This also needs to be removed.

        But I am serious that putting any kind of "toolkit" interface into the system in a very very bad idea.

    • Re:If only... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ncc74656 ( 45571 )
      If only there was a theme that used the OS native widgets, without the ugly 'classic' icons...

      Phoenix [slashdot.org] looks like it's going that way. I would be using it right now instead of the new Mozilla beta, but Phoenix doesn't let you disable third-party cookies (you can't check the checkbox that controls third-party cookies, at least not under Win2K). Once they get that fixed, though, I'll more than likely switch over to Phoenix. All I really want is a browser. I use Mutt [mutt.org] on my home Linux server for mail, so I don't need a mail client, and I use text editors (such as JOE [sourceforge.net] or Notepad) for editing HTML and CSS.

      The thing that bugs me right now about Mozilla 1.2b is that the Pinball theme doesn't work (it didn't work in Phoenix, either, and for the same reason...it hasn't been updated). Classic is ghey (as you noted), and Modern isn't much better. Pinball ought to be the default. :-)

  • pinstripe theme (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Cowrad ( 571322 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:12AM (#4469460)
    Note that if you're using the pinstripe theme [kmgerich.com], you've got to use the one made for nightlies.

    I don't know why.

    First thing I noticed.
  • Link prefetching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rhubarb Crumble ( 581156 ) <r_crumble@hotmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:12AM (#4469462) Homepage
    check this out: Link prefetching [mozilla.org]

    seems to mean that if you're reading page 1 of a multi-page article, page 2 will be loaded in the background. nice!

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:15AM (#4469492)
      And if your reading a page with links you dont want to click, lets say to a picture of a man stretching his balloon knot open, then they'll be cached for you and swallow up more and more system resources. nice!
      • Re:Link prefetching (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rhubarb Crumble ( 581156 ) <r_crumble@hotmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:19AM (#4469549) Homepage
        And if your reading a page with links you dont want to click, lets say to a picture of a man stretching his balloon knot open, then they'll be cached for you and swallow up more and more system resources. nice!

        That's a fair point - there is potential for abusem since the web page decides which "hints" to issue. Hopefully it'll eventually have an "enable prefetching for these sites"-type access control, similarly to the way it's done with cookies. Or a limit on the amount of data to prefetch.

        • Re:Link prefetching (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Eimi Metamorphoumai ( 18738 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:49AM (#4469868) Homepage
          How is this worse than just embedding the image into the webpage, possibly with height=0 width=0? When you go to a webpage you already pretty much give it carte blanche to download what it likes; this doesn't seem very different.
          • Re:Link prefetching (Score:5, Informative)

            by mpsmps ( 178373 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:16PM (#4470134)
            Embedding an invisible image has a variety of problems.

            1. Relying on obscure side-effects leads to bad code. For example, one could imagine a highly-optimized browser-rendering engine may choose not to read the bits of the image because they won't be visible. It's much better to have an XHTML tag that explicitly expresses the desired semantics and leave it to the presentation tool to properly figure out how to present.

            2. Languages, standards, and practices evolve. For example, if my webages are XML interpreted by XSL stylesheets, do I really want to start embedding browser hints in my XML pages (or have my XSL stylesheet assume a browser is the client)?

            3. How does the browser know not to start prefetching the image before it has loaded the main page? The prefetching FAQ says that prefetching uses an idle test to avoid doing harm. Embedded images can't readily be optimized by an idle test.
        • How about limiting the prefetching to pages in the same domain as the page doing the prefetching. Perhaps you could explicitly allow addtional domains for prefetching in the head of the document.
        • Re:Link prefetching (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Erik Fish ( 106896 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @02:23PM (#4471365) Journal
          Well if there's an enable/disable for prefetching it's sure to be accessable via the best Mozilla plug-in ever! [xulplanet.com]
    • by PEdelman ( 200362 )

      This sounds cool, but it looks like the page author has to specify what has to be pre-fetched. Due to the relatively small marker-share of mozilla, there will probably be few sites which implement this feature. Too bad, because it looks like a nice feature to me.

