Mozilla.org Launches Mozilla 1.3

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

hmm

what, no mp3 player?

Re:hmm

The Konqueror web browser that comes with KDE 3.1 plays both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis!

Re:hmm

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

Re:hmm

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

Nope

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

What about phoenix?

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

Phoenix dead at age 1

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

Re:Phoenix dead at age 1

No prob.
Rembember it's Phoenix [everything2.com], it will just raise again and start a new life!

Re:Phoenix dead at age 1

Was it found dead next to Stephen King?

Re:What about phoenix?

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

Automatic image resizing

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

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

Re:Automatic image resizing

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

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

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

steveha

Image auto-sizing

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

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

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

--Asa

Re:What about phoenix?

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

Re:What about bloat

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

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

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

Re:What about bloat

What is wrong with Mozilla?

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

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

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

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

They dropped the ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex

Re:The best tool.

Oh, please. That's just one big stupid OSS flag-waver. IE versions since 4 have been plenty stable and, yes, I do administer LANs of up to 80 machines, all running MSIE 5.5 and 6 reliably. For me and other "die-hard Windows users," Mozilla hangs and crashes. IE doesn't. Does that mean that Mozilla sucks?

Hm. First, I will say this: IE is stable, sure. But does IE do what the user wants to be done?

How many users can raise their hands and indicate that it's okay for web pages to pop up additional browser windows to display advertisements. Perhaps even maximize some of them.

How many users would say it's okay to "stretch" the standards -- standards that the rest of the Internet is based upon -- implementing them in MSIE so that pages end up being IE-only?

I will give you this: MSIE is stable on Windows 2000 and XP in my experience. Mozilla is stable on Windows *lt;any version>, Linux, *BSD, Mac, and so on. Mozilla lets you decide if you want sites to spawn new browser processes on your machine. Mozilla complies with established standards -- standards that extend far beyond the Wintel world.

If you use linux because it works for you, that's just great, but don't go making blanket statements that are dead wrong. Wishing doesn't make it so. If IE 'sucked,' it would be obsoleted by popular opinion. It doesn't and it isn't.

Honestly, this has nothing to do with reliability, or Linux. It has to do with a browser doing things according to *your* preferences, *your* best interests, as opposed to those of the company distributing the browser (or their partners).

And, WRT your familiar commentary about the magic of having "the source," how much does that mean to the 99.6% of the world who can't code? I certainly can't code beyond scripts, so I don't care and I'm not about to hire someone to do it for me. If it's broken, I find something that ain't, just like everyone else.

It's not about being able to modify or review the source, it's about the methodology that is open source. The fact that hundreds, possibly thousands in this case, of competant programmers are reviewing each-other's source code. All coming from different environments, different backgrounds, different training -- and all spotting different potential problem areas. Bringing in different new ideas.

This, as opposed to a company who may say something like "Okay, you've found a potentially serious security flaw. Here's what we're going to do: pretend it's not there, we'll fix it in the next major release, and hope no "hacker" finds it on his or her own."

Don't tell me this doesn't happen on a daily basis over in Redmond (and in other closed-source projects).

Re:What about bloat

IE is quicker, less bloaty and that is it.

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

Re:What about phoenix?

"Phoenix authors have quit working on it"

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

--Asa

Crap!

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

Re:Addendum: Never Fear

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

From domainwhitepages.com [domainwhitepages.com]:

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

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

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

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

Re:Addendum: Never Fear

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

That sounds like a challenge! Everyone, hit [aol.com] AOL [aol.com] quick [aol.com]! We can do it! GO GO GO!

Sorry, couldn't resist ;)

Autocomplete

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

Re:Autocomplete

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

Neat feature

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

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

Re:Neat feature

If it will make you feel better, I'll send you a giant pic of Janet Reno out of her bikini.

Spam filtering

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

Re:More Importantly!

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

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

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

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

Mozilla! Machine learning????

Thursday March 13, @04:07PM
Mozilla is contacted by slashdot.

Thursday March 13, @04:30PM
Mozilla is slashdotted.

Thursday March 13, @04:50PM
Mozilla takes FIRE BREATHING REVENGE OF DOOM! LAUNCHES NUCLEAR MISSLES AT "THE THREAT"

Thursday March 13, @05:01PM
Mozilla successfully slashdots slashdot with nuclear missles.

One really good thing about this is...

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

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

Re:Already installed

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

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

fuck!

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

You know your internet connection is slow...

...when you're downloading in the middle of a slashdotting, and it's *still* going at max speed. Sigh.

Kjella

How To Build Mozilla w/ Anti-Aliased Font Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks good to me!

