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Mozilla Software The Internet

Mozilla 1.6 Beta Released 404

Posted by timothy from the dinomonster dept.
Sick Boy writes "As reported on Mozillazine, the Mozilla Foundation today released Mozilla 1.6 Beta. This latest milestone adds support for NTLM authentication on all platforms and improves the implementation on Windows. The automatic page translation feature has been restored (now powered by Google Language Tools) and a new version of ChatZilla, 0.9.48, is now included. In addition, several security and crash bugs have been fixed during the beta release cycle. Builds can be downloaded from the Mozilla Releases page or directly from the mozilla1.6b directory on ftp.mozilla.org. The Mozilla 1.6 Beta Release Notes have more detailed information about what's new and known issues to watch out for."
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Mozilla 1.6 Beta Released More

Mozilla 1.6 Beta Released

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  • Torrents (Score:5, Informative)

    by shamilton ( 619422 ) * on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:41AM (#7678031)

    Not that I doubt they can take the load, but why make 'em?

    • Re:Torrents (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Aaron England ( 681534 )
      And why should we trust you to provide tampered-free code?

      • Re:Torrents (Score:5, Informative)

        by shamilton ( 619422 ) * on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:46AM (#7678052)

        You shouldn't. Good thing they provide MD5 sums [mozilla.org].

    • Re:Torrents (Score:5, Funny)

      by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:51AM (#7678075) Homepage Journal
      Not that I doubt they can take the load, but why make 'em?

      Holy Smokes! 1 peer, 1 seed and 184kbps??

      You sir are seeding from the bandwidth of the gods!! My hats off to you!

  • very nice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by koekepeer ( 197127 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:46AM (#7678049)
    especially things like the NTLM authentication support on all platforms gives us a stick to beat the anti-opensource FUD spreaders with

    see? it works!

  • I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:46AM (#7678053)
    The roadmap has implied for some time that 1.4 was the last unified (XPFE) Mozilla-based release. 1.5-1.6 was supposed to be the Firebird transition period, during which Mozilla-the-unified-browser was supplanted by Thunderbird and Firebird. Perhaps that was too ambitious, and they've changed their mind, but the roadmap (here [mozilla.org])still indicates otherwise.


    What's the deal? It really looks like the new roadmap is "build in all the features people REALLY bitch about into XPFE Mozilla, then once Firebird/Thunderbird is more stable, we'll transition to those". I'm fine with that, but shouldn't they just come out and say it?

    • Beats me too... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:57AM (#7678108) Homepage
      ...I'd think that getting Firebird & Thunderbird going, which seems to be a lot more plug-in oriented would make it easier than the "One tool to please them all" that they're trying to make Mozilla into.

      Oh well, I won't complain, I'll just use Firebird in it's 0.x stage, it's more than stable enough for that anyway. Maybe they'll come in version 2.0 after all?

      Kjella

      • Re:Beats me too... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by koekepeer ( 197127 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:09AM (#7678143)
        i don't get you... how do you mean "one tool please them all that they are trying to make Mozilla into?"

        Mozilla *is* and *was* already a "swiss-knife" application. including a kitchensink ;)

        but yes, i agree completely that a more modular, plugin-style architecture would make things a lot better (more maintainable). just have a little patience... apparently it takes more time than planned
    • If I recall correctly, there was a really tiny note at the bottom of the roadmap or of the 1.4 release that said that it was not going to be possible anymore. Speculation was they were hit really hard by the demise of Netscape (and thus the loss of umpteen Gecko developers). I think this more than anything put off Firebird being anointed the new Mozilla Browser.

    • Re:I'm confused... (Score:5, Informative)

      by superyooser ( 100462 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:50AM (#7678476) Homepage Journal
      Go here [mozillazine.org] and scroll down to the post by jasonb (a moderator).

      Elsewhere on MozillaZine, somebody (sounding authoritative) said that the transition would occur in the first half of 2004. Nobody really knows. I would guess that it will be at least two more versions after 1.6, but I am not a Mozilla developer.

