Tree Closes for Mozilla 0.9.6Wednesday November 7th, 2001mozilla.org today closed the tree in preparation for the branching of the 0.9.6 Milestone later this week. As usual, drivers@mozilla.org will work towards a Friday branch and a release on the following Friday. Check-ins to the tree will be moderated by the Drivers until the branch happens. What caused the recent spate of bad builds? And what's the bug number for the bug where Mozilla shows: <html><head></head></html> just before loading a page? Bugzilla choked up when I queried it for this. There have been some bad bugs in the past few days, but it looks like they're gone in the second round of November 6 builds: http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/ The bug you mention is bug 106558 and is now fixed: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106558 I think they should try to run it before distributing it this time. Distributing it? These were automated nightly builds, with big "DOWNLOAD AT OWN RISK" signs. Software projects go through periods like this from time to time. (Although there's probably egg on the face of the developers that checked in and reviewed the broken patches). It's not like this was a milestone. The "broken patches" were a huge rewrite of lots of form functionality to deal with numerous architectural problems that prevented non-displayed form elements from working. The patch was 900K of code! That means that the reviewers had to carefully read the 900K and catch any and all errors in the code and its interactions with other code. The fact that only 2 issues arose is a wonder in my opinion. Also, test builds with this patch were available for weeks. Shame on all of us (including myself) for not trying them. Had we done so, these issues would perhaps have been caught much sooner. Major component rewrites at this stage? Ouch. Rewrites being checked in without basic bug testing? Double ouch. > Major component rewrites at this stage? It was a case of "rewrite or ship a browser not usable for things like tabbed interfaces in webpages". Agreed, the testing quality on this was poor. > It was a case of "rewrite or ship a browser not usable for things like tabbed interfaces in webpages". < I sure hope that wasn't the reason. If it was, it underscores the point about feature freeze being vital at this stage. The tabbed interface was a new feature that should have been rejected for the sake of stability. Now you seem to be saying that this new feature caused a major component rewrite which has destabilized not only the product but the bug database for days (and which may well have further destabilizing impact not realized yet). > Agreed, the testing quality on this was poor. < You'd think people would have learned about the impact of rewrites after the big code crash earlier this year. I think I may have read your post incorrectly, though. Are you referring to tabs implemented in HTML using the visibility and display CSS attributes? If so, I wonder why that would only be found out now, but it doesn't seem to bear on the feature freeze issue. Yeah he meant tabbed interfaces implemented in HTML. AFAIK this bug has been known about for a long time, but has just been getting round to being fixed. This bug http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34297 was filed a year and a half ago so it's hardly been "only found out now". I'm sure everyone would have liked to see it fixed sooner (especially as it's a spec compliancy issue blocking a host of other bugs) but it seems to have been a non-trivial bug to fix. Yes, I did mean interfaces in HTML. As you saw (since Fabian nicely posted the bug number that I could not recall) this fixes submission of form controls in containers with display:none. This is a must for being able to do complex UI in HTML. I believe he meant navigating the page with the tab key. I've seen people get confused on this issue here and in the n.p.m.* newsgroups. I think we should stick to easily differentiated terms for both features to avoid this problem. I propose "multi-tab interface" for the <tabbrowser> feature, and "tab-key navigation" for the keyboard accessibility issue. The rewrite fixed very important DOM and HTML compliance issues that mattered to a lot of business users who write web applications. See bug 34297 for more information. It has fixed an incredible number of form controls bugs and makes the code much easier to understand and to extend. I'm not sure exactly how it helps tabbed browsing, but if boris says so ;-) -Fabian. I downloaded the nov6 nightly and was surprised to see the tab close button gone. Is this a design decision. If so, please bring it back. PrintPreview is cool but needs the UI to go back to normal view. Also, it only shows one page on framed pages. On the other hand, this nightly just feels nice & fast. Good work. Tabs are turning out to be the killer feature. I have a script that starts several copies of Moz (or IE) with my favorite sites at once. Is there a way to tell a single instance of moz to open 5 web sites in different tabs from command line (in Windows)? Yes, this is a design decision. It confused the hell out of dozens of