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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits 256

Posted by timothy from the back-to-lucky-numbers dept.
Anderson Silva (among others) zapped us the news that you can now grab Mozilla's M14 release (Seamonkey). The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availability, but it will soon. For now, here are the release notes. So grab, test, and gripe -- bug reports will only make the Mozilla browser better.
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Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits More

Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits

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  • Mirrors (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I get a feeling the reason the release wasn't announced was to give a chance for it to propagate to automatic mirrors before announcing it. This is true of a lot of releases, by the way .
  • I'd agree with you on that. I'd love them to anounce as early as possible, but maybe they don't want their server to take all the traffic.
  • Looks like this browser is starting to actually become usable. I'm counting the days until I can finally ditch Netscape 4.x for good for my graphical browsing needs and still have a browser that has full functionality.
  • I have just downloaded the build, its certainly getting more stable and faster (Win98 version)

    Ok, lets get cracking in finding bugs, and submit them to BugZilla...

    Can anyone tell me if the Linux version is any faster than previous builds?

    Anyway, its getting there.. finally...
  • where is it?
  • I'm writing this in mozilla M14 right now, and I've one thing to say about it : the fonts are still AWFUL! See Mozilla Bug # 29726 [mozilla.org] for my report and screenshots - does everyone else see this problem? Any ideas what to do?
  • My Mozilla keeps crashing when I try to download the new one. Did it three times in a row now
  • Pavlov increased drawing performance on Linux by at least 2x, scrolling by 5x.

    Worth looking at.
  • Yeah, my two-day old nightly release did the same thing. Eventually gave up and used command line ftp.
  • Check out http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html [mozilla.org] for a list of download mirrors.

    #include "disclaim.h"
    "All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
  • (see topic)

    Hrrrm. I guess I should expect that it would take longer to build the Mac release... but if the Win32 release is already out... hrrrrm.

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by seanb ( 27295 )

    Mozilla looks VERY nice on win32 (I'm at work right now). The dailybuilds have been getting MUCh fatser, and that debug window has finally been hidden.

    I really like the looks of that Mozilla splash screen. Anybody know where I can get that image (aside from taking a screen shot when moz is starting)?

  • If anyone is interested, I've written an article on the release on Betanews.com:

    Here. [efront.com]
  • I was wondering if anyone can tell me how to be able to enter Japanese text in Mozilla for Linux. Currently, I have Netscape 4.6 working under i386/Debian with kinput2. If anyone has an answer please post. (I seem to recall I could read Japanese text just fine. kinput2 doesn't come up like it should...)

  • This better not be M14 (Score:3)

    by slag187 ( 70401 ) <geoff@@@zorched...net> on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @02:50PM (#1233390) Homepage
    So, I downloaded the M14 for Linux (with Talkback support). All I can say is - huh? I ran it for maybe 15 minutes and have had it crash already a dozen times - even on pages that are supposed to be verified (like www.cnn.com).

    I know that this is alpha software, but my impression of the road to M14 was supposed to make it so that people could use it as their full time browser - and thus squash more bugs.

    It crashed the first time I loaded it before getting through the profile creation process.

    I've been rooting for Mozilla for a long time now and have been apologetic - I keep telling people to give them a month or two, to wait for the next Milestone. I was very disappointed with it as I had had high hopes for this release (which has been much touted as the push for stability). Am I the only one? Was it built against different shared libraries than what I'm running? Is it better than Netscape 4.7 for anyone (which I've heard before)?

    Well, I give up for now - I'll wait until the official launch and see how it is then . . .

    I'm jaded :^\

  • Slow and crashy and trembling screen (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mozilla (on Linux) crashed twice on me as I was trying to post a message here. The first time, I was complaining about the slow UI (menu draw slowly, right mouse button menu comes up slowly), but now I think I'll just complain about the crashing.

    And oh, a wonderful trembling screen effect. When I switch from 'html formatted' and 'plain old text' the whole text box literally trembles.

  • Use a talkback build (Score:5)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @02:53PM (#1233392)
    If you're using Windows or Linux please consider downloading a talkback build (they have talkback in their filename) this'll automatically send back crash data (with your permission - a box will appear first) to the Mozilla team which will help them track down the main causes for Mozilla to crash.

    BTW the source code for M14 should follow on the FTP site soon. If you can buld for other platforms please do so and contribute your builds back to Mozilla. See here [mozilla.org] for details of packaging your own milestone build for your platform.
    --
    Make use of your spare CPU time!

  • Is anyone working on a newer OpenBSD port of Mozilla? The one in the port tree is REALLY old.

    What about NetBSD? I think they are in the same state as OpenBSD, but i dont know.