    • Maybe the regressions? Or profile migration? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @08:14AM (#7678913)

      There were several unfortunate bugs that crept in with 1.5, and as far as I'm aware haven't been fixed yet, e.g.,

      • Mozilla mail pops up asking some people for their password all the time, even if they tell Password Manager to remember it
      • Gecko still renders some page layouts (like Slashdot) badly first time out, IIRC due to some bug with the box layout code
      • they've messed up a couple of things with the CSS code while trying to fix other bugs, e.g., margins around HR tags don't work properly now.

      These are annoyances more than critical faults, but bring down the general quality. Given that the functionality used to work until 1.3 or 1.4 in each case, they're also regressions, which suggest weaknesses in the code introduced inadvertently and best fixed before building on it further for Thunder/Firebird.

      It could also be the issue of profile migration. AFAIK, there are still no solid tools available to move a profile from Moz to the next generation alternatives, nor any easy way to move back if you don't like the change. The Thunderbird download pages are covered in warnings about this. If you're relying on Moz for more than toy use, for example if you have thousands of e-mails filed away that you want to keep, that alone might be enough to prevent you considering an upgrade, and thus to justify continued development of the original Mozilla tools in parallel with the new work.

  • SVG support (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AllergicToMilk ( 653529 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:47AM (#7678057)
    Ah, but when will they add SVG support to the standard build. I suspect we will always be tied to the non-open Flash format until someone steps up and makes SVG support in a browser standard.
    • In order to check out the SVG support, I build my own image of Moz from the mainline CVS branch a couple of weeks ago.

      The SVG isn't included for good reason - in its current state it is next to useless. Moz natively supports SVG right now as much as Microsoft natively supports the POSIX API - just enough to claim it, not enough to be useful.

      However, IF you have the machine and the connection to do so, I suggest building your own - they have greatly improved the build process. Compiling moz with "-Os -marc

    • Re:SVG support (Score:5, Informative)

      by gaspyy ( 514539 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @09:29AM (#7679243)
      the "non-open Flash format" argument is so old is not funny anymore.

      The Flash IDE is proprietary. The Flash file format is open and documented. You can write your own program to create or read flash files like so many have.

      SVG may be nice but with 98% market penetration I don't see Flash disappearing anytime soon. Also, considering its graphics+animation+sound+video (sorenson based) capabilities, coupled with a pretty good language (based on ECMAScript 4), Flash is a very powerful tool.

      I realize that /. is an anti-Flash crowd, but as a technology Flash is no more evil than animated gifs. Both are abused by advertisers but both have legitimate uses.

  • Any news on AmiZilla? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:48AM (#7678063)
    Any news on how the port of mozilla to AmigaOS is going?
    • I think the development team dropped that in favor of the ComiZilla project ... the port of Moz to the Commodore 64 ( ... the lead developer's email is apparently mccarthy@mozilla.org).

    • Re:Any news on AmiZilla? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:29AM (#7678212)
      Dead as a doornail. IIRC it began around the time of Milestone 9 or something, and nothing was ever released in public.

      Besides, why do you ask on Slashdot?
      Try a more specific site like ANN.lu [ann.lu] or amiga.org [amiga.org].

      (Or if you want to be fed with lies and hear everything's A-OK and you should send more money to "Amiga, Inc." in order to "support the community", then head over to AmigaIncOtherworldly.nuts [amigaworld.net])

  • Firebird is WAY better than Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's smaller, faster and supports the W3 far better than IE. It's also incredibly extensible - if you are a web designer you simply must try out the webtools bar. And I thought it was supposed to take Mozilla's place. Why haven't they killed off Mozilla yet?

    • I disagree (Score:5, Informative)

      by jopet ( 538074 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:13AM (#7678152) Journal
      FB is hardly that much faster - it uses exactly the same rendering engine and set of libraries under the hood, so there is just a tiny speedup from the GUI that is unnoticable on modern fast computers. It does NOT support W3 better or worse, since it uses exactly the same Gecko engine. And it lacks many features of Mozilla that need to be brought back through extensions. And inflationary extensions can eventually cause severe security problems.

      • Re:I disagree (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hacker ( 14635 )

        "It does NOT support W3 better or worse, since it uses exactly the same Gecko engine."

