Well the rest of you guys enjoy M12 and the builds following it, I probably won't get to until early January because I'm at home for the holidays with infrequent web access with my brother's labtop.

<:3)~~

I'm tryin' it now. I really like the improvements in the mail client. I think I'm going to try using this stuff as my main browser/mail program now. Just two things I'd like to see. When are fonts going to be supported and when will I be able to make a desktop shortcut for the Linux version?

Jonathan

Been trying a few of the M and nightly. It keeps gettig better and better. This is my first try here.

Using M12

One small step for mozilla. One giant step for mozilla kind.

So, is this the alpha or is this just one step closer to it. I couldn't find the version with the install/uninstall for windows. Also, all the debug info was still there.

I've been rying mozilla since around M2 and I have to say that it is really starting to take shape now. I compiled the source to M12 while nothing else was on the ftp site and ran it under RH 6.1. So far it is pretty solid. I can notice a definite improvement in stability and speed from previous builds. I can't do anything but praise everyone who is working so hard on this project.

If this is supposed to be an alpha build (10/21 M12), then I can't wait fer the beta. Runs ok under win98, but on my mac @ home, it's dog slow (i also had to copy this text and switch to comm 4.7 to submit this post!)! Keep it comin, guys! You're doing a great job!

As some may remember I couldn't get M11 to launch at all on my system. M12 is going, in fact I'm using it right now.

I used the installer program and let me tell you, it gave a new meaning to slow. It took 13 minutes to install on this 225 Mhz sytstem with 96MB of RAM. It's a 603e but it still shouldn't take that long.

I like the chrome except for the way the buttons overlap into the grey area on the button bar. Looks tacky to me.

The text fields are a little odd, wrapping doesn't seem to work quite right and the cursor seems to jump to odd places if I type to quick.

I managed to pop the customize area of the sidebar open once but couldn't make any changes and it won't open again.

Can't seem to change themes from the preference either. Is it just my imagination or does Mail and News use a different chrome? I like that one.

Speed is decent, it's not as fast as Mac IE or Communicator 4.7. I'm undecided as to whether it's quicker than iCab or not.

Considering this is, maybe, Alpha 1 I'd say I'm pretty impressed. If Mozilla's progression is anything like iCab's than performance should be blazing when it's done. Each iCab *beta* get's a little quicker and at alpha level Moz is almost as fast.

iCab has the clear advantage in RAM footprint and install, it doesn't even need an installer. It doesn't do javascript, yet, or have a mail/news client though.

The tab in Moz isn't working as it should, apperantly.

Anyhow, I've never used Alphaware before so I'm sure all these bugs are quite normal and will be mostly solved by beta.

Mozilla is turning into an impressive package, I just hope things like launching and installing get much, much faster that right now is it's biggest flaw IMO.

PS: I was surprised to see the installer refer to this as Netscape Communicator 5.0. I thought they were to be entirly different packages with Netscape branding their own.

This is the first Moz I'm not trashing right away, it hasn't crashed and it's pretty useable.

RickG fixed that bug yesterday (closed about 50 bugzilla entries!). It had to do with residual style entries. Download an M13 build and try it out.

Special thanks go to the thoughtful person(s) who built the FreeBSD version (finally). Cheers!

Unfortunately M12 crashes during startup running under WinNT 4.0 SP6 (bug 21673), which makes it completely unuseable on the box at work. Also XPCOM isn't threadsafe (bug 18110), so it also dies (usually very quickly) on SMP systems, which makes it unusable on the Linux box at home.

M11 would at least run, in the former case anyway.

Just to note that Debian has M12 packages in the unstable distribution already. Just do "apt-get install mozilla" to get them :)

Using it now and it seems very nice... the bug with transparency in the last build I tried seems to be fixed, but tabbing between form fields seems to have regressed - that's a shame. Since this is the first thing I'm doing with it, I can't comment on any other aspects...

Stuart.

WOW. I've been downloading the daily builds...but this is really polished. Most of the work has been going on under the hood, but using Mozilla now is (almost) like getting a new present under the tree. Things are looking very polished and professional. I've even ventured to download all my mail to try out the mail reader. Nice job.

anyone else on a Mac (I'm on OS 9) able to increase the RAM in the 'get info' window. Whenever I try, it zaps the finder fast. I'm goin' back to M13 nightlies.

I started using M11 a while ago, and it didn't seem to want to run that long on my iMac. I just got M12 today and it seems a bit better, but is still very slow(especially installation) and I only got to use it for about 10 minutes before I got my first crash. Still, things are looking better than they did in M11.