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

Strangly enough, thats not way I would Build Mozilla. Usualy I use these to get what I want, this includes all sorts of goodys, that are not just font specific. Also I shy away for the "-march=i686" but I do use O2.

ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --enable-ldap-experimental
ac_add_options --enable-optimize=-O2
ac_add_options --enable-reorder
ac_add_options --enable-cpp-rtti
ac_add_options --enable-cpp-exceptions
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --disable-toolkit-gtk
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --enable-freetype2
ac_add_options --enable-oji
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-short-wchar
ac_add_options --with-system-zlib
ac_add_options --with-system-jpeg
ac_add_options --with-system-png
ac_add_options --with-system-mng
ac_add_options --disable-tests

Unicode in the titlebar!

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

IEZilla

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

Force-upgrade people without them noticing.

Machine Learning in Autocomplete not in 1.3

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

Machine Learning autocomplete is NOT implemented

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

No NTLM?

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

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

Re:No NTLM?

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

Huh?

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

Hope this helps...

Re:No NTLM?

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

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

*grrr* WTF?!?

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

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

Re:*grrr* WTF?!?

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

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

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

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

Looks good so far.

1.2.1 finally fixed www.msnbc.com. However, www.nvidia.com was still not "right". Now even that site works. woot!

I know judging a browser by it's ability to handle the twisted "html" these sites use is a bad thing to do. However, it's nice to see Mozilla take on the challenge and succeed anyhow.

Midas

The Midas functionality looks really exciting, particularly for "Wiki"-like tools - no more ugly customized Wiki syntax!

Only problem is that I can't find a single web page which demonstrates Midas in-action, what gives?!

Re:Midas

How about this [mozilla.org] ?

Bad import feature! Bad!

No IE favorites import. :( It's broken again. Back to Bugzilla....

Re:Bad import feature! Bad!

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

RPMs?

Just curious -- how long does it usually take before they create the RPM's for each release? They don't seem to be available for 1.3 yet.

Mozilla is fantastic :-) :-)

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

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

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

Mozilla usage is rising!

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

All I have to say...

... if any Moz devs are reading, thanks. Mozilla rocks. Still a wee bit slow while loading on Win32 without the 'autoload' feature, but nonetheless an incredible browser.

An excellent example of what open source can accomplish, and I really mean that. Kudos and all that.

Image autosizing!

New to this version are features like image auto sizing...

Am I the only person who does not like the image auto size feature? I am a web developer, and sometimes the graphics I look at are bigger than the window I'm browsing in, and I can't always expand the browser to be bigger than the image.

If this feature has indeed been added to mozilla (and MS could learn this as well), please add an option to turn it off!

An online Starcraft RPG? Only at [netnexus.com]

How *I* want completion to work

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

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

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

They call autosize a feature!?

Do you have any idea how much porn I didn't keep because autosize made it too small??? Not Mozilla too, geez...

Problem with Autocomplete

It seems like this autocomplete thing is more about ranking... I wonder if they'll fix what I consider to be the bigest problem with autocomplete - Mozilla will pick one site from which to return URLs.

Example: If I start typing in 'http://s' for example, it will gladly show me a list of 20 URLs from slashdot.org, but not a single one for stickdeath. Why doesn't it do like (Windows) Explorer-style autocomplete - when I type in the above, provide me with domains from which to choose. When and if I pick Slashdot, then it should provide links from slashdot only, but why on earth does it assume that by typing a few letters, that it should automatically complete 10 documents from the same website, but none from any others?

--Dan

And who said the browser war was over???

Mozilla just keeps getting better and better... With all the features it has, it's well on it's way to becoming the super user's uber browser. I had to tweak one of the "secret features" a few weeks ago. (Port 1080 is denied unless you explicitly tell the browser that it's OK to access) The info I found, referred me to the about:config screen. When I saw it I was very impressed at how much potential there is for using this browser in so many different ways. The only thing they need on Linux now is the "Quick Start" or whatever they call it launcher program. That way you will only have to wait a fraction of a second for Mozilla to appear. I think this could be implemented by having another Mozilla componenet that you can run at X login. It doesn't actually display any output, it just loads the base elements of Mozilla needed to launch any Mozilla app. That would be EXTREMELY cool...

-- For my comments on the new difficulties in first posting and the "broken-ness" of metamoderation, go here:

http://slashdot.org/~Trolling4Dollars/journal/2699 5 [slashdot.org]

Alt tags...

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to configure moz to display ALT tags when I mouse over images? I thought maybe there's an option in that jungle of "secret settings" via about:config.

I know I can see the ALT tags by doing properties on the images, but I'd rather be able to simply see them on mouse over.

But why (redux)?

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

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

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

.haeger

Re:But why (redux)?