        Actually, the HTML rendering in 1.6 changed in very ugly (i.e. broken) ways. I can have 1.5 and 1.6 running against a site, such as our bugtracker [plkr.org] for Plucker [plkr.org], and the way it renders the tabled HTML changes. colspan is broken and appears to be "reversed" (adding a colspan incrementor, shrinks the width of colums spanned).

        There are a few places where it completely ignores CSS values for coloring as well, leaving pages

  • Legal Ramifications Resulting From Use of NTLM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:50AM (#7678071) Journal
    From http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3 990 [mozillazine.org]
    Microsoft's NTLM authentication protocol, popular on Windows-based corporate networks, is now supported by Mozilla on all platforms. Previously, NTLM authentication was only available to Windows Mozilla users, requiring the presence of the Windows SSPI API. Now, the SSPI code has been discarded and a cross-platform implementation has been checked in.

    This makes me wonder if Microsoft will peruse legal action to block Mozilla from using a cross-platform, non MS implementation of an MS technology. Because NTLM is undocumented [innovation.ch], I wonder what the legal ramifications of implementing it are? Do you own a copyright to an undocumented technology?

  • Deja-vu (Score:4, Informative)

    by a.koepke ( 688359 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:52AM (#7678086)
    I was getting a bit of Deja-vu reading the NTLM stuff since I was sure they had announced it earlier.

    NTLM support on all platforms was announced on the 18th of Nov and has been available in CVS since then.

  • Firebird merged, When ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sorry guys, but IMHO Firebird is what mozilla should habe been : nice look, 'speed-o-light' fast, IE killer ...

    And last time i used mozilla (a year ago), it was slow, ugly, and somehow much buggy !

    So my question is, when will they merge the two project ?
    • I don't think they are merging it, they will keep working on the Mozilla core but not release any more Seamonkey (Mozilla Application Suite) milestones.
    • a year ago, mozilla was slow, ugly, and somehow much buggy. I use 1.5 and it is fine, so - on the whole - (there was a problem with font-sizes when printing) was 1.4.
    • > Sorry guys, but IMHO Firebird is what mozilla
      > should habe been : nice look, 'speed-o-light'
      > fast, IE killer ...

      Yeah, 'speed-o-light' ... maybe in an alternative universe where c 10m/s

      I have Firebird 0.7 installed here. To start it up (from an initial zero-window state) on this 550MHz Pentium III, I have to wait something like ten and a half seconds.

      Mozilla 1.5 has this nice feature that lets you preload the application. Because of this, I can start from the same zero-window state and get
  • Firebird is clearly the chosen one. I wish they would put a final stake through the heart of the old mozilla and pass the mantle to Firebird already.

  • Skins (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:15AM (#7678157) Homepage Journal
    Warning, this is semi offtopic.

    As much as I love Mozilla as a regular user both in Windows and in Linux (using it now) I really wish they would fix backwards compatability with older skins. There's some really nice KDE skins out there (one in particular on KDElook that I love) that I wish I could use.

    • Re:Skins (Score:3, Informative)

      by bgfay ( 5362 )
      Backward compatibilty with skins doesn't seem like the biggest issue to me. I worry that developers get too caught up in supporting what was and that limits what can be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for open source developers to do a Word format thing where they keep changing the format to get everyone to upgrade, but neither do I want a system whereby every legacy app is supported in the new version and thus, everything is clunky.

      I'm not saying this as well as I had hoped. But what I guess I'm talk

  • One flaw with Mozilla & Firebird. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zymano ( 581466 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:23AM (#7678191)
    I was talking to a few members of the development team and asked them when they would implement a faster,better web page caching system like opera but the developers mentioned it would take thousands of lines of new DOM code. They also said if you want faster browsing then just open a new window . I think there is a lack of priorities by the top managers at mozilla. How could making an installer be more important than making the brower faster. Also the fast forward and rewind is a good idea . If you notice ,alot of these direction features are in ADOBE ACROBAT PDF viewers.

    • Re:One flaw with Mozilla & Firebird. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Alex ( 342 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:08AM (#7678345)
      I think there is a lack of priorities by the top managers at mozilla. How could making an installer be more important than making the brower faster.