    • Re:Link prefetching (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:17AM (#4469523) Journal
      ... provided the page is written for link prefetching explicitly. It doesn't mean you can go to a site like Google News and it will start loading the various articles in the background.

      Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages. This combined with a customizable maximum bandwidth restriction for the prefetching would be nice.
      • by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:33AM (#4469688)
        Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages.

        What would be great is if it could recognise if a page is of thumbnail images, and then automatically download the linked images. It would make browsing porn much quicker.
      • Re:Link prefetching (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:05PM (#4470018) Homepage

        The style of web browsing I use is to load all the links I want to read in new windows by clicking on them with the middle button. Then they can be loading in the background while I read the first part of the article. It forms a kind of queue of pages to read, so when I've finished reading the first page I just close that window and go on to the next (which is ready instantly). The result is up to a hundred browser windows open at once - but I know that I'm not the only person who browses like this. Of course, it helps to have a browser which can open lots of windows without thrashing and slowing the machine to a crawl (like Dillo [cipsga.org.br]) or one that has tabbed browsing.

        This style of following links can also work well with offline browsing and a proxy server designed for offline use like WWWOFFLE [demon.co.uk]. If you go online briefly and click on all the links you want to load, the proxy remembers to download them. Then a few minutes later you can go online again and all the pages will be loaded ASAP. Once they've loaded you can disconnect again and continue browsing. This makes the most sense for people whose internet access is metered (hmm, I wonder if something like this could work for palmtops).

        But what I'd really like to see in a browser is an explicit 'to read' queue. When you click on a link with the middle button, it doesn't immediately open in a new window or tab but instead is added to the queue and starts downloading in the background. On the browser's toolbar there is a 'next page' button which goes to the next URL you have marked for reading.

        Automatic prefetching of all links from a page, la wget -r, would be crazy for many heavily-linked sites. But you could have heuristics for it or specify particular sites where the link following should be more aggressive.

        • by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:25PM (#4470231) Homepage Journal


          Ed,


          If you're using Mozilla, or the recently-released Phoenix (highly recommended), you can also accomplish your browsing style by right-clicking the links and selecting "open in new tab". The other page will open a new tab within your existing window. When you're done reading the current page, you can click on the tab for the other page without having to juggle windows.

          What's nice about Phoenix in this respect is the default behavior is to have the new tab open in the background. I complimented the design team for this on their discussion board and some guy came back and said you can also set this up in Mozilla via the prefreences. It's supposed to be controlled by the checkbox 'Load links in the background'. You can also set middle or right-click to open these tabs in the preferences.

          Seth

      • by j7953 ( 457666 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:07PM (#4470045)
        Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages.

        No, that would be a very bad idea. Just right now in the navigation menu of the Slashdot page I'm viewing ("Post Comment"), there are 17 navigation links, plus the category links, etc. You cannot tell me that you'll be following all of those 17 links. Web sites (and probably ISPs as well) would not like such a feature due to the increased bandwidth costs they'd have to account for.

        Also note that e.g. this page has a "log out" link that I really do not want to be automatically prefetched for obvious reasons. Granted, it contains a query-string so Mozilla would not prefetch it anyway, but I imagine there will also be web sites that have log out links without query strings in the URL. And there are lots of other actions that might be associated with following a link (think prefetched one-click-shopping).

        The HTTP standard (RFC2616) states that "In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered 'safe'", and if there are side effects, "the user did not request the side-effects, so therefore cannot be held accountable for them", but I wouldn't trust on web site administrators knowing this.

      • by zmooc ( 33175 ) <zmooc@NOSpaM.zmooc.net> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:59PM (#4470493) Homepage
        Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages. This combined with a customizable maximum bandwidth restriction for the prefetching would be nice.