users and looked ugly as all hell. You can close tabs by right-clicking (context menu), middle-clicking on the tab, and, soon now, using ctrl-w. Hyatt is also open to suggestions on bringing back the [X] in a way that does not create bad UI. The current thought is to put an [X] on the active tab. Feel free to discuss the issue in n.p.m.ui Cool, I was waiting for that feature. Do you know if it is possible to call it from the embedding API? Once again, my open bugs didn't get fixed and made into the release. Has much of anything major changed since 0.9.5? I have open bugs too and a few pet peeve ones I've been watching that still aren't fixed. It used to bother me, but I think once you get involved in a project that has a million open issues you understand more. I've been working on a web site in my spare time, and on my to do list there dozens of minor details that need fixing but have languished for some time because of more important things, both for the site and in real life. I'm much more sympathetic to Mozilla developers now and don't worry about every bug not being fixed immediately. I've actually been hoping for 97138 (table sizing) to be fixed for a while now because it impacts something I'm working on, but I understand that it wasn't for so long because it doesn't affect most sites. Just relax and wait for the e-mail updates. Also, the build comments on this site are a great way to find out what's being fixed in general. Almost daily updates, bug summaries as tooltips, and links to the actual bugs. Much more useful than the Mozilla.org status reports are. ..was fixed a few days ago. Or was that your point? On http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsquery.cgi?treeid=default&module=SeaMonkeyAll&branch=HEAD&branchtype=match&dir=&file=&filetype=match&who=&whotype=match&sortby=Date&hours=2&date=day&mindate=&maxdate=&cvsroot=%2Fcvsroot there is a list of all the fixes of the day. It is a cross platform CVS query and all changes to the tree are listed (including tests, build fixes etc), so it is bloated enough. Links to specific bugs along with descriptions help you in finding interesting bug fixes. The reason I like this site's build comments though are because the interesting bugs are culled for you and presented in plain english. I have CCs/votes on bugs I want to follow in detail, and this site for the rest. >The reason I like this site's build comments though are because the interesting bugs are culled for you and presented in plain english. I have CCs/votes on bugs I want to follow in detail, and this site for the rest. I follow the same practice but there are always some bugs that have slipped your attention. Besides, some language specific bugs are not covered by the build comments. New Checkins is a nice tool for detecting changes. And I would be very happy if they had a "filter" feature to suppress non-bug related checkins (bustage fixes etc) ... before I download another build on my slow line, did any of this get fixed yet? -when a tab times out or doesn't load, the url is not written in the address bar. By then you forget what you right-clicked on, or left the original page, so you're screwed. I hate this one. -Ctrl-T doesn't work while the tab you are on is loading. -often have to close a tab two times to get it to close. (never offline, though!) -Oh, and the wacky textarea editing problems messing up my posts all the time. Thanks. #14 Re: how about the most annoying tab bugs? fixed yeby evlg Wednesday November 7th, 2001 10:30 AM The 2001-11-06-03 build for Win32 i downloaded last night had much improved tab support. Options for Ctrl+Click on a link to open in new tab, etc. They did kill the [x] to close the tab, which I thought was a big mistake. Hopefully it will come back in some form soon. Having to middle click is a mess, and I'd prefer to have a close button single clickable. I think that hiding the [x] until your mouse is over it is a problem, because there is no indication that the [x] will appear until you happen to go to mouse over the tab. Having the [x] static seemed fine to me - why not add a bit of text next to it that says "Close Surrent Tab" and then have a preference to turn that text off for power users? #15 Re: how about the most annoying tab bugs? fixed yeby schapel Wednesday November 7th, 2001 10:30 AM You can check Bugzilla for those bugs: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ If you vote for the bugs, you not only indicate that they are important to you, but also you get e-mail updates when they get fixed. The wacky textarea bug is 101122. Add yourself to the CC if you want to know when it's updated. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101122 Recently a comprehensive testcase was added and Kin took it, so it might get some traction soon. Sorry, this is waaaaaaaaaay offtopic but does anybody know whatever happened to Mozilla themes at themes.org? When clicking Get New Themes from the View|Apply Theme menu it brings you to a page with a 404 error. Just curious Sorry, this is waaaaaaaaaay offtopic but does anybody know whatever happened to Mozilla themes at themes.org? When clicking Get New Themes from the View|Apply Theme menu it brings you to a page with a 404 error. Just curious themes.org changed their entire site. The link in mozilla needs to be changed to reflect that link or themes.org should put a redirect page to the proper location on their site. Well, I think I found it .. but it only has ONE theme ... ?!? http://www.themes.org/skins/mozilla/ I think themes.org wanted to get rid of unmaintaned themes from their site by forcing authors to reregister their themes... and I believe there was also some new meta data in the new site, so the couldn't just convert directly from the old site to the new. Please note the Mozilla section is not functional. Go to http://www.themes.org/skins/mozilla/ and try and install the only theme on the site, the JavaScript triggers have been set up wrong. This is a known about bug but they don't seem to want to fix it, email feedback@themes.org to indicate that you'd like to see this fixed. I use sometime Opera and when i want to swich the browser child windows (tabs) i do an CNTRL-TAB This could be cool for long time users and yes CNTRL-F4 (for closing the things) i saw the Msn(explorer) i want to say it could be cool to have the close-minimise buttons with in the same theme so and kill the system-windows upper bar cntrl-tab switches frames and will stay that way. ctrl-pgup/ctrl-pgdown change tabs Shhh, this goes against almost all tabbed programs on every platform. Anybody here ever used ^TAB for frame switching in non-text browser? Mozilla really needs UI for custom key-binding settings. But with them spread about all thinkable files... Looks like Mozilla's getting more and more to places the creators never dreamed of ^_^ I've not tested night builds for a while, and when I finally have a chance to download the latest nightly build (11/6), I found a pretty serious problem with the password manager. Whenever I visit a site that has multiple username/password stored in my profile, the password dialog pops up, but it can never be dismissed. Closing the dialog results in a crash. Has this bug been filed? The form problems (Including crashes involving the password manager) seem to have been fixed in this mornings build. The password manager dialog does seem to have some problems displaying but I'm not seeing any crashes. And there is the beginings of a print preview too! On a site such as Mozillazine the password manager pops up every time a new post is read and asks for the password. This is not the best design IMHO. If the user remains at Mozillazine the password manager should only pop up once. It should automatically fill in the same values without a dialogue box continually reasking for the information again. If there is more than one password for Mozilazine the password manager pops up as each nedw post is read. The reason this happens is that each time a reply is posted the password manager thinks this is a new password beause it has a different title and store this as a new password. With multiple passwords the password manager continues to pop up as each post is read. This ia annoying. I wonder if a button could be added to the password manager such as "use only this password" and a menu item if the user wants to substitute another user name/password for the one currently selected? On some chat boards you might want several "niknames", but do not want the password manager poping up unless you want to change your nikname. If the password manager pops up after each post when reading chat boards such as "Mozillazine" this will make it harder for new users being comfortable adopting Mozilla/Netscape. Note: mozillazine doesn\'t like URL\'s in parentheses. That was bug 108637 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108637, and it has been fixed. Sigh, it doesn\'t like commas, either. This time for real. That was bug 108637 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108637 and it has been fixed. Go to http://www.gner.co.uk/ Select File | Print Preview The page is shown incorrectly and flows off the page. Take a look, I don't know how to describe it, so if someone more familiar with bugzilla than me could file a bug or check to see if it;s reported. Let me know the bug number. Thanks. That looks like a problem with the site rather than a problem with print preview. Resize the browser window and you'll see that the page doesn't render any differently. Sites that are designed with a fixed width are going to have problems if the browser window it's displayed on or the page it's printed on isn't that wide. Yes, I think that's right. With IE6.0 on Windows 98SE, normal U.S. setup, the print preview truncates the graphics at about the "Y" in "JOURNEY". I was talking about a bug in the way the page is displayed in the Mozilla Print Preview window (only in the latest nightlies) not print preview in IE or Netscape 4.x Yes, I am also talking about the way the page is displayed in the Mozilla Print Preview Window. I am using build 2001110703 on Windows 2000. The way it is displayed in Print Preview in that version of Mozilla is exactly the same as the way it is printed from that version of Mozilla and is exactly the same as it looks in the browser version in that same version of Mozilla. The site itself has a problem that it has a fixed width page. If the browser window or the printed page is narrower than that width, the site is truncated. The problem is with the site. Feel free to enter a Tech Evangelism bug in Bugzilla if someone hasn't already. On a print preview window you're not meant to have some image floating off the edge of a page. I know they shouldn't use fixed width but that's not the issue here. It's that the print preview window should not show the part of the image that isn't on the paper, it looks very strange indeed. The image should be truncated. I'm using buildid 2001110703/Win2ksp2 It looks to me like an overflow bug. I seem to remember there being a bug with mozilla's support for overflow clipping. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102952 Actually overflow: hidden has a lot of problems with it, IF that's what they're using, it will probably take a little bit of work to fix it. In the latest upto the minute nightly build I've got the 2001110703 build there's a cool new feature - favicon support, but in a more useful way than IE has it. If you enable the following option in Edit > Preference > Appearance > Show Web Site Icons then the tabbed browser adds support for IE's favicons to the tabs. So when you've got a lot of tabs open you can still easily see which ones are from which site. It's good that this feature is a preference tho. Yes, this is cool but this has been disabled in the current build. Do you know how to enable it in the prefs.js? anybody know what's the difference between site icons and favicons? I saw these preferences in the all.js pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", true); pref("browser.chrome.favicons", true); Setting site_icons to true seem to allow for IE's shortcut icons. However, I noticed that only when I set favicons to true, does mozillazine's icon show up. Also, looking at mozillazine's source does not reveal a <link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="favicon.ico"> tag. Does anyone know this is accomplished? #48 Mac (classic) doubles/echos every character typedby nagano Wednesday November 7th, 2001 4:52 PM TThhee llaasstt ffeeww nniigghhttllyy bbuuiillddss eecchhooss eevveerryy cchhaarraacctteerr yyoouu ttyyppee.. TThhiiss mmaakkeess mmoozziillllaa wwoorrtthhlleessss,, ssiinnccee tthheerree iiss nnoo ssuucchh tthhiinngg aass ..ccoomm iinn aannyy ddnnss.. The last milestone build for Older macs works fine. The last few nightly ones exhibit the weird typing bug. I am running it on 8600 with macOS 8.6 and an ADB keyboard. I\'ll try this latest build on a powerbook running 8.6 later tonight. One build (2001-11-06-12-trunk/MacMozillaFullInstall.sea.bin) Three Macs, three downloads. All of them exhibit the doubling of typed characters. Turn that thumb down. Note: no usb macs were tested. Is this bug limited to non-usb keyboards? 2001110703 is great, and since 2001110603, the collapsed headers bug has been fixed. But there's something weird. On webpages, before an image has been downloaded, I'm seeing yellow smilie faces. A personal touch from some Mozilla developer? :) Oh, and search from the URL bar seems broken again. Quirks mode behavior has been changed to put a "broken image" placeholder in. The icon hasn't reached the tree yet, so they grabbed the closest one they could find. :-) Something quite off topic: I was looking for a Mozilla logo for my Homepage. Something like "Best Viewed with Mozilla", does this exist, I couldn't find it. Thanks simi The World Wide Web Consortium has CSS-compliance images to put on your page. I think one can take it as read that stardards-compliant pages are best veiwed with a recent version of Gecko. Mozilla.org does not encourage people to put Best Viewed With stickers on their pages because Mozilla is all about open standards. My point is that many people simply don't know that Mozilla exists and with it displays correct code correctly. Therefore I think such a logo would make sense. You could be right. Okay, I'll think of something. Such an image shouldn't say Mozilla only - Opera gets all but the most complex CSS correct, too. And IE 6 isn't complete crap when it comes to standards. But I'll come up with something. Well... it doesn't need to be a "best viewed with" button. You could do a "Mozilla Now!" type of button. =) Shawn How about a "Standards Now" button ? Or "Best viewed in something other than IE" ? Netscape Communicator version 4 is "something other than IE". I can assure you, my page, or anyone's page, is not best viewed with Netscape Communicator version 4. (No offense to any Netscape people or anything, I realise that it was alright when it was first released) Well, if it's just for standards, then the Webstandards Project already has way of making you upgrade your browser, and they suggest Netscape 6.2, Opera 5, or IE 6. So I guess a Mozilla button is needed, but where would it link to? If it's just to plain mozilla.org, then people won't know what to do - there isn't anything telling them to download mozilla, just nonsense about binaries and testing and milestones and hacking, which is clearly nothing