      You haven't quite got your head around this "open source" thing have you?

      Alex

    • Re:One flaw with Mozilla & Firebird. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by falsification ( 644190 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:08AM (#7678347) Journal
      Mozilla is optimized for tabs.

      Once you've gotten used to 20+ tabs and flipping between them instaneously, watch out. Mozilla is like the crack of the Internet. Highly addictive.

    • Re:One flaw with Mozilla & Firebird. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wannasleep ( 668379 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:09AM (#7678349)
      I'll give you one reason: the average (window$) users will give up if the installation is not better than smooth and will never see all the great things mozilla has to offer. Sadly, the average user is used to bearing with slow stuff more than he is to thinking.

      Remember: perception is more important than reality.

    • Re:One flaw with Mozilla & Firebird. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by monkeyfinger ( 683580 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:46AM (#7678462)
      How could making an installer be more important than making the brower faster.

      I think a proper installer is a very high priority. I'm a linux user and use and I am quite happy using tar, but I've got a lot of friends who use windows and don't have the skills to install software that doesn't have an installer.

      With an installer these people can download and install it themselves and then they can tell their friends, who can do the same. Mozilla usage can increase at an exponential rate. Without the installer mozilla would only be available to the technically savvy and their close friends.

    • Not the Unix way (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @09:07AM (#7679110) Homepage Journal
      I don't understand why Mozilla has ANY form of disk caching built in in the first place - that is not the way of Unix.

      Let a seperate program do the disk caching (e.g. Squid). Let Moz and any other program use that program. Thus, everybody benefits from the cache.

      Just like in the latest released of libresolve (the DNS library for *nix systems) now has the "lightweight resolver" which is a small caching resolver library, so that applications that stupidly keep asking to resolve the same address don't load down the nameservers.

      The way of Unix - "small, sharp tools" or "one job, one program" is not just for geeks - it makes for a more robust system as the programs can be optimized to do what they do VERY WELL.

      • Re:Not the Unix way (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tack ( 4642 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @10:11AM (#7679519) Homepage
        I don't understand why Mozilla has ANY form of disk caching built in in the first place - that is not the way of Unix.

        You might not know this, but Mozilla doesn't just run on Unices. It also runs on Windows, Mac OS, and god knows what else. Most of what Mozilla does is not the way of Unix, mainly for the sake of being cross-platform.

        Anyway, if you're interested in "small, sharp tools" or "one job, one program," you should look at Firebird and Thunderbird. You might be interested in knowing that this is the direction Mozilla is heading. So the Moz dev team would appear to agree with you there -- don't hold your breath about losing the disk cache, though.

        Jason.

        • Re:Not the Unix way (Score:4, Interesting)

          by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @10:30AM (#7679627) Homepage Journal
          Actually, my point was that by creating a seperate cache program, they could bring the benefits of this to ALL platforms, *nix or not.

          And by the way - MacOS is Unix.

          The biggest single mistake Netscape made back in the day was to NOT realize that by providing a set of small sharp tools to the Windows programmers, they left the market open to Microsoft, who did exactly that. This is something they are trying to correct with Mozilla, by providing things like Gecko and the Netscape portable runtime libraries, but if they were to provide a unified disk caching library they could begin to provide a real benefit to Windows users.

  • I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:27AM (#7678201) Journal
    But why not concentrate on implementing IE's version of DHTML? Given, MS doesn't follow set "standards" in this department. But many developers prefer MS's approach and most users (willingly or ignorantly) use Internet Explorer. These two factors cause many sites to support IE exclusively. It is very expensive for companies to implement Mozzila compatible versions of their webpages for the minority of internet users who don't use IE. Why not save everyone a lot of time and money and support Microsoft's version of DHTML?

    • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:39AM (#7678243)

      But why not concentrate on implementing IE's version of DHTML?

      Because the Mozilla developers will always be playing catchup. Once MicroSoft cottons onto the fact that the Moz people are expending considerable effort in matching IE's DHTML features, they'll most likely start releasing new extensions. As it is, there is a good compromise already in Mozilla. Web pages that don't appear to be standards conforming are rendered in "sloppy" mode, which generally works for IE targeted stuff.