        And that, my friend, would be the end of the Internet. How many of the links on a website do you generally click? On slashdot, I think, it would at most be something like 5%. Let's say 5% of the users would enable this feature. Now their browsers start pre-fetching. Since they normally only click at most 5% of the links, preloading all would multiply their bandwith-usage by 20 times. So. Our 5% of the users uses 20 times as much bandwidth as they would without preloading. So the average bandwidth-usage for web-browsing would about double and that's with only 5% of the users having this feature enabled. Bye bye Internet. There's a reason this really simple to implement feature isn't there yet.

        But.... combined with a reasonably large distributed network of caching proxy-servers, pre-fetching might be worth a try.

    • by trollercoaster ( 250101 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:39AM (#4469748) Homepage Journal

      Cool, this could lead to preslashdoting.

    • Seems like there's a lot of potential for abuse with this, especially given that right now you have to manually edit the prefs file to turn it off. What's to stop a page from tagging a really huge file, hosted on someone *else's* server as a "prefetch" item. Everyone who goes to page A starts "prefetching" from page B in the background - enough people do this and you've got a DOS going on.

      Even if that scenario is not likely, I think it's still an odd choice for Mozilla - the philosophy behind the idea seems to be "the browser knows best and will think for you behind the scenes." On the one hand that sounds great: the browser will anticipate my next move. On the other, that doesn't sound so great... My cable modem starts blinking when I think I'm not grabbing anything and I get suspicious.
      • Re:Link prefetching (Score:3, Informative)

        by roca ( 43122 )
        > What's to stop a page from tagging a really huge
        > file, hosted on someone *else's* server as a
        > "prefetch" item.

        You can already do this by loading someone else's page into a hidden IFRAME.

        Nothing new here. Move along.
    • Security danger (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:08PM (#4470057) Journal
      I noticed pre-caching when I read the release notes last night. In my opinion it is a major security danger.

      A lot of police investigations go by the browser cache to see where you have browsed. Now you are giving control over to the cache to someone else.

      It would be simple to put a link in the page source to some kiddie porn or other illegal information. You would never see the link on the page and would have no way of knowing what had been inserted in your browser cache until the police inform you of how long you are going to be in jail. Sure, it is possible that the police won't use the browser cache as proof of guilt (don't bet on it), but that requires a lot of trust. And if they want to be technical about it, it is technically illegal to possess that information, no matter how it was acquired.

      And the gain isn't at all proportional to the risk. No pre-caching is done except on sites specifically engineered for it. That means next to none.
      • Re:Security danger (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )
        A lot of innocent until proven guilty hinges on the fact that if there is a reasonable doubt that you did not do something then you are innocent, because proof cannot exist with reasonable doubt. So the fact that you are using Mozilla, and Mozilla has the option for totally innocent looking pages to sneak kiddy porn into you cache would be a valid defense. also there would probably be html files cached that employed that tactic in you cache as a very strong defense.
    • Re:Link prefetching (Score:3, Informative)

      by aftk2 ( 556992 )
      Interesting idea, although it's too bad that, according to the FAQ:
      URLs with a query string are not prefetched.
      This really limits how useful this feature might be. I can imagine reading a multiple page article, and on page one of that article, the link tag prefetches page two while I'm reading page one, for quick access to the next page. Unfortunately, the URLs to most articles on the web contain query strings (a query string is the question mark (?) that preceeds a bunch of variables in a URL.)

      Interesting idea, at least.
  • GTK.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:13AM (#4469477) Journal
    Mozilla's binaries still depend on gtk 1.x, however when compiling from source you can tell it to use gtk2. I don't know how stable that is, though...
    • Re:GTK.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by cyco/mico ( 178541 )
      As it seems, they are not there yet. But there's a patch from the galeon guys, who seem to be working on that too. You can find the respective hints here [sourceforge.net] (galeon2 installation instructions).
  • by fault0 ( 514452 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:14AM (#4469485) Homepage Journal
    Type ahead find is great. Been using it since Moz 1.2 alpha. The neat thing is that you can type a search phrase, and you can search again with ctrl-G. My only suggestion would be to have type ahead and find searches appear in a history combobox in the find window.
  • Mime Types (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:15AM (#4469493)
    Have they done anything about adding large numbers of mime types (ie, made it not be a pain in the arse) yet?

