MozillaZine

M14 Out!

Wednesday March 1st, 2000

Frank Visser writes, "Hello, mozilla M14 seems to be out, there is now content in the mozilla.org M14 ftp download directory."

This release doesn't contain the crypto code yet. That is still to come. But feel free to download! Currently only Linux and Windows builds available -- more to come. When's the crypto code arriving? "Really, really soon", from what I've heard.

#1 Now for that beta1 preview (drool, slather) n/t

by Kovu

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 3:22 PM

n/t

#2 looks like we have some regression...

by Kovu

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 3:26 PM

Some bugs that had been fixed seem to be back. Also it seems slower (Win9x, that is). Was the testing code disabled in this build?

#58 Copy & paste to/from location broken

by sremick

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 11:19 AM

Yep. I noticed right away I can't cut/copy/paste to/from the location bar anymore. I was doing so just fine using the nightly from right before M14. Grrr...

[Posted using M14]

#63 Re: Copy & paste

by Silverthorn

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 2:34 PM

I've pasted addresses into it several times and it seems to be ok. I clicked to the left of everything.. did ctrl-end to highlighted it and hit delete. Then did the paste. Not sure if the method makes a difference. I think once I highlighted and just pasted without deleting first too ok.

Not as sure on copying. If it doesn't work, you should be able to right-click the page and copy the address that way.

Shawn =)

#3 How do the milestones get names?

by wolfseyn

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 3:32 PM

If I do a query in Bugzilla for m14 bugs I get a list http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&email1=&emailtype1=substring&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=substring&emailreporter2=1&changedin=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&target_milestone=M14&short_desc=&short_desc_type=substr&long_desc=&long_desc_type=substr&bug_file_loc=&bug_file_loc_type=substr&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=substr&newqueryname=&form_name=query&order=assign.login_name%2C%20bugs.priority%2C%20bugs.bug_severity of 492 m14 bugs... How can m14 be out? Someone please point in the right direction... I'm confused!

#5 That's a red herring...

by mozineAdmin

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 3:51 PM

The milestone designation that a bug gets isn't set in stone. The developers triage bugs, and the bugs that can't or won't be fixed by a stability checkpoint will get a new milestone reassignment (meaning they're not high priority for that milestone).

#4 Win 2000 problem

by peternn

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 3:34 PM

I've been downloading many daily builds for some months now.

Some days ago the daily builds crashed on my windows 2000 computer.

I downloaded M14 now and that crashed too :(

Anyone else having these problems?

#6 Re: Win 2000 problem

by johnlar

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 4:02 PM

Make sure you completly uninstall the previous build. Del c:\windows\moz*.dat (or is it winnt) deltree c:\progra~1\netscape\seamonkey deltree c:\progra~1\netscape\users50

then reinstall

#7 Thanks! It working fine now... (n/t)

by peternn

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 4:20 PM

..

#48 this happens to me also

by ataferner

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 8:05 AM

i have noticed that recent nighties have been less stable than before, including M14 on win2k. i always make sure to cleanse my system of the old mozilla files before trying out a new build. maybe someone else could comment?

#8 I'll stick to the Nightlies myself :-)

by damian

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 4:46 PM

A couple of the bugs that have been bugging me should be fixed real soon. Too bad they didn't make it into M14, but ah well... as long as they make it in the beta. I have noticed that the latest M15 nightly for linux is much faster than the previous one. Some reflow problems have apparently been fixed.

#9 Much poorer than M13 :(

by tialaramex

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 5:36 PM

This is certainly lower quality than M13. I'm not sure it should have shipped at all, but programmers being what they are would rather die than go from 13 to 15 without stopping at 14 somewhere on route.

More crashy, more rendering bugs, more "weird" bugs and less performance, for me at least. Don't let it put you off though, file those talkbacks (when Moz lives long enough to say anything)

#10 It's much better (on my machine)

by mozineAdmin

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 5:49 PM

It's working much better than M13 here. The mail/news has greatly improved, the rendering is *faster* than M13 (from tests), and all in all it's much more stable.

#11 It's the opposite for me

by gerbilpower

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 5:57 PM

I have the opposite experience. M14 is more stable and faster, and Mail/News has certainly improve quite a bit!

<:3)~~

#12 remember this..

by jazzman45

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 6:22 PM

don't forget to delete your old mozregistry.dat file in c:\windows! i get occasional oddities after forgetting to do this... so far this build is great! i've visited a ton of obscure sites and left it here for 1 1/2 hours, no crash yet!

yeah mozilla!

p.s. i would like crypto, though...once that's in...99% of my browsing will be through mozilla

#13 Still some bugs that have been around for a while

by Quelish

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 6:54 PM

I've been keeping an eye on a few bugs for a while that were slated for M14 but don't seem to be fixed yet. Namely the menu thing where if you click on a dropdown menu item after the menu has expanded itself (just by the mouse being over it for long enough) then the whole menu will dissapear. At least it's still happening on WinNT.

Plus it seems that lots of little things that were working a few days ago are not. I can't quite figure out how at this stage of the game features regress in subsequent builds after the seem to be resolved.

Moz can't go beta if little things like this are still happening!

#14 Nice work people

by Salsaman

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 6:57 PM

The browser is starting to feel a lot more solid. Seems to run a little faster than Netscape 4 on my box (Suse Linux). Well done, keep up the good work !!!

#15 Java?

by odragon

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 8:22 PM

Is Java in? If not when will it be?

#17 Re: Java?

by ppanon

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 8:50 PM

I seem to remember reading somewhere on this site ('Zine status reports?) that it used to work with older builds (M12) but that the API had since changed. The glue code for the Java plug-in no longer works and it wasn't scheduled to be fixed by M14. I would be surprised if they didn't have it working by the Beta.