Hey people, I'm new in here, and i have to tell you, that m12 (win32-version) is excellent. Even on my 75 Pentium with 24 mb ram it is faster than ie5. I wanted to take it as general browser, but when i wanted to load the following page www.prosieben.de nothing happened. Even if i hit the reload button. Nothing, it didn't crash or so, but it didn't load the page. Somebody should know it i think, because you don't surf so much on german pages, do you? And it has problems to load chats, it doesn't load the chat-cgi frame. But you really did a great job by now. Let's beat ie5.

For those Mac users out there...

I'm running MacOS 9. I first downloaded the version of Moz that is linked from the mozilla.org page.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m12/MozMacInstaller-M12.sea.bin

Has anyone else tried this version? On my PowerBook G3 (MacOS 9, 128Mb RAM), all the icons in the Moz folder were corrupted, the Finder became unstable, and I could not modify the amount of RAM the Mozilla application was given. The numbers kept automatically changing to impossible numbers (like negative numbers). Weird. Could it be a virus?

The normal installer worked much better for me.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m12/mozilla-mac-M12.sea.bin

Hope that helps someone...

This application is becomming more PC (Windows) like with every new revision. If any Mac users out there can give concrete reasons why things should be changed by pointing to sections in Apple's HIG, go to Bugzilla (there's a link from the mozilla.org homepage) and help the effort.

- Adam

M12 works on my site now, so I assume they fixed some problems with relative addresses. It still does not work on my colleague's start page. Does Mozilla have a problem with image maps?

I was unable to post to this message board with M12, but I was able to do that with M11.

Mozilla seems to lock up my computer every time my Zip drive powers down. I do not know if there is a conflict between the Iomega software and Mozilla, or if locking up the computer causes the drive to power down. I cannot use Mozilla if I have to choose between the browser and my disc drive. The only thing that could be worse is having my background destroyed for "Active Desktop Recovery".

The full circle software has never worked on this computer, not even with Netscape 4.x. Any suggestions to get it working?

Maybe I should attempt to get a bugzilla account. I've typed these comments to help, not to criticize.

Why do I get the error message:

error: mozilla-browser-5.0-M12.i386.rpm cannot be installed

when I try to install mozilla on my standard RH6.1 system (the binary rpm package) It _should_ be possible to just download and "rpm -i" the package.

please send me a mail if you reply to this post.

I would suggest that anyone who is having trouble installing the zipped version of M12 try using the installer version.

I was having problems installing any M12 or later build. Immediately after clicking Finish on the create new user window I would get an error stating that Mozilla had perfomed an illegal operation and the program would shut down. However I found that the Installer based version worked fine.

I actually haven't used M12 yet, I'm using a daily build of M13 but since it came out only 1 day after M12 I assume that they are probably no too far apart features/performance wise.

I have to say that the peformance has improved dramatically. M11 was so slow that I could never stand to use it long enough to really try it out. It could take 10 seconds or longer just to display a menu when I clicked on the menu bar and web page display was just as slow. On the other hand M13 is very usable and I look forward to actually using it on a regular basis now. It's still no speed demon, but if you've been put off by Mozilla's performance in past milestones I would encourage you to give it another try. FYI: I am running Mozilla on a P133 64MB RAM. Considering how it performs on my machine I can understand how others would say that its performance was close to that Navigator 4.x now. On a newer computer (say...300mhz+) it would not surprize me if there was little or no noticeable slow down.

Anybody else think the accelerator keys are wrong for Linux?

With Navigator 4.x, the accelerator keys used the ALT key (ALT-C for copy, ALT-V for paste). I've always found that really annoying since KDE, Gnome and even Windows defines accelerator keys with the CTRL key.

I'm interested to know what other people think. I'm using build 1999122208 on Linux. I've also logged a bug (ID = 22515) if anyone agrees with me and would like to vote for it.

David

With all the versions of (linux)Mozilla i have tried some hit counters don't display right...some show up as all 8's others dont show at all. Like the one at my site: http://hackme.dhs.org Is this a problem with Mozilla or just baddly coded counters? All versions of netscape and IE show them fine.

I downloaded and compiled M12 and its MUCH more stable then M11. And for the hell of it i got the nightly build(199912208 Linux) of M13 and I have just one word: WOW! This thing is FAST! Scrolling is smooth and doesnt turn the whole page gray. The arrow keys work again and so does TAB. Now if they can just fix that bug in compose that keeps you from inserting a image then I'll be happy as hell. Keep up the good work Mozilla guys!