    TWW

  • Filtering Old Mail (Score:4, Informative)

    by lymond01 ( 314120 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:15AM (#4469495)
    How many times have I wanted to create a new filter, then add all the mail that should go in there, but is already in my inbox? Like that annoying guy that you didn't know was THAT annoying so you didn't think you'd actually need a separate mailbox just for his 20 dumb questions a day. True story. Film at freakin' 11.

    Well, Moz has it...filtering after the fact. Yay!
  • by unixmaster ( 573907 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:15AM (#4469496) Journal
    XFT support on Linux! Now we can get cool anti-aliased fonts on Linux!

    You must compile from source with --enable-xft and need fontconfig & xft2 package from www.fontconfig.org [fontconfig.org] and of course freetype2 from www.freetype.org [freetype.org]

    Great thnx to Chris Blizzard for this!

    Oh btw now HTML for controls & scrollbars use your native GTK theme widgets when classic theme is chosen.
    • by GoofyBoy ( 44399 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:50AM (#4469885) Journal


      Here are the instructions [mozilla.org]

      I have it working with Mandrake 9 and Mozilla 1.0.
  • by MacOS_Rules ( 170853 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:16AM (#4469512) Homepage
    Moz 1.2 works like a champ on my iMac under Jaguar. 1.1 was a little sluggish, but 1.2 seems to have corrected that and then some. Startup times are now nearly as fast as IE 5.2.2, and Moz is and hopefully will continue to be much less crash prone than IE. This is in and of itself amazing, considering it is 1.2 BETA.

    Great job to all who work on this effort. It is much appreciated by many in the computing field.
    Cheers!
  • Fast releases (Score:4, Informative)

    by koh ( 124962 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:17AM (#4469519) Journal
    moz development has been considered sluggish by many a few months ago... now that they have the infrastructure right, they do release early and often. Nice :)

    Too bad I'm still stuck to 1.0.1-r1 on my gentoo distro... ;)

    • Re:Fast releases (Score:5, Informative)

      by rizzo ( 21697 ) <don AT seiler DOT us> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:54AM (#4469922) Homepage Journal
      Why are you stuck to 1.0.1-r1? Just unmask 1.1 and you'll get 1.1. You can copy the 1.1 ebuild and make a 1.2a ebuild. As soon as 1.2b source is released I'll be submitting a 1.2b ebuild.

      You just need to unmask it by commenting out any mozilla lines in /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask. The gentoo people mask apps to create an aura of stability.
  • Type-ahead Find (Score:5, Informative)

    by RPoet ( 20693 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:18AM (#4469538) Journal
    1.2 is really worth installing just for the Type-Ahead Find feature. It's one of those "how did I ever manage without it" features, and a punch in the stomach of anyone who says free software isn't innovating. This feature almost obsoletes the use of a mouse while surfing (well, almost). You see a link you want to follow, called "Click here". So you type "cl", and that link is marked. Now press enter to follow it. So simple, yet so efficient.
    • Typeahead rocks my socks, but the Mozilla team didn't invent it. Internet Explorer for the Mac has had this for quite some time.

      A trivial point, maybe, and I certainly agree that Mozilla is innovative, but they weren't first in this case.
      • Re:Type-ahead Find (Score:3, Informative)

        by Loligo ( 12021 )
        >Typeahead rocks my socks, but the Mozilla team
        >didn't invent it. Internet Explorer for the Mac
        >has had this for quite some time.

        IE has had "fill in the box" type-ahead completion for years, but it sounds like what he's describing is different.

        As an example, say you wanted to reply to this article. Instead of clicking on "Reply to This", you'd type enough of "reply" to jump the highlight to the link in the active window.

        Not exactly the same thing. Not even remotely the same thing, even.