#25 Re: Java?

by ppanon

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 10:32 PM

Ah, now I remember check the release notes <A HREF="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/release-notes/m14-detail.html"> here</a>

#16 RPMs

by basic

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 8:38 PM

Hope there will be RPMs for this build. There were ots of complaints about not having RPMs in M13.

#47 Re: RPMs

by orev

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 7:45 AM

Learn how to install tars, it will help you much in the future. RPMs are conveinent, but if you can't function without them you shouldn't be using unix.

#62 Re: RPMs

by WillyWonka

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 2:10 PM

Come on. No wonder so many people are using microsoft os's. With attitudes like that... <sigh>

More people should be making the install/uninstall process EASIER in unix/linux. Thats what turns away most people from the unix os. Have you ever tried to install that beast with absolutely no unix knowledge... good luck.

The Mozilla install should be as simple as typing ./install for beginners. Afterall, in windows you just click the executable and the install program does everything else for you.

#70 Re: Re: RPMs

by jhdaly

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 9:57 PM

there are debian packages available for it, as well as rpm build scripts included in the tree. they may not make them available for download from ftp.mozilla.org, but the packaging facility exists.

#71 Re: RPMs

by beej

Friday March 3rd, 2000 12:11 AM

I've been getting the Linux tar.gz files for quite some time now (dloading the nightlies almost every night - which is almost overkill when you're on 28.8. ^_^)

What I've done with every release, though, is simply extract it into a directory, delete my previous registry and prefs files, and type in: ./mozilla -installer

Works fine for me every time. It imports my Netscape profile, but never overwrites my newer Mozilla bookmarks file (yay! ^_^).

Given the simplicity I seem to be having at setting it up, is there really a need for an RPM file?

-Beej

#18 New User!!!

by shk41

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 8:58 PM

I'm am very new to the whole Mozilla gig, and I was wondering if anybody has any idea of where Mozilla will actually stand after all the bugs are fixed. Will it be better then Internet Explorer and Netscape? Are there other organizations developing high-qualtiy browsers from the Netscape source code?

#19 New User!!!

by shk41

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 8:58 PM

I'm am very new to the whole Mozilla gig, and I was wondering if anybody has any idea of where Mozilla will actually stand after all the bugs are fixed. Will it be better then Internet Explorer and Netscape? Are there other organizations developing high-qualtiy browsers from the Netscape source code?

#96 Got to be Kidding

by skeeterow

Saturday March 4th, 2000 11:46 AM

Sorry to sound so negative, but go to the Urls listed below in NS and look around a the scripts for all browsers. Do this in an NS 4X and then visit the same pages in M what ever and well perhaps Santa will get a Mozilla to gether that handles these things.

http://dynamicdrive.com/ http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/watcheye.htm

#20 Re: New User!!!

by Belzebutt

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 9:13 PM

Well, Mozilla will support more HTML and CCS than any other browser, and it should be as fast as IE (hopefully even faster), while being much smaller.

There are companies working with Mozilla code, not much super-high profile stuff but there are a bunch of them. For example, Nokia demonstrated a hand-held cell phone / internet appliance type of thing running Linux and Mozilla.

Mozilla is taking a long time, but it's getting better and better...

#45 It'll definitely be better than Netscape

by leafdigital

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 6:48 AM

Definitely better than Netscape (by which I mean the current 4.x Netscape - Mozilla will be released under the Netscape name, possibly as 5.x or 6.x). Netscape 4.x is completely deficient in all Web standards and has many, many serious bugs in implementation of the critically important CSS standard.

It will also be significantly better than IE5 in terms of Web standards support, although Microsoft may release another version by the time Mozilla is completed, so there may not be much of a difference there (we'll see!)

In terms of usability, well, at the moment it's significantly harder and less pleasant to use than both Netscape 4.x and IE5, due to missing features like drag and drop, and having a horrible ugly sidebar [which you CAN turn off, though :)]. By release, they will fix the missing features, and my personal expectation is that it will be roughly on a par with those browsers.

From a user's perspective, if you are hoping for a dramatic improvement over IE5, you won't see one. However from a web developer's perspective, Mozilla is heaven because it actually works properly.

hope this helps

--sam

#69 Thank You

by shk41

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 8:56 PM

Thank you all for your help!

#21 Mac differences

by masri

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 9:20 PM

Hello,

I just went to the download directory, and I notice for the Mac version:

mozilla-mac-M14.sea.bin and mozilla-mac-M14-TB.sea.bin

any idea what the TB stands for?

- Adam

#22 Re: Mac differences

by Tanyel

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 9:32 PM

It probably means "TalkBack".

#35 Yeah...

by Waldo

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 3:14 AM

I think this is teh version which, upon crashing, will send crash information back to mozilla to help debug it.

W

#23 M14

by Tanyel

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 9:36 PM

I am not impressed. I hope it becomes much more efficient and less frustrating.

#51 Re: M14

by beastie

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 9:47 AM

Gee, there's a surprise.

#60 Re: Re: M14

by Tanyel

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 1:46 PM

Are you surprised that Mozilla is slow and frustrating, or surprised that I mentioned it?

#61 amen to that. (n/t)

by url

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 2:08 PM

(n/t)

#90 Someone needs to make the negative comments.

by damian

Friday March 3rd, 2000 5:43 PM

I agree, there really isn't anything great about this release. But keep in mind:

1.) It's still a pre-release, not even beta yet. 2.) All the real effort is being put into the upcoming beta, the whole process was not going to be held up to get everything fixed in this release. 3.) This is an open sorce project, so if you don't like the way things are going, you can make a difference. If you don't code, you can write bug reports. Or search existing bug reports for duplicates. Or help confirm bugs. Or switch to another browser that completely sucks, and you have no say whatsoever in its development. Anyways, it's not all bad, Mozilla will eventually be everything that it was promised to be.