but gibberish - line noise, perhaps, caused by a faulty network connection. It is the assumption of the mozilla.org homepage that anyone looking at it already knows everything there is to know about Mozilla. And you'll not get mozilla.org to encourage people to download Mozilla except for debugging purposes, and there are already Best Viewed With Netscape 6 images (I think). So... suggestions? If, perhaps, someone with a server capable of handling traffic had a Introduction To Mozilla type page that linked to the Mozilla.org ftp site...? Emlyn, You make a great point! Your line about all the jargon used on Mozilla site reflects what I first felt when I visited the mozilla.org site: "What are all these technical terms? How about a gentle introduction to what Mozilla is and why I should be interested in it?" As far as a site providing a gentle introduction to Mozilla: try Newzilla: http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/ . The author of Newzilla has done a great job in presenting loads of information in a visually pleasing and technically clear and understandable way. As mozilla.org is redesigning its webpage, it should consider creating a gentle introduction to beginners, which should be posted prominently on its webpage. Additionally, it should improve its glossary of mozilla jargon, and make that easily available. Additionally, make the documentation on the website easily available and searchable (Atomz, for the search engine, maybe? http://www.atomz.com ). About the issue of a "best viewed with Mozilla" button: I think this issue is related to the issue of Mozilla evangelism. Even if you don't have a "Best viewed with Mozilla" button, you could still have one of the following buttons, (designed to spread the popularity of Mozilla, without arguing for browser-specific pages): "Mozilla is cool" or "Run with the lizard - Get Mozilla" or "Championing web standards: Can you Gecko?" or "WoahZilla! - Mozilla is fast, stable and cool! - Get it now!". My point is: There are so many people who are working hard on and believe in Mozilla - and if they want to ensure its success, they have to help spread its popularity. Mozilla needs some coherent identity, which can be popularized accross various media. Another related issue is: the start-up logo on some older mozilla builds was not very impressive. I have not checked recent builds, so maybe that has improved. To make my point clearer: Netscape's branded version of Mozilla is all coolness and polish: what about a similarly polished look for Mozilla? Some words of praise to all those people working hard on Mozilla: great work, guys and gals! It's hard making good software, and even harder co-ordinating a large group of developers on a project as large and ambitious as this. I have been impressed with word of new features gleaned from newsgroup postings, such as print preview(My first reaction: "Print Preview in Mozilla: OMG!!!"), tabs and icons. now the only features I am left wondering about are: saving images along with locally-saved webpages, the "publishing" (ftp) feature, improved usability (make checking and sending email easier) and stability in Mail. Once all that is accomplished: hey, I'd call it a 1.0 browser! Get back to the original topic of this post: If any of you have ideas on buttons/logos which could be part of a Mozilla evangelism campaign, please let me know. Regards, - Jayesh How about a button espousing the goodness of specifically Gecko? Not Mozilla, but Gecko. That way, we'll be encoraging people to get CSS-complaint browsers, and I think that most gecko-based browsers also do the Document Object Model as decreed by W3C, so that should be enough. That way, we won't be upsetting Mozilla.org by getting people to think Mozilla is end-user targetted, and we give users a choice of standards compliant browsers, *and* raise awareness about the Mozilla Project. Emlyn, Good idea about creating a Gecko promotion/evangelism page! Gecko is common and critical to Mozilla, Netscape, and scores of other products such as Galeon, K-Meleon and Activestate's Komodo development environment. It is a developing/burgeoning "standard" for some products, and is importantly different from the "old" Netscape 4.x technology, in that it *can* be employed in other products, whereas the "older" technology could not. Having a Gecko Advocacy page would have several aims: * Educate people on what Gecko is and why it could be useful/important to them * Educate people on how is different from the "old" 4.x Netscape technology, and why it is critical to the Mozilla project. * Provide a forum for beginners to ask questions about Mozilla and receive prompt repies. * Create greater awareness of how Gecko ties in with other technologies such as XUL - and thus enlist the support of graphic designers to create more themes for Mozilla / Netscape. (Winamp http://www.winamp.com has done a great job of gaining popular support for its "themes"/ skins. Granted making a Netscape theme is probably much harder, but still, we should ask: why are there only a handful of "good" themes available for Netscape? *Establish the credibility of Gecko as a solid component