    :wq

  • M14 already? What happened? (Score:4)

    by drivers ( 45076 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @02:55PM (#1233394)
    But there are still 500 bugs targeted for M14 [mozilla.org]

    I saw M13 get whittled down to zaroo boogs, then it came out, I assumed the same for M14. Does this have anything to do with Netscape wanting to get a Communicator 6.0 beta out ASAP?

  • Don`t forget about Mozillazine! (Score:5)

    by Sits ( 117492 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @02:56PM (#1233395) Homepage Journal
    Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] is a website manned by helpful volunteers hoping to make Mozilla the best browser possible. If you are unsure as to how to get started bug testing, I recommend stopping by #mozillazine for a friendly chat.
  • uh, nope, it says m13 when you follow those links too. what i was referring to was that there was no source directory under the m14 directory as is customary with all the other releases.
  • As anyone been able to use mozilla on Linux with 100dpi fonts? I'm running 1600x1200 on a 17", so 100dpi fonts are vital! No matter what I chose in the font preferences, I'm still stuck with 75dpi fonts, which is simply unreadable.

    Besides that, for me M14 seems to be even less stable than the two previous builds (It took me 5 minutes to crash it, doing nothing unusual).
  • I've been using talkback versions of Mozilla since about M8, I think - it doesn't always work. In my experience four out of five crashes go down so hard and so fast that talkback never gets a chance. Maving said that, M13 was in my opinion very nearly as stable as 4.7 - but having said *that* I've now ditched 4.7 in favour of 4.6, because I found 4.7 so fragile as to be more or less unusable.

  • Re:Fonts still AWFUL! (Score:3)

    by Ungulate ( 146381 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @02:59PM (#1233399)
    The problem is really with the abysmal state of fonts in X in general. The best thing any person using Netscape under X can do for themselves is get the Microsoft web fonts [microsoft.com] and install them. Web pages look dramatically better in both Netscape and Mozilla.

    xfstt [unc.edu] is probably the easiest X truetype font server to configure. If you went nutty trying to get the patched xfs in RedHat to work, give xfstt a try.
  • I use mozilla when I can, but it still has crash bugs to work out so it isn't my primary browser. Mozilla has made so much progress so quickly that I am not really worried about the browser.

    What I am worried about is the mailer. The mailer in mozilla, even M14, is atrocious. The UI has so many different styles going on at the same time, it makes me queasy. The widgets are constantly jumping around on the screen. And of course it is hideously slow.

    Today, Communicator is the only viable IMAP mail client for X. Sure, there are dozens of alleged mail agents, but they invariably have some huge glaring usability problem that turn me away. I'll be pretty depressed if the Mozilla mailer sucks and I have to keep 4.72 laying aroung just for the mailer.

    -jwb

  • nightly builds (Score:3)

    by miahrogers ( 34176 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:00PM (#1233401) Homepage
    I've been using last-night nightly build for the last several hours, and (on my machine) it hasn't crashed. I know that on some machines the luck is not so good. But I'm using a newer version of glibc than the computer that built it was(i use libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3 and it was built for libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2), i had to symlink the libs, and it still works great.

    Note: If you are using woody, until the debian build comes out mozilla won't run out-of-the-box on your computer, symlink libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 to libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 , then it should work(at least it did for me).

  • Sites that don't render correctly (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It seems that more sites don't render correctly with M14 than with M13. I'm using Linux.

    Try
    www.wired.com
    www.cnn.com (minor glitches)
    www.zdnet.com

    And did I mention how horribly slow the whole thing is? It seems to lock up my poor P200 whenever a page is rendering.

  • I'm very happy that Mozilla is happening and that its in a pretty usable state now, but it seems that every time I actually try a new version, it is unnaturally slow. (Netscape 4.7 is -much- faster at rendering large pages).

    Can any mozilla developers answer this?

    I know that there is supposedly lots of debugging code enabled (which could be a big part of it), but has anyone tried an optimized build without the debugging overhead? How's the speed compare to netscape and, more importantly, IE?

    (all my testing has been done on Linux)

  • Bug Reports (Score:5)

    by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:03PM (#1233405) Homepage
    Mozilla releases these milestone checkpoints with the hopes that lots of people will take a look and give some feedback. Bug reports are the best way to give this feedback. Mozilla's bug database Bugzilla (located at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org ) provides some really nice tools for reporting bugs and feature requests. Before reporting any bugs it is a good idea to give the database a query to see if your bug has already been reported. This will save mozilla QA a lot of time weeding through duplicate bug reports. You can search the database at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi . Start off with simple searches in the Description field. If that yields too many bugs to weed through you might add more to the search. If you find your bug reported please add any relevant comments to that bug report. If you find that your bug is not reported then please take a quick glance at the bug reporting guidelines before making your report. These guidelines will help you report a bug that developers and QA can track down and fix more swiftly. The bug reporting guidelines ca be found at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guideli nes.html . If you are new to the process you might try the new Bugzilla Helper which will guide you through the process. Remember that the better the report the more quickly it will get confirmed, assigned and fixed. Thanks, and enjoy M14 (for those that like to stay on the bleeding edge, M15 cycle nightly builds have been available for a few days now.)