      At the end of the day, I cannot think of a single website that uses IE specific DHTML in a way that makes me yearn for support for it in Moz. The last IE only website I encountered was the Egg online bank one. Their insistence that I hadn't got a recognised browser simply means I got a credit card from somewhere else (Sainsburys as it happens).

      Chris

      • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Informative)

        by zonix ( 592337 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:13AM (#7678364) Journal
        As it is, there is a good compromise already in Mozilla. Web pages that don't appear to be standards conforming are rendered in "sloppy" mode, which generally works for IE targeted stuff.

        Actually both IE and Mozilla/Gecko (don't know about Opera) have this quirks rendering mode.

        They use DOCTYPE - the first line of the source - sniffing to determine which (X)HTML version the web page is written for. If the page indicates the use of a strict version of (X)HTML, these browsers will render the page in a strict standards compliant mode. Everything will be rendered according to the strict standards as proposed by The WWW Consortium [w3.org]. Your pages will look the same both in IE and Mozilla, however don't be fooled by IE's relaxed attitude towards block/inline content - do read up on this in the specs. If you preview your pages in Mozilla first you will save a lot of time, because it's not as forgiving when you make mistakes.

        In quirks mode you can use all the dirty tricks from the old days. Everything will look horrible accros different browsers, and the source will be next to unmaintainable!

        The quirks/strict standards modes are triggered by these doctypes respectively:

        Quiks mode:

        HTML 3.2
        HTML 4.01 Transitional
        HTML 4.01 Frameset
        XHTML 1.0 Transitional
        XHTML 1.0 Frameset

        Strict standards mode:

        HTML 4.01 Strict
        XHTML 1.0 Strict
        XHTML 1.1

        I'd advise everyone to write (X)HTML to the strict versions and make the www a better place to be for all of us.

        z

        • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Informative)

          by neocrono ( 619254 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @06:02AM (#7678517)
          (don't know about Opera)

          Here [opera.com] is Opera's rendering mode "strategy."

          Having recently made an excursion into the world of XHTML 1.1 web design, I have to say, it demands so much of your code, you'll never look at tag soup the same way again. But it's worth it. It took a while, I adjusted, and will never give an (X)HTML document that doesn't validate* [w3.org] to the browsing public again. I strongly urge all of you to put forth the effort to check your pages and read up about web standards (here [w3.org]) as well.

          If only there were some way to get the same from the 8,419,528,073 animated GIF-loaded, Frontpage Express, Geocities-hosted messes elsewhere on the web.

          *: Don't forget to check your CSS [w3.org] for validity as well. :)
        • "Everything will be rendered according to the strict standards as proposed by The WWW Consortium [w3.org]. Your pages will look the same both in IE and Mozilla" Not quite true, that is what the strict or standards modes are intended to do (and partially do) but realistically certain things are going to be treated differently even by browsers in standards mode. For example floats are treated much differently by IE then in Mozilla even if both are in rendering an XHTML 1.1 page (personal experience with my o

          • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Informative)

            by zonix ( 592337 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @07:25AM (#7678765) Journal
            For example floats are treated much differently by IE then in Mozilla even if both are in rendering an XHTML 1.1 page (personal experience with my own site).

            That's probably because IE's CSS implementation is a wee bit lacking. I've run into that float problem myself, but I got around it.

            There are ways around other IE CSS lackings as well, e.g. IE 5 had problems the w3c's _recommended_ way of centering text by specifying both left and right margins as 'auto'. It's fixed in IE 6, but I believe you could put in extra (well, redundant) rules in your style sheet to satisfy IE 5. However it's a bit ugly and unfortunate that you have to do it.

            If you check out W3c's pages, even they will sometimes present different style sheets depending on your browser. The CSS page [w3.org] itself is a good example. Try IE and Mozilla with this one.