        -l
      • by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:37AM (#4469724) Homepage
        In fact, the bugzilla item which typeahead find sprang from was named "implement typeahead find (like Emacs isearch)".
    • Re:Type-ahead Find (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Corvaith ( 538529 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:42AM (#4469783) Homepage
      It sounds good, sure. But, I can't be the only person out there for whom it's more of an irritant than a feature. On long pages, if you accidentally type something without focusing on, say, the form box... then it'll scroll you right down to the link it thinks you want.

      I'm therefore waiting expectantly for the feature that lets you turn this *off*. I'm sure it's nice for some people, but if you don't want it, being forced to have it is a pain. If there /is/ a place to disable it... it's definitely not anywhere visible.
      • Disabling it (Score:3, Informative)

        by RPoet ( 20693 )
        Alright alright, if you really want to disable it, the way to do it is described here [mozilla.org]. Requires some prefs.js entry though.
  • Great News (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MercuryWings ( 615234 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:18AM (#4469541) Journal
    I've been using Mozilla since the 0.6 beta days and count my blessings on a regular basis. It's nice to see they've added the GTK support - now it'll not only be a linux app, but will have the look and feel that is consistent with other GTK-based apps. That part tended to be irritating - didn't feel like GTK, didn't feel like KDE, felt like one of those 'let's design the entire interface to our own personal tastes' programs that one finds far too often on that 'other' OS.

    One question I have though - does it support GTK 1.2, or 2.0 (including the anti-aliasing fonts feature)?

  • Beware of GTK themes (Score:4, Informative)

    by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:21AM (#4469567)
    Some of the themes I tried with GTK and Mozilla this morning crashed Mozilla on startup. Others were okay. I guess there are still a few bugs to work out there.
    • by l0ungeb0y ( 442022 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:36AM (#4469711) Homepage Journal
      Well of course, that's why I"just say NO" to themes. OS themes, browser themes, any theme at all besides the defaults they come with.

      Not because I don't like themes, but they are version specific for each release... and having to drop/change themes with each new release seems like more of a pain in the ass than it's worth.

      Maybe someday in the not so distant future, they will build a theme utility that will adjust theme graphics to match the current GUI... but I doubt it.
  • by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:22AM (#4469578)
    Remember all those offline browsers and 'modem accelerators' that sucked up your modem bandwidth by downloading contantly, spidering every link on every page you visited?

    While the Mozilla project is an incredible piece of work, I have to question this feature. It appears that they've designed it so that a page designer or webmaster decides what is appropriate for prefetching or not. Still, if used inappropriately, this feature could lead to more information being transmitted across the internet that is either discarded or unwanted. In a worst-case scenario, an inexperienced web designer might routinely run into his bandwidth cap or unintentionally force users who have bandwidth caps to exhaust their allowance.

    If you can only download 3GB per month over your cable modem, do you really want the designer of a page deciding that your browser needs to spend time downloading ads or useless images?

    For some people, this could be really useful. For others, it could be a real pain. Team-Moz, if you have any consideration at all, please adjust the default configuration of Mozilla so that this feature is turned OFF.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      It requires the web-"designer" to hint, what pages to prefetch.
      Since, the employer of named designer pays for the bandwith, it surely will be used only at adequate places (Cost/Benefit).
    • by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:41AM (#4469773) Homepage
      and only if explicitly specified, and if nothing else is going on (i.e. if you have an active download, prefetch is disbabled).

    • This point has been made elsewhere but it needs to be reiterated:

      A Web page can already force you to download arbitrary files. For example, it can include a hidden IFRAME linked to some URL. This prefetching feature does not allow Web sites to do anything nefarious that they couldn't do before.