    Asa
    external QA on the Mozilla project
  • Is it one of these?

    http://personal.inet.fi/cool/ne t/mozilla/splash.htm [personal.inet.fi]

    -jwb

  • Before I forget, the irc server is: irc.mozilla.org

  • Bugs (Score:2)

    by jesser ( 77961 )
    <redundant>Report [mozilla.org] the bugs you find!</redundant>

    Also check the frequently reported bugs [mozilla.org] page and the most popular bugs [mozilla.org] query. If you're really bored you can even look at the bugs [mozilla.org] I submitted.

    I got the impression that M14 was not much more than just another nightly build with the label M14 slapped onto it - Netscape engineers are concentra ting [mozilla.org] on getting all of the big bugs [mozilla.org] out before the M15, the first public beta release. I'm going to skip this release and download another nightly build in a few days.

    --

  • Talkback seems to work most of the time for me, although there's a few times where it's crashed and talkback hasn't appeared (but it's rare).

    The main problem for me is that sometimes it's not possible to connect to the talkback server (it's either down or M14 is crashing a lot and it's gettting slashdotted). Hopefully they'll make sure their talkback servers working by the time they officially announce this on mozilla.org

    --
    Make use of your spare CPU time!


  • You said: "The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availabilit, but it will soon."

    Well.... how soon?

    One look at the mozilla nightly builds ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/ and we all know that the M13 was first built sometimes before 12/20/99 but the official M13 release was 01/21/00

    Actually, the first nightly build for M14 was at 01/21/00, and now we are seeing the M15 nightly builds.

    Let me ask you the question again: how soon?

    One has to be cautious not to raise too much hope on projects like the Mozilla. Unlike commercialware, most open-source projects do not have rigid deadlines.

    So, please be patience. The Mozilla M14 will be out when it is ready.

  • OK, this is just my opinion (usual flames > /dev/null)... I'd tend to blame the idea of XPToolkit for the stability and speed problems in Mozilla. It adds another layer to something that's already complicated enough:
    Mozilla->XPToolkit->GTK->GDK->X (am I forgetting anything).

    Actually, I think the problem is not necessarly with the idea of a cross-platform toolkit, but the idea that widgets should look exactly the same on all OS's. This way you need to rewrite all the widgets for all toolkits, which adds both bloat and bugs. For instance, the scrolling in the message (mail) window is way too slow. A simple GTK widget would be 10x faster. Why not an XPToolkit that keeps the look of the original toolkit? This makes even more sense with GTK when you have themes...

    Any comment on that?
  • if you have the sources the image is under mozilla/xpfe/bootstrap/ and the file is splash.bmp or splash.xpm depending on which format you want

  • Why is this off-topic? Silly maybe. But it's on-topic.

  • Try making sure you deleted all the mozilla files, registry settings, and don't forget to delete these two: C:\windows\mozregistry.dat and C:\windows\mozver.dat

    Then try installing again.

    I'm running M14 on my wife's Win98 machine. Seems snappy fast, and hasn't crashed once!

  • irc log from last night (edited) (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:14PM (#1233418)
    #mozilla topic: "sarcasm is just another service we provide"

    <Icos> Does anyone want to throw in a quote for my article on M14's release? (hint: say yes!)
    <alecf> "At least you don't have to reboot twice to install it"
    <tor> "It sucks less than previous milestones"
    <Pavlov> "Don't run it on SMP systems."
    *** Quits: Icos (Greg@hyper2-61.wctc.net) (Read error: 131 (Connection reset by peer))
    <alecf> heh
    <alecf> we scared him off
    *** Joins: Icos (Greg@hyper2-61.wctc.net)
    <Icos> bah
    <Icos> I was thinking more along the lines of "We here at Netscape are proud of the great new features of M14 and look forward to delivering an impressing beta"
    <Icos> Sigh.
    <Icos> nobody likes the press.
  • Do you run Redhat? I know there were some problems reported with random crashing on older versions of Redhat.

    I've been personally using Mozilla for a number of weeks as my main browser, under Debian (woody) and I rarely have crashes. Javascript can still sometimes bring it down, but for day to day browsing it has already replaced Netscape 4.x

    The only thing I need Netscape 4.x for is sites that require logging in (like the NOC site at work), and Mozilla doesn't handle those.