Been running M12 on my 166/64MRAM (Win95) machine since the Win32 build showed up on the server. I haven't tried the installer. There are some minor bugs, but the browser and email are both working fairly well. Arrow and PgUp/PgDown keys aren't working at all for page scrolling and are unpredictable in text boxes. There are still a few rendering bugs (MozZine is a good example -- the right column isn't showing up, and the pages are scrolling horizontally at 8X6 res). Form buttons definitely need some work. But I am really impressed by the improvements in the sidebar -- I had no trouble importing and using my NS 4.7 bookmarks (a 150k file). I'm using M12 for about 90% of my surfing and some of my email as well. (Question: M12 is still leaving POP mail on the server by default, right?)

Niggling little details aside, it's basically feature-complete and usable for everyday surfing. I don't care what anybody else says about what to call this release, I say, "Congratulations on the alpha ...ON TO BETA!!"

:-)

Ok, I downloaded the M12 build for testing on my NT4SP6 system, and it works like a dream, except that it killed an email without a trace - downloaded and trashed in one hit! Ah well, nothing's perfect in the Alpha release :)

Merry Christmas Guys!

M12 is GREAT, and the nightly builds for m13 are even better.. tons of little stuff is working again!

I've now totally switched over from NS4.7 to Mozilla for my brower and excpecially Mail needs.. Really looking sharp.

Quick question though, does anyone know how to get Flash to work in Mozilla? I see (some how) flash 3 is installed.. but what about flash 4??

Thanks CHeers!

I installed M12 for Mac. It crashed twice within the first five minutes of use: once when trying to hide the sidebar from the View menu, and once when trying to navigate within netscape.com. In ten minutes of use I also observed these bugs:

1. Closing the browser window leaves the File and other menus missing most of their items and full of divider lines, with no way to navigate or open a new windows. 2. Command-key menu shortcuts only work if you click on the menu bar first. 3. Command-click on a link doesn't open the page in a new window. 4. Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys do nothing. 5. Scroll bars do not conform to Mac UI standards, and are very confusing because the empty fill color is darker than the thumb. 6. Pressing Next and Sign In buttons on My Netscape first time registration page has no effect. 7. Open File dialog does not put text cursor in edit field when dialog comes up -- must click to type. 8. Popup menu arrow appears on all blank text fields even though the popup contains no items.

So let's see, that's about one bug per minute, and MTBF is about three minutes and twenty seconds (two crashes and one unusable state in ten minutes). It's not clear to me how anyone could think of this as an alpha candidate. The stated alpha criteria have MTBF in the one hour range. This is not even close.

Echinacea Feldercarb

The program is goddamn slow on my P100 with 32MB of RAM running Win95 OSR2 without a trace of IE.

My favorite bug is still that the sidebar doesn't "move" right when you drag the grippy. The grippy moves, and goes under the content, and only when you let go does the rest follow. Sometimes it dissapears entirely. Looks VERY amauterish. It has been this way for forever now, and I haven't heard anyone talk about it. Don't tell me it's going to stay this way!

under a 2.2.10 linux kernel with a "new" enough glibc:

1) proxy config from the preferences menu still doesn't work.

2) proxy config by editing package/defaults/pref/all.js doesn't work either.

is this *supposed* to work now?

feldercarb -

I think you're missing the point somewhat. The way the open-source development model works is that everyone does what they can. While a coder should certainly code to their best ability, they are not expected or required to test things out on every platform/OS/processor combination out there. That's what the daily builds are for. Every day, you can download a recent copy of the program and submit feedback. This is very rapid, and is much more foolproof than a single person hunting down bugs on multiple platforms - at least in a case when a browser runs on a half dozen platforms at the least.

As an aside, I can run M12 on my Mac (PB G3, 64 MB ram, MacOS 9) without crashing for hours - at least in the browser component, the rest I haven't played with as much. Compare this to M10 where I was crashing all of the time.

It's easy to say that Mozilla is buggy because, well, it is. That's a worthless assertion though until you take into account the rate of progress. It's buggy, but it's a hell of a lot less buggy than it was only a couple months ago. The fact that you're installation was so bad doesn't mean all of ours is the same.

Mozilla is a developer release. Unless you don't mind helping along in the process, don't download it. While it may seem foreign to you, it functions exactly like the average open-source project.