#111 i totally agree. (n/t)

by url

Monday March 6th, 2000 11:48 AM

n/t

#24 wow...fast as lightning

by caseyperkins

Wednesday March 1st, 2000 9:50 PM

Just downloaded M14...and <b>WOW</b>! It's the fastest loading and fastest page-displaying build that I've tried yet (and I've been getting them since M5). Keep up the good work, Mozilla team!

#26 [mac] Still can't open Preferences window

by scalar

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 12:16 AM

The last working build for me was M8 or M9. All the subsequent builds fail to display the Preferences dialog -- I get an empty window and it hangs. I have to force-quit Mozilla to get out of it. If I don't open Prefs, OTOH, it's a working browser for low values of "working". It doesn't feel like a Mac application at all, with all the superfluous chrome in the user interface. I hope Opera will get it right. Tested on beige G3/333, 128 MB RAM, OS 8.6, ATM Deluxe 4.5

#36 Re: [mac] Still... try removing mozResource file

by Waldo

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 3:16 AM

Hey, you might wanna try the following before running Moz14 on the mac:

1. Go into your preferences folder in your system folder. Get rid of any file starting with "Mozilla" as in "mozilla resources" etc. You need to junk all these if you've run mozilla before.

2. In your hard drive there's possibly a directory called documents and inside there you might find some more mozilla stuff. Toss it too.

THEN, when that's gone, try running moz 14 again. Let me know if it works.

#40 Problem persists, giving up

by scalar

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 4:28 AM

Thanks for your reply. However, I've already read the Before You Install section and removed all previous mozilla crud on my system. Still doesn't work.

I also tried the following: disabled all ATM Type 1 fonts to see if mozilla hangs building the font list for ~300 fonts. Didn't help. Altered the memory allocation for both mozilla and viewer.app all the way to 32 megs a piece. No dice.

Well, Netscape 4.72 works for me, and being the only app with mail and news capabilities built into a browser, I'll stick to it for the time being. I'll give it another look when Netscape 6.0 is out.

<mode=rant> I'm piss sick and tired of milestone after milestone with no actual progress towards a working application and total ignorance of consistency found in other Mac OS apps. Come on, the widgets provided by Apple for handling dialogs, buttons, checkboxes etc. are perfectly usable and *expected* by a Mac user. The world doesn't need another M$ that produces needless chrome with no apparent usability value and a performance hit to boot. Will we get fade-in menus in M15? </mode>

#41 Re: Problem persists, giving up

by danielhill

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:00 AM

-quote- The world doesn't need another M$ that produces needless chrome with no apparent usability value and a performance hit to boot. -unquote-

Apple are among the worst offenders in this regard. Seen the screenshots to Aqua?

#50 Re: Problem persists, giving up

by rkl

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 9:21 AM

I'm sure there'd be lots of Mac users complaining about not being able to run Mozilla if there was a general problem with it.

What I suspect is that you have some specific software, hardware or configuration on your Mac that's conflicting with Mozilla in some way.

As for the rant mode, I'm sure this has been covered many times before - basically, the native widgets cannot support all of what Mozilla needs to do, so cross-platform widgets are used.

Being a UNIX and occasional PC user, I have no problem with this at all - I'd rather see an app work the same across all platforms than have subtle differences between the platform versions. If this means sacrificing some native look-n-feel for the sake of ease of maintenance, then so be it.

If Mac users don't like the look of Mozilla, they can stick with MSIE (or even the dreadful NS 4.X series) of course - no-one's forcing it on them.

#55 Re: Re: Problem persists, giving up

by mstearne

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 10:35 AM

I am too kind of in the camp where I would rather an application work the same across platforms. I think this was one of the design goals of Mozilla. Also, because of the MPL there is no reason someone can't build a Mac-centric version of Mozilla that does use all the native Mac dialogs.

As for the final comment, I've never used MSIE and I've had any problems with NS 4.x on the Mac. I don't really experience any crashes or problems beside the basic problem with the rendering engine of all NS 4.x browsers.

#27 What is the difference?

by nakedlie

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 12:21 AM

I was wondering why there is a difference in sizes between the installer (4933 Kb) and zip (5952 KB) versions? That is a little over a meg.

#64 Re: What is the difference?

by brobinson

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 3:38 PM

I don't think the installer version has the test files.

#28 What is the difference?

by nakedlie

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 12:37 AM

I was wondering why there is a difference in sizes between the installer (4933 Kb) and zip (5952 KB) versions? That is a little over a meg.

#33 Re: What is the difference?

by gerbilpower

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 2:14 AM

The zipped version has has some testing programs attached to it, while they were removed for the installer version.

They are basically the same since the test programs are non-essential to running Mozilla.

<:3)~~

#29 M14 Great Improment for me...

by Silverthorn

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 12:55 AM

Ok... I finally registered for the forum here so I could tell my own experiances here.

The only builds I've used is M13 and now M14. I'm using a pentium 100mhz with 40 megs of ram. Win 95 at 800x600.

M13 did impress me mainly in the features of Gecko. I made an experimental CSS page and used Mozilla as the tester. Worked really well.

But seriously not enough for regular use. Very slow in general, keyboard commands even when they worked were too slow to use (arrow down took around a full second to move down one line).

First things I noticed with M14. Splash screen. It looks good, but what's with that gray border that sticks out from some of it? Looks really weird..