    Anyway, the results you had surprise me - I've been getting more and more pleased with Mozilla. I haven't touched the snapshot, because I use the nightly builds, but font support seems to have greatly improved three days ago in the nightly builds, and it's getting much faster.

    Maybe M14 is on a different cvs branch to the nightly builds. The only (and irritating) problem I have at the moment is when trying to change fonts in preferences, I can't scroll down at all. Maybe it's my gtk theme, ThinIce.

  • I saw a similar post to yours over on mozillazine [mozillazine.org]. According to MozillaAdmin, they are "low-priority" M14 bugs that are in the process of being triaged to M15.

  • I did delete my old .mozilla directory.

    But I couldn't find c:\windows no matter how hard I looked :)

    (I run Linux as I stated in the original post.)

  • mozilla.org front page might not show m14... (Score:3)

    by jesser ( 77961 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:18PM (#1233422) Homepage Journal
    but the release notes [mozilla.org] are up.

    --

  • I'm in Win95 testing Mozilla M14 at the moment (can't run it in Linux because I haven't got glibc2.1), so I can't give you specifics, but have you tried putting your font paths followed by :unscaled in your XF86Config? Also, have you got the URW outline fonts installed?

    There's more details at http://www.gimp.org/fonts.html - I think modern Linux distributions have all the relevant bits done automatically. It'll help some people suffering from blocky fonts at any rate...

    The Windows version of Mozilla M14 seems very nice - it gets better with every release. Soon it'll replace Netscape as my standard browser.

    Ford Prefect

  • The installation notes in the release notes ask you to delete the registry in~./mozilla if it crashes at startup. I haven't tried it yet but the nightly build before this was stable on my box at home.

    Which version of glibc do you have? the release notes say that the dlopen and dlclose are broken in glibc2.0 which rh5.2 and many distros are linked with.

  • ... but I'm a big fan of Microsoft Internet Explorer. It offers far better support for HTML4 and CSS than any other browser available, it's less quirky than netscape, faster than mozilla (though most browsers are), and free unlike opera.

    I've heard that there is a linux port in the works, but haven't able to find much information on it. Anybody know anything?
  • I do run Red Hat 6.1 - so I doubt it is that bug (which IIRC had something to do with glibc 2.0).
    I don't know what all the libraries that it depends on are, but I'm pretty up to date with my system:

    gtk+ 1.2.6
    glibc 2.1.2
    XFree86 3.3.6

    I sincerly hope that it's just a quirk of my setup that someone will know what it is, and that I will fix it and never run anything but Mozilla again :)

    Any ideas along those lines would be greatly appreciated. Or, how do I get it to dump core so that I can use gdb to find out where the problems are? Anyone know?
  • Yes, I've just downloaded and tried M14 for Linux (I'm running rh6.1), and it has done nothing but crash, run slowly, and render pages incorrectly. Somehow I seem to recall that M13 worked better.

  • Protocols supported (Score:4)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:25PM (#1233431)
    As well as the protocols you'd expect to be supported some outside contributors have also added the daytime protocol (although they've wrongly called it the datetime protocol) and the finger protocol. There has also been work at implementing the IRC protocol.


    Try clicking on the following links in Mozilla:

    Finger [finger]

    Daytime [datetime] (site may be down in a few hours though so if it doesn't load it's probably not mozilla)


    I can see a use for the finger protocol (if all major web browsers end up supporting it there'd be no need for those finger CGI scripts that people use to view .plan files on the web)

    --
    Make use of your spare CPU time!

  • testing vs. personal use (Score:4)

    by SEAL ( 88488 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:26PM (#1233432)
    Why should you download the latest Mozilla milestone?
    Don't say for personal use... it is still in a testing phase.
    You have to remember that the developers are counting on your input.
    Pour over the little details and give them feedback.
    Some of the crash bugs need to be endured - don't go screaming back to I.E.
    Hot off the press builds (nightlies) should probably stay with the developers, however, who have more
    Grits to deal with the situation.
    Down to the last milestone, you have to think like a tester, not an end user.
    Your feedback is important to the Mozilla team.
    Pants off to them... er whoops ;) Hats off.

    SEAL

    (sorry I couldn't resist...)

  • Re:Blame it on XPToolkit? (Score:3)

    by WackyTJ ( 27815 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:28PM (#1233434)
    No..

    Actually that GFX controls and the XPToolkit is almost required. it offeres the following advantages

    -Ease of portability
    -reduced "hard coded" interface routines..

    but the most important thing..