      In fact, this prefetching feature is strictly better for users than hidden IFRAMEs or similar, mainly because prefetches are given bottom priority so they never interfere with your other Mozilla network activity.
  • by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:27AM (#4469624) Homepage
    Of course, lets heap praise on the Mozilla developers for their hard work. Without it, we would not have the best browser for Mac OS X, Chimera. [mozilla.org] Mozilla is a full of bloat that Mac OS X users don't need. We already have iChat, Address Book, Mail and iSync built into our beloved UNIX operating system. So a lot of Mozilla's functionality is not needed -- newsgroups are nice but we have better alternatives. [thothsw.com] Chimera is what Mac OS X users really need. Its blazingly fast, supports standards and gives Microsoft Internet Explorer something to aspire too. Poor Omniweb never knew what hit them.

    Get the latest nightly build here! [mozilla.org]

    • by analog_line ( 465182 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:33AM (#4469679)
      The next time I read someone in all seriousness using the term "blazingly fast" the baby seal gets it.

      Chimera's great, I use it, but it has zero speed advantage over OmniWeb. Nil. Goosegg. And in my opinion, OmniWeb looks better.
    • by kitzilla ( 266382 ) <paperfrog&gmail,com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @01:12PM (#4470648) Homepage Journal
      I agree that Chimera ("Navigator," officially) is a terrific Mozilla browser for OS X, but we have a lot of choices these days.

      Chimera is still pretty sparse on features. I use the nightlies, and run into a fair number of buggy builds. But it's quick, and sure looks like an OS X app. I use it far more than anything else.

      KevinG, the guy who did the Pinstripe skin for Mozilla, was nice enough to compile Phoenix 0.3 for OS X. It's just an experiment, not part of the regular project. But damn if it doesn't work, and it has some very cool features. Even *more* OS X choices:

      http://www.kmgerich.com/misc.html

      This OS X build introduced me to Phoenix, which is now running on my Linux box. Kevin's page says his OS X build requires Jaguar, but I'm using it with 10.1.5 just fine.

      Mozilla 1.2b feels very stable on OS X. It's not as fast as Chimera, nor is it as consistent with the Mac human interface standards. But it doesn't suck, and some users like working from within a suite. I know plenty of OS X guys who are more comfortable with Mozilla's mail than Mail.app. It's a matter of preference.

      To me, Netscape 7.0 is heavy and gaudy. It has a spellcheck app, however, and isn't a bad choice for those who rely on the Netscape/Mozilla suite for email.

      As for Omniweb, it's a great browser. A few more features than Chimera in its current state of development, though don't think it renders as well. Speed is a toss-up.

      Every OS X user's needs are different. It's a great time to explore the platform, however. There's a browser for everyone. Run whatever you prefer, and support the community which surrounds it.

      Thanks to all the developers who make my online experience more enjoyable. Your work isn't taken for granted.
  • Moz versus IE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:28AM (#4469627) Journal
    With the two rapid releases of Phoenix and Mozilla, with Netscape (the browser) being pushed by AOL, and with Chimera popular on the Mac, IE may have more users, but aside from being more stable and configurable, Moz is now steadily heading for a 1-1 user:browser ratio. Hopefully, this will result in an extremely customized browsing experience.
    • by azzy ( 86427 )
      Moz has gone beyond 1-1 user ratio. I have several versions of Mozilla installed.. it's about 1-3 user:browser ratio :)
  • by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:31AM (#4469656)
    Type Ahead Find is currently part of the default install. To turn it off, use:

    user_pref ("accessibility.typeaheadfind", false);

    Or, to remove it completely, find all files in your installation subdirectories that match *typeaheadfind*, and delete those files.

    Whilst it's great that stuff like this is being implemented, is anyone actually working on making a point and click interface to active/deactivate functionality rather than having to get users to resort to deleting or editing files?

    If it's already there, for gods sake, why on earth do they insist on giving you these contrived instructions on how to deactivate it?

    If the aim of Mozilla is to get a sizeable userbase and encourage developers to avoid writing for IE only then the first thing they should do is make it easy for the common computer user to do this sort of stuff without having to resort to editing text files.

    Once they have to do that, then you lose and IE will continue to reign.