Loaded seemingly faster. No weird static when moving between pages, and going forward and back is a lot faster. Scrolling with the keyboard works well (lack of left, right, home, end, alt-left+right, etc. is annoying though).

Preferences is a lot cleaner. Keeps settings from session to session.

Menus are still a little slow.. especially the bookmarks one.

Has only crashed once so far and seemed to crash at least somewhat elegantly (didn't have to force quit).

So, for my situation at least M13 was just not realistic to use for any kind of regular browsing. But M14 is A LOT better in almost every apparant way to me. It actually feels like something I can use.

The speed seems similar to netscape 4 to me (at least if NS4 actually worked well for me.. it always seems to want to suddenly write to the hard drive and lock up for no reason, really really often).

I may still stick with Opera for most stuff just because it is SO fast and the keyboard shortcuts and setup is just so logical... But then again we'll see...

So, I'm sure that all of you that get the nightly builds and everything know tons more on what's really going on etc, but from just a simple user perspective this seems a vast improvement to me...

Shawn =)

P.S. And yes... I am writing this with Mozilla.. hehe

#30 M14 a serious milestone???

by allard

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 1:11 AM

Helle Mozilla people,

the M14 is

- crashing when trying to make a user profile in anything else than default on German NT 4 SP6 - crashes fatally (not simply displaying incorrectly) when visiting sites like http://www.essence.co.uk/essence/foldertree/document.htm Can you imagine the feelings of someone towards Mozilla when downloading his prepayed software at the same time? - Java not implementable, although this had been announced for M14 (why are Sun/AOL/Netscape allied anyway??)

My conclusion: M14 seems to have been thrown back to M11 or so, concerning these bugs. Mozilla will be crunched by any independent software magazine, if this kind of things are considered as beta stuff...

Allard Mees

#38 on windows, delete your mozregistry.dat file

by RvR

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 3:39 AM

i'm just quoting jazzman45's post : ----------------------------------- don't forget to delete your old mozregistry.dat file in c:\windows! i get occasional oddities after forgetting to do this... so far this build is great! i've visited a ton of obscure sites and left it here for 1 1/2 hours, no crash yet!

#39 mozregistray.dat deleted

by allard

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 4:01 AM

- mozregistray.dat was deleted! (and user50 as well) - it works fine on more simpler sites. But anything using heavy DHTML crashes. The point is, that Mozilla appearantly is not going to be backward compatible.

Allard

#46 Why be back-compatible with broken standards? n/t

by Kovu

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 7:18 AM

n/t

#49 Re: backward (bugward) compatibility

by sacolcor

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 8:38 AM

That is correct; Mozilla will no longer support the bugs that were in previous versions, nor will it support many of the old proprietary elements that NS4.X used, instead replacing them with their W3C standard counterparts. It is very much a forward-looking project, rather than a backward-looking one...a decision which I heartily applaud.

#91 why not Backwards

by allard

Saturday March 4th, 2000 4:18 AM

It is totally clear to me, that Moz/Netscape 6 will bother more about standards. And thats good so. Nobody will expect the Mozilla group to make new proprietarian stuff. So far the forward looking part. But everyone will expect tons of websites to be viewable (and not simply crashing the browser), which are created with "old sins", especially those of Netscape, which formerly were being told as the best there is... Screwing up all these websites will take another considerable part of the already lowering market share. The Mozilla team might have taken this decision, but I wonder whether they are aware of the results. This way, they shouldn't wonder about ending up as a niche product. Starting from the expectable results, nobody will see this as a forward-looking strategy.

allard

#95 I Love the W3C!

by Tanyel

Saturday March 4th, 2000 8:36 AM

I do not think the traditional style of HTML is "buggy" or "broken". All of these Webpages work just fine with the current Web browsers. They only became "broken" when the W3C decided to make "Web standards" that were totally incompatible with many existing Webpages.

I do not think the problem is the Webpages. I think the problem is the shortsighted, smallminded members of the W3C, who decided to make "standards" that were not compatible with ANY current browsers or Webpages. All of these Webpages were just fine before the W3C came along. Now, all of a sudden, they are bad?

I do not think the W3C should have the right to say all of these Webpages are broken when these Webpages work well on all existing Web browsers and are written in an accepted format. I think some of the designers, who made these Webpages, are going to resent Mozilla for expecting them to change. I also think this is going to encourage them to support only Internet Explorer.

I am not saying there is no reason for all of the recomendations of the W3C. I am saying the W3C should not have the right to make all of the old Webpages "broken". It was not necessary. Also, I am not blaming this on Mozilla. Would anybody like to guess who I am blaming?

#103 Re: I Love the W3C!

by Ben_Goodger

Sunday March 5th, 2000 1:09 AM

If there is anything to hold against the W3C, it is that their standards (namely existing CSS specs, and parts of the DOM) are inadequate at supplying the tools necessary to create a high performance XPFE (or, I imagine, a large website).

Your point is taken, but it is invalid in application to the W3C - the W3C exists to make standards, so it is no surprise that their recommendations do not coincide with the implementations from existing web browsers. To create standards that recommended new browsers base implementations of the existing stock would be a futile, frustrating excercise in bug duplication.

#104 Re: I Love the W3C!

by sacolcor

Sunday March 5th, 2000 1:23 AM

Sometimes, it is simply not possible to write a new standard that is perfectly compatible with the old one. Other times, it is not desireable. The more backwards-compatible you try to make a new standard, the more complicated it becomes. This complexity takes its toll in a couple ways:

1) It makes the standard harder to understand...you have two or three different ways of doing some things; this is going to confuse someone that is trying to learn, say, HTML by reading the spec.