    CSS requires styles to be applied to controls, such as "blink" strikethrough etc... this cannot be handle by ALL native controls in ALL target platforms of Mozilla, so the GFX controls, and XP toolkit, is almost required... there is no other way.. Even IE uses a similar thing to the XP_Toolkit.. but a more proprietry one.
  • [Redundent, just for those that are copy and paste imapaired]
    Mozilla's bug database Bugzilla [mozilla.org]
    Query Bugzilla [mozilla.org]
    The bug reporting guidelines [mozilla.org]

    -bergee
  • YOu can now set the DPI for fonts. For reasons best known to Mozilla, it defaults to ninety-five on my system (xdpyinfo insists I'm on a 75 dpi display...) BTW, how do you tell X what DPI your display is - mine's closer to 120 DPI, being an old 15inch mointor I've underclocked to do 1280x1024@50Hz
    (Modeline "1280x1024@50" 87.602 1280 1312 1624 1656 1024 1025 1031 1058 -HSync -VSync) Yes, I know what a silly idea that is...

    Alos, M14 is only finding a tiny subset of my installed fonts - another poster suggests earlier versions found his (truetype) fonts, and now M14 doesn't, but I don't have earlier versions around to check this, and it doesn't seem to find a lot of non-tt fonts too...
  • One more thing that I noticed is that when I run mozilla, I get this error:

    modprobe: can't locate module net-pf-10

    Maybe that's related? I'm running a stock 2.2.12-smp kernel that came from Red Hat (after having some problems with 2.2.14 - I reverted to see if it would help). But, I saw the same error when I was running 2.2.14.

    Don't know exactly what it is as I could only find references to net-pf-3,4,5 (IPX and appletalk related).

    Huh - maybe that's my problem? Anyone else seen this? Lets see if there is a correlation. Check /var/log/messages - that's where it shows up in my logs.
  • YES, the fonts for the /. headings are HIDEOUS. Other fonts are OK... I've made my font server prefer 100dpi fonts, btw. netscape looks great; M14 renders some fonts all whacked.

    Other than that, everything seems to look good, and it feels a bit snappier UI-wise than M13. (No "middle button fires link in new browser" fix, tho... argh)

    --

  • That is very strange. I'm running Mandrake 7, and I have found the latest nightly builds and M14 (which I am running right now) to be pretty rock solid. Crashes are fairly rare, probably every half hour or so of solid browsing. Rendering was a bit problematic in M13, but is flawless in the latest nightlies and M14, for most pages, even pretty damn complex ones. Make sure you are using ViewManager2, and if you find specific rendering problems PLEASE post URLs to bugzilla and they will be fixed ASAP. Oh, and M14 is much faster than M13 (Linux builds). And the M15 nightlies have a speedup of about a factor of 2-3 for some complicated pages (like the bugzilla query page) over M14... they didn't put the changes into the M14 tree, because they wanted it stabilized.
  • It appears in this build for these finger and daytime links to work you need to right click on them and open them in a new window.
    --
    Make use of your spare CPU time!
  • just started getting my new smp box (BP6, 2 celery 500s) and I've noticed that M13 crashes randomly and often, while it is very steady on my K6. Planning to file a bugzilla report once I get a chance to delve into it a bit...
  • I'm having problems creating a Mozilla.kdelnk for my KDE desktop in Linux Mandrake 7.0. I point it to usr/bin/mozilla/mozilla (or wherever I unpack the files) but I can't get it to start up the browser. I've tried using the "run in terminal" option but I have the same problem. Whenever I go through Konsole, though, and do a ./mozilla it starts up fine. What am I doing wrong? Please help.
  • Hmmm... I just tried it out (Win32). M13 seemed to render pages just fine to me, but M14 seems to get spaces between tables and table backgrounds among other things all wrong... anyone else notice something like that?

    Noted some improvements though... I sure hope they get this thing into a good usable state soon.

  • Do you have any specific examples? Find a URL, post comparative speed results between NS 4.7 and Mozilla. Mozilla, by the way, is a *whole* lot faster in the win32 builds than in the Linux builds. This is a reported, known bug, and is being worked on currently. The latest M15 nightly builds are about 2-3 times faster on some widget intensive pages (like bugzilla query form) than the M14 builds, although in general only a bit faster. Mozilla at it's best (i.e. latest builds on win32) is still slower than IE5, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and it's still in alpha. So I am quite sure win32 builds will be up to snuff. I just hope that Linux rendering is brought up to parity with win32 rendering.
  • You need a distribution that uses glibc 2.1 which includes RedHat 6.0, Slackware 7.0 and the latest Debian (I think - not 100% sure).

    The reasons for glibc2.0 not being supported are ">here [deja.com].
    --
    Make use of your spare CPU time!