    • by Kidbro ( 80868 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:47AM (#4469845)
      If the aim of Mozilla is to get a sizeable userbase and encourage developers to avoid writing for IE only then the first thing they should do is make it easy for the common computer user to do this sort of stuff without having to resort to editing text files.

      Good point, but remember that this is the first time we see this feature. I wouldn't expect it to be finished yet (and if you can't live with non finished stuff - don't run betas). I can't speak for the Mozilla team of course, but being a GUI Application developer, I can tell that sometimes you choose between implementing a feature and providing a rough interface to it, or not implementing it at all - as providing a nice "user friendly" (whatever that means) interface would take twice, three or a hundred times longer.
      I would expect there to be a nice point and click interface by the time this leaves beta...

      Moral of the story: Patience :)
    • UI Not needed (Score:4, Informative)

      by tweakt ( 325224 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:49AM (#4469869) Homepage
      Whilst it's great that stuff like this is being implemented, is anyone actually working on making a point and click interface to active/deactivate functionality rather than having to get users to resort to deleting or editing files?
      1. This is a BETA release. (remember Mozilla is not intended for end users)
      2. It's nothing you'd ever need to turn off unless it was causing major problems (ie: crashes).
    • ...is anyone actually working on making a point and click interface to active/deactivate functionality... ...why on earth do they insist on giving you these contrived instructions on how to deactivate it?

      Well, why don't you type "about:config" in your Mozilla location bar. By your argument, there should be pointy-clicky stuff for all 1100+ configurable parameters in Mozilla. Implement that, and Mozilla turns into something like Microsoft Word or the Windows Control Panel (shit everywhere piled under menu upon menu).

      Trust me, it is a good thing that Mozilla doesn't put everything in the GUI. Be thankful that the configuration is in a plain text file and not some binary GUI database or, worse, the Registry.
      • Last I heard, the general Mozilla project attitutde about documenting the preferences was that if you don't know what they are, you shouldn't mess with them. As a highly techincal user, I myself would beg to differ. Failing to document all of these options in one place is a cop-out, and their excuse is pure arrogance.

        If I'm wrong about this, and there is complete documentation on all the prefs files, I'd love to know about it.

  • GTK on Phoenix (Score:3, Informative)

    by distributed.karma ( 566687 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:33AM (#4469684)
    Since Phoenix (my default browser, as Mozilla is a hog) is built from the Mozilla tree, its latest nightly also has the GTK look. Time to rpm -e galeon.
  • by billybob ( 18401 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:36AM (#4469710)
    So what happens when the greedy web master decides to add "rel=prefetch" to his <a href> tags for banners?
  • Wow - what a bummer (Score:3, Informative)

    by baptiste ( 256004 ) <mike AT baptiste DOT us> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:54AM (#4469927) Homepage Journal
    I've used Mozilla as my primary browser/email for a LONG time. Been happy with it. But I made a clean install of 1.2b (after uninstallin 1.2a) on my Win2K/SP3 laptop, and it won't even go past the splash screen. I guess something in my prefs file is hosing it - sure would like to know what.

    Still digging, but it won't even start? Sheesh.

  • by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:02PM (#4469995) Journal
    I really have to say that I find the recent development of Mozilla very inspiring as it brings completely new, unique features to the users. First came integrated popup and advertisement blocking. A simple but effective feature. Then came Type Ahead. Then came link prefetching. Now, in what time span?

    I don't know about you, but at least my opinion is that the browser software has suffered from some serious stagnation during the past years. Since Internet Explorer 4.0 and its CSS and "DHTML" (mostly Javascript+CSS) support, I haven't seen much development in the browsers at all. Opera was innovative with mouse gestures, but I think the browser that truly turns this stagnation of browser features that's often limited to things like "slightly better CSS support", etc is Mozilla. I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?

    IMHO, the changes in Mozilla from a late version such as 1.0 are surely larger (at least more useful) than the changes since Internet Explorer 4.0. Each new version is right now bringing lots of new features. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts for sure. :-)
    • I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?