            In any case, these lackings on IE's part will hopefully be fixed in the future, which means if you follow the standard IE will ultimately have to follow you.

            z
        • Do IE and Mozilla treat the box model in the same way? (Example : try setting a fixed width box with a border, then adding some padding to it - it will currently look different under each browser)

          If it does, then cool, but I'd be surprised.

      • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Informative)

        by John_Booty ( 149925 ) <johnbooty@NOSPaM.bootyproject.org> on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:29AM (#7678418) Homepage
        At the end of the day, I cannot think of a single website that uses IE specific DHTML in a way that makes me yearn for support for it in Moz.

        I agree 100%. I've been using Mozilla and Firebird as my primary browsers for several years... never do I hit sites that make me "need" Internet Explorer.

        Occaisionally I'll hit a site with DHTML menus that render a little funky in Mozilla because they weren't coded right, but I never hit any sites that "need" IE.

        If the "compatibility" thing is what's holding anybody back from trying Mozilla or Firebird, then... by all means... you're really not missing anything, guys!
    • because your statement is false. I work at a company which develops applications for web browsers, so there is a lot of Javascript/DOM/DHTML etc involved. The current browser generation is not nearly as difficult to handle as it was in the bad old times of Netscape4/IE4. We have a neat little js-framework that handles the differences between IE and Mozilla and most code works on both browsers without heavy modification.

    • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zonix ( 592337 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:49AM (#7678277) Journal

      Shouldn't that be:

      But many developers (willingly or ignorantly) prefer MS's approach and most users (willingly or ignorantly) use Internet Explorer. It is very expensive for companies to implement Mozzila compatible versions of their webpages for the minority of internet users who don't use IE.

      I'm tired of hearing this argument! If you just adhere to the standards [w3.org] when creating web pages you'll be just fine. In fact, you'd be better off as your pages will be much more easy to maintain, and you'll benefit greatly from all the available features that come with CSS. Try weighing the cost of maintaining a tag soup IE optimized (ugh!) page against a page using strict standards and the latter will win anytime!

      IE is way behind Mozilla and Opera, it doesn't even support application/xhtml+xml, which is (or should be) used for XHTML. And don't get me started on the XML-declaration, IE chokes on this and throws itself into quirks mode when rendering your content.

      z
      • I'm tired of hearing this argument! If you just adhere to the standards when creating web pages you'll be just fine.

        If you adhere to the standards it will work just fine in Mozilla. It might work in IE, but quite probably won't if you're doing any CSS2 or some CSS1. IE plains sucks when it comes to standards support.

        This is both a blessing and a curse for Mozilla really. On the one hand it's good that there is an open source browser will full support for the latest standards, while MS still don't have on

    • Re:I know I will get flamed for this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by globalar ( 669767 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:57AM (#7678307) Homepage
      "Why not save everyone a lot of time and money and support Microsoft's version of DHTML?"

      Which is harder? Designing web pages by a common standard or conforming to one application's twisted implementation of said standard? You don't necessarily save money by developing only for IE. You waste time trying to create interesting ways to mimick features that can be trivial to implement in any compliant browser or simply attempting to figure out what IE will let you do. Remember browser compatibility charts that used to tell you what browser's supported what features? These were nightmarish for a simple markup language and a few CSS features. And so the solution is to just give up on compatibility charts and let MS have its way?

      "It is very expensive for companies to implement Mozzila compatible versions"

      No, no, I think you have it backwards. You are familiar with web standards [w3.org]? IE does a half-baked job of implementing them, makes some mistakes, omits things, and then leaves most of these problems for long periods of time. Oh yes, and some features actually might crash the browser.

      Mozilla doesn't try to make web pages conform to some twisted view of a standard. Rather, Mozilla takes said web standards and attempts to comply with them.

      There is also a principle here which is very important and every one seems to give up on. Open standards are important because they accomplish several things at once:

      1) They promote use of the medium - making a given medium more accessible and beneficial to all involve.

      2) They limit unnecessary complexity/redundancy - this saves everyone time and money.

      3) They keep control away from single-minded interest groups who wish to control users of the medium. In essence, they protect the medium and its users. In the best cases they represent the interests of users and those care most about the medium's community.