  • Nice job, the scrolling really got better.
    still no java though, thats the only thing preventing me from using it as my main browser, so I guess I'm still stuck with my old, buggy netscape 4.x

    ---
  • It's there [mozilla.org] now. But it still isn't and probably won't ever be up to Mac interface standards, which almost makes me wonder why they bother. I assume Communicator 6, based on the Mozilla code, will be though. Can anyone confirm that? Will Communicator 6 use the native widgets for the OSes it runs on?

    --

  • Re:This better not be M14 (Score:5)

    by Slothy ( 17409 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @03:49PM (#1233451) Homepage
    The problem here is that you're using an SMP box and Mozilla is not yet thread-safe, though I have NO idea why they don't put this is big bold letters on the M13/14 pages. So people with a single CPU have a fairly rock-solid browser, and people with SMP boxes think this should probably be Milestone 3.

    The bug for this is:

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2155 6

  • I don't even have netscape any more. I dl'd the Marc 1st build and promptly deleted all other browsers. Coincidentally I freed up about a gig :) didn't know how many other browsers I had on there - - whoa.

    If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
  • (I posted this list of sites earlier as an AC):

    Problems rendering:

    www.wired.com
    www.zdnet.com

    General slowness. When one window is rendering, all the other mozilla windows seem to lock up. e.g. www.nytimes.com seems particularly slow for me, and as it's rendering, this /. window can't be accessed. The entire UI is extremely sluggish as well. And this /. text box seems to tremble whenever I change the /. formatting option.

  • I know that this is alpha software, but my impression of the road to M14 was supposed to make it so that people could use it as their full time browser - and thus squash more bugs.

    The fact that it crashes for you doesn't mean that it isn't usable as most peoples full time browser. It just simply means that it doesn't work for you. Find out what is different about your system, or narrow the situations the crashes occur on. Cross reference this with Bugzilla, and add a bug, or add your comments to an existing bug.

    This is what a public alpha is all about; expect bugs and try to identify -- if not solve -- them.
  • M14 is beginning to show some definate speed increases, as well as the slow disappearance of the many smaller less-important bugs that ran rampant through earlier milestones. It is still clearly a beta product, but it's reaching it's final state very quickly. It may not yet be stable and complete enough for every typical user, but i'm using it right now as i type this, and i would definately reccomend it to anyone with interest in the future of web browsing.
  • I agree. IE beats Netscape flat out at HTML 4.0 spec support, iframes, CSS sheets, and the like.

    I've gone looking for a Linux port but haven't found anything - IE on Linux, as corny as it sounds, would be my ideal setup. Until then I'm stuck with Mozilla and Netscape.

  • You can't run it like that... here's how I fixed the problem. In any way to run it other than from an actual terminal (ie panel, icon, etc) I did:
    cd /where/mozilla/is; ./mozilla
    and it works fine.

    If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
  • Thanks, I did not know that. I agree, it should be widely advertised. I guess SMP is still not very widely used, so it doesn't effect very many people.

    I'd moderate this way up if I could :)
    Thanks again.

  • Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this ... (Score:3)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @04:00PM (#1233466)
    What a lovely comparison. Reminds me of this review for Douglas Adams' "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul":
    "Funnier than
    Psycho, more chilling than Jeeves Takes Charge and shorter than War and Peace..."

    --
  • I had the same problem - looks like another bug.

    BUT

    I did find a (sort of) workaround...if you have a mousewheel, try using it to scroll the menus where the scrollbar doesn't seem to work - it worked for me.

    You may have to have Netscape configured to use the mousewheel first though (although I did notice a "new" pref area for mousewheel settings...)
  • Well that's being generous. It's already crashed once within 10 minutes of using it. I tried to download something, but it kept forcing me to choose to save the file, even though I was already selecting a directory. I know I should report the crash, etc etc, but I spend most of my day at work fighting bugs, so nah! Can't be bothered tonight. Mozilla is still a *long* way away from being an Alpha release methinks.
  • If you've got Netscape profiles already, you can migrate them to Mozilla. Just make sure you've deleted your mozregistry.dat file and then run mozilla -installer or mozilla -ProfileManager. Mozill will present you with a profile manager and you just select the 4.x profile from the list and start it. It will prompt you with a migrate dialog. Agree. Then you can run mozilla with all your 4.x bookmarks, preferences and mail-news settings. Have fun.

    Asa

  • Re:OpenBSD (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just installed the linux-emulation port, and the Linux builds work fine. (Slow, but that's constant across all platforms. Especially when you have a measley 32M of RAM.)

    I'm using FreeBSD, mind you, but I'm 95% sure you could run M14 w/ Linux emulation under OpenBSD.
  • The source is there, why not just compile for your system?