      All of those things. I think type ahead find was written by an open source contributor (of course the module owners helped out, as with most Moz features). Mozilla is very very easy to hack on, as it's very componentized and large parts of it are just text files (xml/js/css). And finally they've been doing stuff like code review, super review, commit for a while so they are pretty slick about it.

  • Some problems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:09PM (#4470063) Homepage Journal
    I've got to admit, I am have some problems with Mozilla 1.1 (final release). Recently the problems have led to instability. I was trying to buy a generator on eBay the other day. I had a search going and I opened windows to tabs as I found auctions that interested me. Mozilla kept dumping me. My box is a G4/500MP with 512 RAM running OS X 10.2.1. I've had window focus problems where I click in a Mozilla window text box but my focus is still on another window. I have to switch apps and back to regain control. The javascript driven menus on my PacketShaper 4545 web GUI still don't work. This one is really annoying. And the web GUI to the PacketShaper renders very slowly. Overall I'm pleased with Mozilla. It just needs some honing to fix some of the current problems.

    Maybe delaying a release and all new features for a short time to fix existing bugs would be worth it. My $.02.

  • by Milican ( 58140 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:31PM (#4470276) Journal
    You can share bookmarks amoung all your installs of Mozilla, Phoenix, and probably other Gecko browsers (untested). All you do is add the following command to your prefs.js file:

    user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\userdude\\Application Data\\Mozilla\\Profiles\\default\\wx4vqyna.slt\\bo okmarks.html");

    In addition, you can share plugins by adding the following line to your environment. Her is an example of what I did on my Windows box:

    MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH = "C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Share\Plugin" (in Environment Variables on Win2k)

    Really helps so you don't have to redo plugins all the time and you can share one bookmark file for all!

    JOhn
  • by oliverthered ( 187439 ) <oliverthered.hotmail@com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:34PM (#4470295) Journal
    Well, this is almost true,
    please vote for this bug [mozilla.org] (99 votes so-far, lets make it 100)

    so that me and anyone else who uses microsoft proxy server 2 or any NTLM authenticating proxy can use mozilla. (this is probably a few million people, and a lot of corporations)

    This bug has been there since 2000-01-11, and won't make 1.2, hopefully it'll make 1.3 alpha 1!!!
  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:57PM (#4470478) Homepage
    The bug that causes crashes and profile corruption if you have both Netscape and Mozilla installed [mozilla.org] still hasnt't been fixed.

    That's been outstanding for most of a year now, which is inexcusable for a major bug that causes data loss and crashes. The Mozilla team still has way too many "don't do that" items in the release notes. [mozilla.org]

    Unless this thing gets cleaned up, it's never going to get market share. Adding additional features of very marginal utility won't help. Could AOL use Mozilla as their standard browser? No way. It's got to just work.

  • by Thenomain ( 537937 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @01:07PM (#4470575) Homepage
    Maybe I'm missing the standard for it (I'm not on the bleeding edge of things), but I was looking at the HTML 4.01 link rel types [w3.org] and can't find "preload". Fortunately, according to the FAQ [mozilla.org], "next" will do just fine.

    This is a not nit-pick, but with all the touting of how 100% standards compliant Mozilla is, I'm wondering what the philosophy is on extending the standard, if "preload" isn't in some later HTML standard that I don't yet know about us.
  • by esarjeant ( 100503 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @01:37PM (#4470901) Homepage
    There also appears to be a View Selection Source option now. So I can highlight a section of a document and view just that HTML source -- very handy for development.
  • by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @02:17PM (#4471309) Journal
    I installed XUL Planet's Preferences Toolbar [xulplanet.com] on Mozilla, but the next time I installed a new version, it was gone and I had to reinstall it. I know that you can install plugins into your ~/.mozilla directory so that upgrading the browser doesn't require reinstalling the plugins, but is it possible to do this for chrome-like things (like the aforementioned Preferences Toolbar)? I've highly customized the toolbar, as well, and I don't even know where that configuration gets saved. Thanks.

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