2) It makes the standard harded to implement. If the W3C put (for example) NS4.X's document.layers[] call into the DOM1 spec, then Opera and IE would both need to implement it in order to be DOM-1 compliant. But wait...if they put in document.layers[], shouldn't they put in IE's document.all() too? You end up with every browser being required to support every other brower's (formerly) proprietary extensions in order to be standards compliant. I'd bet that if that happened, the browser makers would all start ignoring the standard because it'd be too much trouble to implement.

There needs to be /one/ correct way to write a web page, in order to avoid a massive duplication of effort by web and browser developers. In order for this to happen, the other ways have to be labelled 'wrong', and their use discouraged.

This is not, BTW, saying that HTML 3.2 documents will suddenly be 'wrong'...they will still be valid HTML 3.2. However, for things like the DOM, where there were two competing de facto 'standards', it's important for those pseudostandards to be re-cast into a single 'correct' technique, through the efforts of a standards body like the W3C.

#101 Re: why not Backwards

by sacolcor

Sunday March 5th, 2000 12:58 AM

I don't think many people understand the problems created by trying to support both the old way and the standard way. Let me mention a few of them:

1) Time. Would it be worth delaying the release of Mozilla by (I would guess) 2-3 months? Much of the old NS4.X code simply won't work in Mozilla...it would all need to be rewritten.

2) Size. Adding the code to handle multiple rendering methods will bloat Mozilla...it will be a bigger download, take up more memory, and run slower. Nokia's using this layout engine in their portable devices; this decision was undoubtably based in part on the fact that the code was relatively compact.

3) Ambiguity. There would be two possible ways to render many of the elements and calls. How does Mozilla know which one the designer intended? Some of the old ways of doing things conflict with what the standard ways, and there will often be no way to tell.

4) Complexity. Adding this extra code, and especially trying to make decisions of which method to use, is going to make the code more complicated. This would incur a maintenance cost; trying to coordinate the two methods would require some pretty 'clever' code, which will undoubtedly create a number of 'clever' bugs that will need to be worked out.

All of this trouble, just to support techniques that there are generally new and better ways of doing anyway...it just doesn't seem like a worthwhile thing to work on. I doubt that many web designers have been coding their sites for /only/ Naviagtor, in any case...they probably also coded for IE, and /most/ of the IE code I've seen looks pretty decent on Mozilla, since IE5 has something like 95% HTML4 and 85% CSS1. The ones I've talked to have generally been /eager/ to ditch their old NS4.X code ASAP, because it was filled with kludgy workarounds that were put in because of NS4.X's poor CSS support.

Mozilla certainly shouldn't /crash/ on those old pages; that's a bug that I hope you put into Bugzilla. It should process them by the standard as best it can, and fail with a nicely descriptive error message if it can't make heads or tails of it.

#102 Re: M14 a serious milestone???

by Ben_Goodger

Sunday March 5th, 2000 1:03 AM

the profile folder problem was a bug that was fixed after M14 had been branched. you can get a fixed version of this by grabbing a nightly build.

#31 XML w/o line breaks?

by slm

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 1:24 AM

...since when?? http://home.germany.net/100-261485/xml-in-o/xml-in-o.html

#32 newsgroups unusable

by lubricated

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 1:46 AM

newsgroups are totally unusable. It's impossible to scroll through 1000 messages. And thats a moderately sized newsgroup. This totally sucks. I don't see how this at all is usable for reading news. Are the developers not seeing this? All they seam to care about is how pretty their code looks and are forgetting to put out a usable product.

#42 Quite usable on my machine...

by mozineAdmin

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:23 AM

and you seem to expect everything to happen overnight. Well, it just doesn't happen that way. You have a peek into a piece of software that you just aren't used to. If you wanna a pre-beta to act as a release product, you're out of luck. You're going to either have to hunker down and not expect Mozilla to do everything immediately, or just wait until the release.

#53 Re: newsgroups unusable

by beastie

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 9:50 AM

"All they seam to care about is how pretty their code looks"

You've never delved into the code, have you? (!)

#34 M14 .....

by ibcmlk

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 2:33 AM

I've just downloaded M14 just now and install it on windows98 . It's fast but slow on java sites :(( May i know why Mozilla does not support java homepages ? I hope it will be able to support in the next realeased ! I realised improvements has made since M12. Keep up the good work ok !

#37 Re: M14 .....

by Waldo

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 3:18 AM

As someone said earlier, m14 doesn't work with java. Read the release notes.

W

#43 First Milestone i've downloaded Since M10.........

by Hendy99

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:46 AM

And now back to the Nightly builds until I see crypto-enabled M14 :P~~

#44 Bassackwards Compatibility (allard)

by zontar

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:53 AM

It was announced some time ago that Moz would not support the old Netscape DOM (anything to do with "document.layers" or "window.captureEvents", basically). So, no, DHTML pages intended for NS 4.X won't work in Mozilla.

There are some valid reasons for this: 1. One of the project's objectives is to produce a small, lightweight, standards-compliant browser. Having to support two antiethical object models rather than one (standard DOM) contributes to bloat. 2. There's also the little problem of trying to handle both event capturing and event bubbling in the same environment. I suppose it could be done, but I'd sure hate to be stuck on the team trying to develop an implementation. 3. Supporting the old Netscape DOM would just encourage Web developers to continue using non-standards like the LAYER tag.

People using LAYERs and such are going to have to give them up sooner or later -- might as well be sooner, IMNSHO.

The good news is that there's a lot of MSIE stuff (which can be emulated in the current NS production browser only with extreme difficulty, if at all) that'll be compatible with Moz with a minimum of conversion-related fuss and bother, since the IE 4/5 DOM and event model are a lot closer to the W3's standards than those of Netscape 4.X.