    Because it requires the latest release of CodeWarrior, which I don't own, plus two dozen other obscure Mac development tools.

  • Re:M14 already? What happened? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But there are still 500 bugs targeted for M14

    Wow! That's 130x less than W2k! So why not use it now? :)

  • Huh? I'm a little confused; when I've run Mozilla it looked like it was running single-threaded. Where does SMP come in? (also, a well-written threaded program shouldn't encounter bugs only when running with SMP..these probably bite non-SMP users occasionally, but SMP just exacerbates them..for example, from the bug logs, the problem seems to be that the internal Mozilla memory-allocation/refcounting system wasn't thread-safe! This is a big no-no, and I'm not surprised it was causing problems..) Daniel
  • unfortunately, mozilla is multithreaded but not smp-safe. sucks, don't it?

    But nice and solid otherwise... hopefully it will get fixed.
  • If you want to see more details on this issue, take a look at the primary SMP bug here. [mozilla.org] To comment on some of the other notes on this SMP thread: 1) Yes, it is multi-threaded. The problem is that certain key functions arae not thread safe. 2) The problem does show up on non-SMP boxes, but is rare- it is greatly exagerrated on SMP, both Linux and NT. 3) There is a lot of work underway on this problem, since several of the developers use SMP boxes at home. Unfortunately, while the solution is reasonably straightforward, it will require a lot of work. You'll note that the bug is marked beta1- which means it is a priority. We'll see...
    ~luge
  • The way some people talk [...] Linux products are almost unbelieveable in their stability.

    I agree this isn't true. However I think you could make the following claims:
    • Mature free software tends to be more stable than closed-source software of equivalent functionality.
    • Once a version of a piece of free software is stable, subsequent versions are usually stable. This is not true of closed-source software
    • Linux (and GNU libc and other core parts of the OS) is very stable. This means there is a chance that applications running on top may be stable. This is not true of any popular closed-source OS. It is true of some unix systems which are derived from software developed openly.

  • I would imagine that stable versions will run on solaris, irix and *bsd just as well as on linux. However, you must expect that development versions will be documented best for the most active development platforms. This means Windows > Linux > Mac > Other Unices.
  • I can see a use for the finger protocol (if all major web browsers end up supporting it there'd be no need for those finger CGI scripts that people use to view .plan files on the web)

    Yep. More boxes will be slashdottable.

    --

  • Today, Communicator is the only viable IMAP mail client for X. Sure, there are dozens of alleged mail agents, but they invariably have some huge glaring usability problem that turn me away.

    I'm not sure what your definition of 'viable' is, but this is the first time I've seen Messenger turn up in that sentence without a negative ;-) In any case, assuming you mean a graphical mail client (as opposed to one which can be run in an X-term) there's a pretty lengthy list right here [imap.org]. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention Pine which, though not graphical, is a very solid IMAP client (it should be since the author is one of the people to design the IMAP protocol) and allows you to configure any program you want for viewing of attachments; so unless you have to view your images inline, it works out pretty well.

    Chris

  • OT: Slashdot speed (was 'any hope for the speed?') (Score:4)

    by orcrist ( 16312 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @05:58PM (#1233524)
    I'm very surprised that Rob hasn't implemented Gzip::Chain for Slashdot. For those of you who don't now what that is, it's a modperl handler which gzips the output before sending it. This takes advantage of the single most unused feature of Unix Netscape, namely gunzipping pages on the fly. Given the huge amounts of text on most Slashdot pages, as well as the above-average use of Unix Netscapes by Slashdot visitors, I figure this would be a very significant improvement in speed for said users, not to mention reduced bandwidth usage. Of course, I'm not sure how much CPU time that would require on the Slashdot servers, though I assume bandwidth is more of a bottleneck.

    Just a thought which I keep on meaning to mail Rob...

    Chris
  • Open up a local directory in mozilla. I don't know how it looks on win32 but it really kicks ass under *nix. I know it's kind of silly but it still makes it pretty neat.

    As a side note, do the precompiled binaries have SSL support? I can't get it working and the crypto FAQ on the page hasn't been updated yet.

    Any tips or should I just let the Lizard build overnight?