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

--Asa

Re:But why (redux)?

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

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

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

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

and still no fix for horrible DNS caching bug

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

Search bugzilla for "dns cache".

No "Snap to Default Button", yet

It's only a minor annoyance, but Mozilla doesn't yet snap to the default button [mozilla.org] in Windows if that setting is configured in Control Panel (when set, the mouse cursor should automatically move to the default button in dialog boxes). You might think it wouldn't be such a tough fix, but it's apparently ellusive :-/.

If you like, you can vote for the bug [mozilla.org] (you'll need a free Bugzilla account [mozilla.org] to vote). You'll probably need to copy-n-paste the URL, as Bugzilla doesn't accept referers from Slashdot.

Yes!!

I love the spam filter... I even used 1.3a and 1.3b get the bayesian filter feature. Now that 1.3 is out I'll be installing that ASAP and hope that it fixes a few minor bugs I've noticed.

No MacOS 9 support anymore

For those of us using MacOS 9, we'll have to stick with version 1.2.1--they've dropped MacOS 9 support this time around. Augh!

So if you want to help a poor Mac (and Linux, for my servers) user who can't afford to upgrade to Jaguar, go to this website [mouken.com] and make a donation! (or buy something).

Shameless, I know. Shame is too expensive for my budget.

Have they fixed the e-mail speed problem?

I would have liked to use Mozilla for my e-mail, as Netscape Messenger 4.7x finally has enough unfixed time/date induced problems so as to be unusable.

I have an inbox (no messages left on server) with about 90 e-mail and 10 MB of attachments. My folders in total have around 30 MB of e-mail. This is on Windows 2000, 800 MHz cpu, 7200 RPM 60 GB disk, HDD FULLY defragmented two days ago, folders compressed not less than a few days ago..

"Compressing" the folders takes 1.5 minutes, despite the fact that I swear I did it only a few days ago. Deleting an e-mail with a 2 MB attachment runs the CPU and HDD for 15 seconds. Same goes for "saving" the attachment to disk.

Oddly enough, even though those operations sound and feel heavy, HDD rattling like heck and system all slow like molasses, the HDD is only reading and writing at 0.5 MB/s, and the CPU is no higher than 10-40 pct.

Now *that's* an unscalable architecture.

Worst of all, while you're saving an attachment to disk your pointer is not locked to an hourglass, and you're free to close the e-mail and delete it from your inbox (which you will do the first time you don't notice the "M" icon still spinning in the e-mail). You get no warning, but I guess because that happens "while" it was trying to extract the attachment, the attachment save gets silently cut off, and you end up with a corrupted partial file on disk (bad zip, etc etc).

That's ONE HELL OF A USABILITY BUG.

After only 1 month, I'm dumping Mozilla Mail as fast as I can.

Is there some auto-update feature?

Maybe I'm just spoiled, but rather than fetching the giant re-installer, is there some way that mozilla can upgrade itself? For all the complaining that web developers do about people out there still running Mosaic v0.9b, it amazes me this isn't a primary feature.

-Zipwow

emacs team

must be getting jealous just about now... ;p

Right Click Tab Menu

Does anyone know how to change the order of the right click tab menu for
the windows version? Before it had "new tab" on the top, now "close tab" is
the top one.

You get to the menu by right-clicking anywhere on the tabs bar.

Upgrading Fun and Mozilla

Can someone tell me the best way to upgrade between the versions?

I've been usin' and lovin' Moz for a long time now, but I'm always worried about going from one version to the next....can I just "cheat" and install overtop? Should I uninstall the old Moz first for the best stability? I tend to be anal in this area because I like my installs to be 'clean,' yet at the same time I'm lazy and want to do as little work as possible. :)

What is the most I can "get away" with?

Why was popup blocking castrated?

In a bizarre move, Mozilla 1.3 actually degrades popup blocking. You used to be able to simply prevent unrequested popups. Now, you have to categorize web sites and make an explicit whitelist. Never mind if one page gives popups that you want to avoid (unrequested) and another page gives popups that you want (requested). What a mess.

Fortunately, you can return the functionality by putting the following line in your prefs.js file:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

Re:Why was popup blocking castrated?

That pref is _exactly_ equivalent to just setting all popups disabled in the new UI. The UI should be clearer -- it only deals with unrequested popups, not requested ones.

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

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

not to mention...

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

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

Re:And they still doen't support IE's DHTML model

Where did you get the 95% figure? It's hard for me to find any sites that don't work in Mozilla, and I go to plenty of sites that use JavaScript and DHTML. When I do find a site that doesn't work in Mozilla, it's nearly always very poorly designed and it's just an accident that it happens to work in any browser.