As someone who's used up countless hours of precious lifespan applying large dollops of JavaScript and duct tape (and a healthy supply of curses!) to bridge disparate DOMs, I say Good Riddance. My current daydream: The morning after Moz/NS 6.0 final is released, I awake to find out that everyone's magically already switched over to it and forgotten all about 4.X... Ahhhh... :-)

#56 Re: Bassackwards Compatibility (allard)

by mykmelez

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 10:36 AM

-- 2. There's also the little problem of trying to handle both event capturing and event bubbling in the same environment. I suppose it could be done, but I'd sure hate to be stuck on the team trying to develop an implementation. --

Mozilla implements the DOM 2 standard event model, which contains both event bubbling and event capturing mechanisms. I can't speak to being stuck on the team that did it, but I hear working on Mozilla is pretty fun, and as a developer I sure appreciate having a choice of standardized mechanisms.

#93 Re: Re: Bassackwards Compatibility (allard)

by zontar

Saturday March 4th, 2000 6:03 AM

-- Mozilla implements the DOM 2 standard event model, which contains both event bubbling and event capturing mechanisms.

True enough of DOM-2 -- but I was under the impression that Moz was only doing DOM-1, as the new standard hasn't yet been finalized...? Of course, I spent most of the fall buried in C++ and VB coding, and may have fallen a bit behind the JS/DHTML times... &lt;grin&gt;

I was really thinking more of the state of affairs in NS 4.X wherein one must remember to turn on capturing for specific events, which can be a real pain sometimes, and about the LAYERs/ILAYERs thing.

Thanks for the reminder to do some reading...

#97 Re: Bassackwards Compatibility (allard)

by skeeterow

Saturday March 4th, 2000 12:58 PM

Why should one want to give up layers? Or should I say div? Here are some practice pages of mine that only contain javascript and we're not talking applets here.

http://members.xoom.com/_XMCM/skeeterow/science.htm http://members.xoom.com/_XMCM/skeeterow/tool.htm In NS 4X, IE 4X and Opera 3X these hidden Div work fine, but in M what ever there is nothing to see. steve

#105 Re: Re: Bassackwards Compatibility (allard)

by sacolcor

Sunday March 5th, 2000 1:35 AM

Your problem is one of the most common DOM issues. The situation here is that NS4.X uses document.layers, IE uses document.all, and the standard (and thus Mozilla) decided not to play favorites, and used document.getElementByName. Check the DOM spec on the W3C site, and code a section that follows it; it should work fine on Mozilla.

#107 Sounds Great

by skeeterow

Sunday March 5th, 2000 10:47 AM

Their site is so big, can you point me to an url?

#109 Re: Sounds Great

by sacolcor

Sunday March 5th, 2000 12:29 PM

Sure can:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/

Be prepared to sit back and read for a while, and don't expect (or try) to get it all your first time through. I've been trying to teach myself the assorted specs for a couple months now, and I've found that the best way is to go back and casually re-read one of them every week or two, rather than trying to cram the whole thing.

#110 Re: Re: Sounds Great

by skeeterow

Sunday March 5th, 2000 3:19 PM

Wow, I see what you mean. It's good that I've got some good stations in my favorites in my G2 Player. Here is one of my favorites Orange Sunshine Web. http://www2.orangesunshine.com/orangesunshine/main/metafile.ram This is a ram link. Thanks again for the url.

steve

#52 Reduced Stability

by sacolcor

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 9:48 AM

I've got to agree that so far, M14 seems less stable than M13. (And yes, I deleted the .dat file). Could some of you try checking the following URL?

http://www.w3c.org/MarkUp/

It, and several XHTML pages I wrote simply refuse to render on my machine (P3/500, 128 MB, WinNTSP6). Also, the Mozilla application seems to spontaneously lose focus at times.

#54 Re: Reduced Stability

by sdm

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 10:31 AM

There's a bug in identifying the XHTML namespace. Check bugzilla.mozilla.org for status on this bug.

#57 I am trilled!

by shim

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 11:10 AM

I have been using mozilla browser since M12 and I am very happy that it let me view Chinese pages with my linux box. However, nothing compared to the M14. It is fast and much stable then the M13. That's why I have no choice but to sign up as a member of this club so that I can say thank you to all you wonderful people. Keep up the good work..|:>B)

#59 Browser Identification

by oopy493

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 11:25 AM

M14 appears to identify itself as M13 - Check out Help/About... How did that make it through the whole M14 lifecycle?

#80 Re: Browser Identification

by KaiRo

Friday March 3rd, 2000 11:51 AM

The fact is, that identifier was introduced in the last nightlies before M14. I don't know why they wrote m13 in that file... And I don't understand it.

Mozilla German (de-AT) identifies itself as "M14 de-AT" as it should... http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9805220/mozilla/

#65 Mouse wheel

by archen

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:12 PM

My mouse wheel (logitech) still doesn't work, but that's okay. So I turned off the gfx scrollbars so the mouse would work again. Then I fould that on certain pages (usually ones containing tables - such as this one) that you barely scroll at all and the window takes off and starts scrolling for 3-4 seconds. Has anyone else noticed this behavior.

Mozilla has a way to go, but it's getting there. I'd probably use it no matter how crappy it was anyway

#66 Use it no matter how crappy?

by Tanyel

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:44 PM

I think that is what they expect. Every time somebody says something other than "Mozilla is wonderful", there is some irrelevant reply.

#68 Re: Use it no matter how crappy?

by archen

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 8:24 PM

Well maybe that came across a bit more negative than I intended. Netscape 4x has severe problems (everybody knows this), and mozilla isn't ready yet, but I still refuse to use Internet Explorer under any circumstances. Crashing every now and then, and having html problems is one thing, but it's far better than... say something such as allowing bookmarks to be exported over the system kernel on M$Win9x.