  • There are a couple of things that you can do to improve fonts:
    • Look at the Font De-uglification HOWTO
      FDU-Mini HOWTO [linuxdoc.org]
    • Install some True Type fonts from ...... Microsoft!
      They have a fontpack [microsoft.com]

    • which provides some nice stuff like Arial Black etc...and then install one of the TT font servers:
    • One of the most popular is xfsft [ed.ac.uk]
    • Another available for download is xfstt [unc.edu]
    • Use RH6.1 which has xfs prepatched with xfsft for TT fonts
    • If it's just the sizes that bother you, that's a pretty oldish problem which is fixed by switching the order of the 100dpi and 75dpi fonts in your font catalogue
      There's a note about it from as far back as NS2 at bigfonts [uiuc.edu]that might help
    • Finally Christopher Browne has really helpful web-pages with this topic indexed (among many others) at cbbrowne [hex.net]

    --Crush
  • The README contained the following line:

    <i>mozilla-win32-M14-talkback.zip is identical to mozilla-win32-M13.zip.</i>

    I'm grabbed talkback and am just running it now, it does say M14 - so I guess that's just a typo and not a version behind!
  • The BSD OSes have made the Bug reporting list, but they have not made the nightly builds/release builds.

    Anytime you submit a bug report, they say 'use a current build'. Make BSD builds, and you will get current info.

    If they build it, we will come.
  • That's strange: I've used the nightly binaries and just built the current CVS, and they both run circles around communicator 4.6. (I haven't bothered to upgrade to 4.7's bugs yet) As an example, load Mozilla M13 or M14 and look at a graphics-intensive site like the Wallpapers section at customize.org [customize.org]. or any of the themes.org [themes.org] sites. It takes about 1.5 minutes to render a 20-image page from customize.org on Netscape, and less than half that on Mozilla. Slashdot and other text-heavy sites seem close to equal on both browsers.

    For the people keeping score at home, that's Netscape Communicator 4.61 and Mozilla current CVS configured with --disable-mailnews --disable-debug --enable-x11-shm, on a P200 running Linux 2.2.13
  • do you not need things that use crypto? personally, I have mr. spammail (and slashmail) box at hotmail that I couldn't get to in M13... of course I expect this to change, but it sure as hell hasn't yet (I just checked hotmail in M14 for linux).

    Lea
  • >and its not worth it when IE is freaking build into
    >peoples operating systems...

    oddly enough, it's not built into mine. and I have no use for anything else in windows, and I can not do my work on it, so I can't switch. see the problem here? you have excluded a good number of people from your customer base with this. (now, I don't buy insurance, so you don't give a damn about me, but that's not the point :) )

    yes, in an intranet you can force everyone into windows, but do you really want to? perhaps you develop applications for windows. otherwise, why would you want to force them? personally, I would have about zilch productivity on a windows platform...

    just some food for thought...

    Lea

  • Re:OT: Slashdot speed (was 'any hope for the speed (Score:3)

    by Zico ( 14255 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2000 @11:13PM (#1233584)

    I don't think that any benefits would be worth the extra load on the server compressing all this dynamically-generated data, though. Especially because I don't think the benefits would be too drastic for most users. A lot of users (I'd guess most) have net connections (modems, isdn adapters, etc.) that already perform decent text compression between them and their ISPs. Just my opinion, corrections welcome

    As an aside, IIS 5.0 (maybe 4 as well, I'm not sure) also supports compressing sent data -- any idea if Netscape can handle this as well?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • In fact, I posted this with M15. It's a nightly build - so far, pretty darn nice. Still a memory hog, though.
  • Gentle Slashdot team,
    please introduce user-customizable comment filters. They may look like this:

    • content:goatse.cx: -1
    • content:grits.*pants: +1
    • author:Broose Perrens: -1
    • author:^TrollKing$: +1
    • etc.
    With an option to display 'em on user's page, and an option to use top N popular filters, where popularity is weighed by karma. You will earn ethernal gratitude and Karmic Koolness.
    --
  • I especially like clicking an MSIE button and seeing a blank window pop up in less than a second. That's all I ask for.

    This is achieved by preloading IE on startup, as testified by Prof Felton in the DOJ trial.

    So if you like it, you could get exactly the same effect by preloading netscape/mozilla. If you also use a window manager which hides shrunk windows, then the effect is identical.
  • They've squashed a couple of showstopping speed bugs in M14. It's the first time I've seen mozilla running at a speed comparable to IE.
    It offers far better support for HTML4 and CSS than any other browser available

    That depends if you count mozilla as "available". It is more standards-compliant than IE.

    If you need to use freedom-eroding software because it is technically better than Netscape, then please go ahead. But don't give people a false impression about mozilla by making misleading claims like this.
  • Do you believe that IE having a very high market share will mean that MS can pollute the HTML standard to their heart's content? Do you think this will make it hard for other people to write web browsers? Do you think that would damage competition, and hence innovation in the web browser market?

    If the answer to all the above questions is "yes", do you think that scenario is your "ideal setup"?

    If the answer to any of them is "no", then I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

    (this is not intended as a flame, though maybe as part of an impassioned debate)

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