      Some people refuse to allow IE to dominate the browsable Internet unchallenged because it will only hurt the community and all involved. IE's dominance has brought apathy to its lackings - everyone knows in many ways it sucks, but the majority of its users are either ignorant, don't care, or are (seemingly) powerless. This in turn has actually warped the perception of the Internet into many things it should not be (a circus for advertising, for one). But even worse, IE has forced many developers to forget web standards and focus on IE and its version of things. In effect, IE says what is standard and what is not and we all obey.

      • Which is harder? Designing web pages by a common standard or conforming to one application's twisted implementation of said standard? You don't necessarily save money by developing only for IE.

        You are familiar with web standards [w3.org]? IE does a half-baked job of implementing them...........

        Mozilla doesn't try to make web pages conform to some twisted view of a standard. Rather, Mozilla takes said web standards and attempts to comply with them.

        You're right, but you're missing the point. Consider t

  • I only have a few computer nerd friends. All my other friends' eyes just glaze over when I try to explain the benefits of using Mozilla. So I don't even try any more.

    Hey, if they love popups (they aren't usually even aware of the Google Toolbar, for instance), and enjoy the occasional virus or homepage hijacking, they can help themselves.

    How sad that most people just don't really seem to care. :(
    • Maybe trying to explain things to them isn't the best idea, not every one will grasp something unless they see it. It may be easier for them to comprehend if you actually go round to their place and give them a demo.

      I personally would set people up with firebird. It's a slick looking browser and that will impress a lot of people. If you sit them down and gently guide them through tabbed browsing it will all make sense. Popup blocking can be demonstrated by challenging them to find a website with a popup (

  • Web Editor (Score:5, Informative)

    by eternal_soul ( 637942 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:47AM (#7678271) Homepage
    Am I the only one in here that do not type out my web pages in a text editor? I happen to prefer the WYSIWYG web editing of Mozilla, which is missing from the Firebird releases. I, for one will be very unhappy to see the main branch of Mozilla discontinued just because of this.

  • DOM performance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by groomed ( 202061 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:13AM (#7678366)
    They should fix the abysmal DOM performance some time. Simple DHTML applications or even plain document.write() hacks can bring Mozilla to its knees as it labors to add nodes to the document.

  • NTLM proxy (Score:4, Informative)

    by alien_blueprint ( 681111 ) <alien_blueprint@hire d g o ons.org> on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @05:17AM (#7678379) Homepage Journal
    Just a quick comment for those stuck with NTLM at work. I run a local NTLM proxy server so I can run whatever browser or HTTP tool I like on whatever OS I need. I just point my browser at the proxy and it just works.

    The proxy I use is written in Python, is small, and is really easy to install. NTLM Authorization Proxy Server [freshmeat.net].

    Since you are authenticating with your user name and password, from your machine, and you are still actually going through the company web proxy just like IE would, there's absolutely no logical reason for the local "preventers of information services" to complain. At least, in my case, they haven't been able come up with an actual reason yet that hasn't been easy to dismiss. Not for want of trying, though ...

  • Appease and Beat the Rush (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @07:57AM (#7678856)
    I for one welcome our new Mozilla 1.6 Beta overlords.

  • Mozilla is still bad with standards (Score:4, Insightful)

    by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @11:01AM (#7679878) Homepage Journal
    Two big problems I see with Mozilla's way of implementing protocols: Why Mozilla developers think that Calendar and Chatzilla (which has nothing to do with web-browsing at all, and by the way it's implemented anyway so badly that nobody use it) are more important for web-browsing than a complete implementation of core web-browsing protocols?

    Maybe at early 90s it was ok that that the web-browsing is a one-way communication when you only read and download the content. But it's not true anymore (perhaps since the dot-com bubble?). Today the web-browsing is almost always a two-way communication: people are answering web-forms and uploading files all the way.

    I suggest Mozilla developers to wake-up, to free themselves from old AOL cultural traditions (remember? AOL still tinks that the internet access == dial-up 56K modems!), and to redistribute their resource accordingly to real priorities. Stop wasting your time on developing ChatZilla and Calendar (really useless components). Instead, devote those resources on FTP upload and HTTP WebDAV.

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