#78 So wait for final n/t

by Kovu

Friday March 3rd, 2000 10:45 AM

n/t

#84 Re: So wait for final n/t

by Tanyel

Friday March 3rd, 2000 2:53 PM

That is a good example.

#67 Re: Mouse wheel

by tono

Thursday March 2nd, 2000 5:53 PM

I also have a Logitech wheely mouse, and I can say with certainty that it will work with either the gfx widgets on or off. However, with them on it scrolls for 3-4 seconds after you stop scrolling, and it will do it blazingly fast, scrolling through 150 slashdot comments. My problem with M14 and several of the previous and current nightly builds, are the Form Buttons are incredibly slow to click. You'll click them and it will take several seconds for them to depress and come back up. I've also noticed that if you click enough of them, it'll BSOD and not recover. Other than those issues it's been completely stable.

#72 Re: Mouse wheel

by beej

Friday March 3rd, 2000 12:28 AM

Found something like this documented in the release notes:

"Windows: If you are using a Logitech wheel mouse, scrolling with the wheel in Mozilla may not work while Logitech's em_exec program is running. A workaround for the problem (which may involve upgrading your mouse driver is documented in bug 20618."

Hope this helps. Any spelling errors above are my fault, as I couldn't get Mozilla to copy-and-paste it straight from the release notes page into this reply box... ^_^

- Beej

#79 Re: Re: Mouse wheel

by WillyWonka

Friday March 3rd, 2000 10:46 AM

Woo hoo thats the bug I reported :)

I also have the problem where if you move the mose wheel one little click it scrolls all the way down the page (Or most of the way in the case of slashdot's discussion groups)

In one of the mouse wheel related bug reports I was told that there would be code to debug the mouse in the nightlies soon. (They can't seem to reproduce this bug) I haven't heard anything since though so I guess its still not in there.

#73 Proxy authentification is not persistant any more

by hfoucher

Friday March 3rd, 2000 12:45 AM

I read in Mozillazine a few weeks ago:

"The latest nightly build has persistant proxy authentication, making it usable for those of us whose only Internet access is via an authenticating proxy server."

It used to work but in M14 it doesn't at all for me. Did any of you succeeded ?

#74 Nightly Build

by Tanyel

Friday March 3rd, 2000 7:12 AM

Yesterday's nightly build is working much better than the "milestone" release. I think they should have held the release back 2 days.

#76 Re: Nightly Build

by asa

Friday March 3rd, 2000 9:40 AM

yesterday's nightly build has about a weeks worth of M15 development. They branched M14 many days ago and put in about a week cleaning it up for release while the tip was still moving forward. Go Nightlies! Tanyel, glad you like them better too.

posted with yesterday's nightly.

Asa

#77 Re: Re: Nightly Build

by Tanyel

Friday March 3rd, 2000 10:06 AM

Maybe that explains the regression. By downloading the milestone, I probably stepped backwards one week. I think I was confused because the Windows files in the "latest" directory do not contain "M14" or "M15" in the title.

#81 You're darn right! But...

by bink

Friday March 3rd, 2000 12:34 PM

This is easily the best build I've seen to date, it's both fast and stable (1 crash in 3 + hours browsing is a record for me). One thing I would *LOVE* to see is navigation with alt+arrow keys for the back and forward buttons. Anyone know when this is due? I don't like using the mouse.

#82 Keyboard navigation...

by Silverthorn

Friday March 3rd, 2000 1:59 PM

I guess I need to get this nightly then... But I have to agree with you about the keyboard commands. It is little things like that that make such a difference when you're actually browsing.

But while we are on this topic... I'd love to see some of the keyboard options that are in Opera. z and x for forward and backward are so much easier than having to do alt-left or alt-right.

Just some thoughts... Shawn =)

#89 Re: Keyboard navigation...

by rkl

Friday March 3rd, 2000 4:58 PM

Silly question here - how do you nav. in Opera with z and x when the input focus is in a text field ?! Er, the answer is "you don't" :-) Alt-left and Alt-right however, would still work in that situation.

I must be an oddball here because I actually use the mouse for virtually everything in a browser and don't even know what most of the keyboard short-cuts are...

#98 Re: Keyboard navigation...

by Silverthorn

Saturday March 4th, 2000 3:42 PM

Well... first of all, the cases when your cursor is in a text box and you want to navigate generally doesn't happen that often when you're doing regular browsing.

But Opera can also do alt-left and alt-right. It can also do ctrl-left and ctrl-right for that matter.

You could also click out of the text box with the mouse (just moving the mouse to the side and clicking it and hitting z is still a lot faster then moving the mouse to the top of the window). Or you can also hit F9 to take the focus out of a text box.

I like the focusing set up in Opera. If you hit ctrl-n for a new window, it opens it up with a blank location bar and the cursor already in it. Then when you're done typing and hit enter, it always puts the focus onto the main page so you can start scrolling with the keyboard..etc..

But, using the keyboard for EVERYTHING is not always the best. It is generally finding the middleground on when to use the mouse and when to use the keyboard that works out the best...

Shawn =)

#75 NTLM Proxy Authentication

by SomeGuy

Friday March 3rd, 2000 8:22 AM

Well, I'm still waiting for NTLM Proxy authentication support to get through this darn MSProxy with anything other than IE... yea I know I am going to be waiting until Redmond freezes over, but I can't help wishing. I know it has to be reverse engineered and all, but I am curious as to why this hasn't been done this already. Is it because MS made it so complicated that is near impossible, or is there simply no demand for it because no sane network administrator would use it in the first place? (which says something about our network admins)

#100 A little from the left, a little from the right...

by FrodoB

Saturday March 4th, 2000 10:16 PM

Probably some of both, and a lot of the fact that no one really has time to do it inside Netscape (it sounds like something a non-Netscape developer could do).