I tend to agree with feldercarb on one point he makes. "Quality is every engineer's responsibility." I happen to think that every engineer on this project has a passion for putting out a quality product. Engineers that I've met have been _devoted_ to this task. There is a lot that still needs to be done to make Mozilla into something that joe everyman will use for his daily surfing. This is an especially daunting task when, unlike any other browser that I now of, Mozilla is being built to run on nearly a dozen platforms. Testing across even the biggest three, Mac, Linux and Windows, takes time. Feldercarb wants Mozilla better faster and sooner. I sure agree with him on that. I can't wait either. Thats why I play with a new build just about every day (some run better than others and I hold on to those). Thats why I spend time in #mozillazine and #mozilla talking about bugs and other Mozilla problems. I've managed to get my system and Mozilla both playing together nicely with the help of many developers and testers. Mozilla is pretty stable on my system and I've talked to others who have found a particular build or group of builds that work well for them. Anyone who is finding Mozilla an untamable beast is welcome to visit #mozillazine and ask for my help.

Asa

feldercarb -

Once again, I'll say this: the rules have changed. Open-source development changes the rules. Forget 'programmers', and definately forget 'software engineers'. We've got 'coders' now. These people certainly are proud of the work they do, but the real work is done when dozens and dozens of people on different platforms, operating systems, etc. do the bug hunting. Large open-source, multi platform projects like Mozilla benefit from this kind of development.

And yes, it DOES work. Look at Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc. for examples. The rules have changed.

Also, as I said before, your case is a fluke. I can use Mozilla for an hour or two before there are any problems whatsoever. This is on the same platform that you are on.

As a fellow Mac user, I can understand how you may be unfamiliar with the open-source development process. That's 100% cool, but as the previous poster said you should read ESR's "The Cathedral And The Bazarr" before criticizing things too much. It was this document that made Netscape choose to open-source their client to begin with.

You can find a link to it on Mozilla.org.

This is not a religious debate, but rather a coding style one. I for one could care less for the 'religious' aspect of things (I'm certainly not an RMS follower, and while I think ESR is better from a more practical perspective, I tend to think for myself). I'm talking from a purely pragmatic point of view.

Ever hear of opportunity cost? If the people working on Mozilla were paid to do so (which, incidentally, some are), it would cost less in the long run for those who can code to do so exclusively rather than debug, leaving that job for those who can't code but know enough to debug. Using your method, coders would produce half as much code, spending the other half of the time debugging, and everyone else who can debug will be left with less to do.

Those who write the code DO debug to a limited extent, but they aren't nearly able to do as thorough job as a bunch of dedicated testers are (multiple platforms, OSes, processors, etc). Everyone does what they do best.

You are also working under the false assumption that everyone's installation of Mozilla is as buggy as yours. As I've said twice already, my install under (I assume) similar hardware is pretty stable. Not up to release or even beta standards, certainly, but certainly as good as any other alpha I've played with.

I'll be the first to admit that open-source is not a panacea, nor will I be one to say that anyone has a moral right to 'free' software, or even that it's perfect for all projects. However, I don't see why you discount Mozilla so quickly - once again I cite the progress it has made in the last couple of months. I don't know what's up with your build, but many of us are having no problems.

Mozilla, by most accounts, has started with a small group of dedicated developers. Just like these other 'successful' open-source projects you cite. As time has gone on, interest has increased as the codebase has become more solid. Once it hits beta, my bet is that even more developers will more than happy to add on to it.

I think the problem is in how you presented yourself upon first posting to this forum. Constructive feedback is fine, but you have to remember that many of the people here have contributed to the project in some way or another. It's not too far of a stretch to assume that you were insulting the programming integrity of the Mozilla engineers and everyone else who has contributed in some way to the project. All this after a single install of a pre-alpha that seems less stable than that of many others. While this may not have been your intention, the wording of your post could be construed as being inflammatory. If you are going to refute the Mozilla development model, don't simply complain - suggest a better alternative. Don't have the time to debug? That's fine, but don't blame us - I've put far more than 90 minutes into Mozilla, and it doesn't bother me a bit. Do as much as you like, and let others take the rest. While your efforts are appreciated, we'll live without them.

Why is it that the milestone releases are built for Solaris 2.7, yet nightly builds are made for Solaris 2.5.1? I'm interested in a 2.6 version (and I think that the 2.5.1 version runs on 2.6).

-Jason

Congratulations to all the people who actively develop Mozilla,it's getting better with every build !

I was just wondering at what stage Mac development is, because I plan to buy a Mac, but can't test any builds, since I don't have one.

I'm happy to see Mozilla is developing into an end-user friendly browser, rather than solely depending on standards compliance, which albeit being extremely important, won't impress Joe Average. Keep up the great work !