#83 FreeBSD Package

by petejc

Friday March 3rd, 2000 2:30 PM

I mailed the binaries to Dawn at Mozilla yesterday but here is a link for any FreeBSDers who can't wait for mozilla to get it up on their site.

ftp://204.107.76.15/pub/M14.tar.gz

pete

#85 Nightly Build & PNG & test exe's

by basic

Friday March 3rd, 2000 3:31 PM

Funny that the recent nightly builds seems more stable that M14, but the fullcircle makes analyzing bugs easier than trying to guess what happened when Moz suddenly disappears ;-)

When are we going to see PNG as the default wedgit format for XUL? I know we still have some transperency problems, but I doubt they would get fix if not enough people are seeing it! Any chance of seeing MNG support soon? ;-)

In the Win32 build, are those test files really needed? (refering to the zip pakages here)

basic

#86 new M14 builds

by basic

Friday March 3rd, 2000 3:40 PM

What new builds are these?

Mozilla-win32-M14-de-AT.zip German? What does the AT stands for?

mozilla-powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu-M14.tar.gz

mozilla-ppc-unknown-linux-gnu-M14.tar.gz

what is the difference between the powerpc build and the ppc build?

mozilla-w2k-M14.zip Win2k build?

basic

#92 AT German

by allard

Saturday March 4th, 2000 4:20 AM

I would suggest AT stands for Austria. The're speaking German as well overthere.

Allard

#87 new M14 builds

by basic

Friday March 3rd, 2000 3:52 PM

What new builds are these?

Mozilla-win32-M14-de-AT.zip German? What does the AT stands for?

mozilla-powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu-M14.tar.gz

mozilla-ppc-unknown-linux-gnu-M14.tar.gz

what is the difference between the powerpc build and the ppc build?

mozilla-w2k-M14.zip Win2k build?

basic

#88 Re: new M14 builds

by basic

Friday March 3rd, 2000 4:55 PM

Sorry about the double post (weird I didn't try to send twice).

I've figured out the de-AT one. But I'm still puzzled at the two linux-ppc/powerpc build. The reason I'm asking is that I'm mantaining a page of links to all the nightly builds at

http://www.geocities.com/_basic/mozilla.html

Basic

#94 Authentication popup on Linux?

by toneman

Saturday March 4th, 2000 6:35 AM

Does anyone else have the problem with recent builds that the authentication popup window won't accept a passwd (on the Linux build). This includes M14 :( Maybe this is GTK related (I run 1.2.5, RedHat 6.0 with most packages upgraded to 6.1)

using the username:passwd@ construction does work however...

#99 Re: Authentication popup on Linux?

by tialaramex

Saturday March 4th, 2000 8:50 PM

Yes, that dialog is screwed. You'll have to live without for a while or perhaps M15 nightlies have it fixed already?

#106 Where to get libjpeg.so.62

by c_froehlich

Sunday March 5th, 2000 8:53 AM

Hi Guys!

Where do I geht libjpeg.so.62. It is needed since M11 I guess. I made an s-link to libjpeg.6.0.1.so, but it doesn't work. I am using SuSE 6.3. Do you have any hints?

#108 Where to get libjpeg.so.62

by c_froehlich

Sunday March 5th, 2000 11:44 AM

Hi Guys!

Where do I geht libjpeg.so.62. It is needed since M11 I guess. I made an s-link to libjpeg.6.0.1.so, but it doesn't work. I am using SuSE 6.3. Do you have any hints?

#112 "Image Maps"!

by L1Ranger

Sunday March 12th, 2000 12:04 AM

The Only Sure *Bet* On The Internet, is an "Image"!

"Image Maps"! YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!;)

Fully Standards Compliant!

Fully Cross-Browser/Platform Compatible!

Fully a Time Saver!

And, If The Standard Changes!...No Problem!

Jus'Change The Document Identifier Code 2 The New Standard..."Botta Boom! Botta Bang!"...U R Compliant 2 The "New" Ever-Changing Standard!

Yeap! "Image Maps"!

#113 "Image Maps"!

by L1Ranger

Sunday March 12th, 2000 12:06 AM

The Only Sure *Bet* On The Internet, is an "Image"!

"Image Maps"! YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!;)

Fully Standards Compliant!

Fully Cross-Browser/Platform Compatible!

Fully a Time Saver!

And, If The Standard Changes!...No Problem!

Jus'Change The Document Identifier Code 2 The New Standard..."Botta Boom! Botta Bang!"...U R Compliant 2 The "New" Ever-Changing Standard!

Yeap! "Image Maps"!

#114 "Image Maps"!

by L1Ranger

Sunday March 12th, 2000 12:17 AM

The Only Sure *Bet* On The Internet, is an "Image"!

"Image Maps"! YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!;)

Fully Standards Compliant!

Fully Cross-Browser/Platform Compatible!

Fully a Time Saver!

And, If The Standard Changes!...No Problem!

Jus'Change The Document Identifier Code 2 The New Standard..."Botta Boom! Botta Bang!"...U R Compliant 2 The "New" Ever-Changing Standard!

Yeap! "Image Maps"!

#115 New Downloader

by shk41

Sunday March 12th, 2000 8:50 PM

I just downloaded the latest nightly build (March 12), and I have extracted the files into a folder (Windows). What do I do from here to be able to run Mozilla?