of an Internet-aware product within the business community, thus encouraging more companies to use it in their product (including Netscape's parent: AOL and Compuserve). Tell me what you think of such a site. Will it work? What would we need? What should we watch out for? Are the aims clearly defined enough? Feedback - good and bad - , please! Regards, - Jayesh I don't think a logo with the message "Best Viewed with Mozilla" is the best way to go. Mozilla is not about using propritary(sp) code which only works in Mozilla. You can on the other hand make an argument for puting up a logo stating "This site is best viewed in IE." IE does use some propritary HTML and other stuff which only works in IE (and sometimes Windows with activeX). May I suggest a better solution? See if there is a "W3C" logo and add the statement "This site is W3C standards compliant. This site is best viewed in browers that comply with the W3C standards such as the most recent versions of Internet Explorer (5.5+), KMelon, Netscape 6.2+" Why. If you add a logo with "Best viewed by Mozilla" you risk adding the message something like "everyone who uses a different browser is an idiot" which is what microsoft does with IE. But if you provide the message: "Best viewed with a W3C compliant browser" and politely suggest some W3C compliant browsers then you are making a much more valuable statement: Standards complience is what is important for the WEB to succeed, not what browser on uses. A "Best Viewed with Mozilla" logo is not good evangelism for Mozilla. This is much different form a "made with a Mac" logo. The Mac logo states that macs are good for Web design, but as blantently say in its subtext that what you use is crap. A "Best viewed with Mozilla" logo includes the subtext that what you are using is crap which may or may not be the case if the site is coded to W3C standards. BTW if you add a W3C logo to your site you must insure the site is W3C complient. I have an XHTMTL and a CSS compliance logo in my site, but the point is that people have to get made aware that something like Mozilla even exists. Maybe the logo should only be \\\"Support Mozilla\\\" or \\\"Mozilla now\\\". AFAIK Mozilla is the only browser besides iCab that supports the <link>-tag, therefore my site is best viewed with Mozilla (for the moment at least). It is good to let people know about Mozilla. I feel the more important taks is to let visitors to a site know how important it is to follow standards. A simple phrase such as "To best view this site please use a standards complient browser such as (provide a few examples of standard complient browsers." If the importance of standards for the internet is not avocated in some manner, and a banner is a good way without being to preachy, then we may in the near future begin to require IE in order to be allowed to view many sites. There are many choices for a standard complient browser. If we only plug Mozilla (or Netscape 6.x) and the visitor does not like our choice, all we may do is annoy the visitor. If we politely suggest that the visitor will view the site best with a standards complient browser and let them choose which browser best meets this need for them, we have kept the visitor happy while at the smae time made a subtile plug that the internet works best when it follows common W3C standards. I just downloaded the nightly build of 7/11 and was surprised by the new search-field on top of the mail-list in the mailer: wonderfull and very practical. My complements! It's Worth bearing in mind that Moz isn't really a Joe Consumer browser - If your -really- wanted to put a "Best viewed with..."[1] then it should be for Netscape/Galeon/etc... [1] I agree with the stance that you should be able to view with any browser that supports the standards. So are you suggesting that what he needs is an animated GIF that cycles through all of the Mozilla based browsers? :-) "Moz isn't really a Joe Consumer browser" .... why not ?? Do you need to make all opensource project like linux (not joe consumer OS) ?? From the Releases page: "We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!. We provide no end user support. If you use our binaries, we strongly encourage you to participate in the various mailing lists and newsgroups hosted by mozilla.org. Please report any bugs you find to bugzilla! That, of course, is the whole reason we make these binaries available." From the Getting Involved with mozilla.org page that is the default home page for Mozilla: "Congratulations! You've downloaded a Mozilla build. This means that you've volunteered to become part of the Mozilla testing community. Great! Welcome aboard. Helping out won't take much of your time, doesn't require special skills, and will help improve Mozilla." Joe Consumer doesn't want to "get involved" or report bugs, so it's better for him to use Netscape, Galeon, or one of the other browsers based on Mozilla. And, of course, the place to report bugs is in Bugzilla, not here! ;-) I really appreciated two new features- the tabbed pane browsing and the new search bar at the top in the Mail/News. Very very useful. Whoever thought of the idea...you are awesome. It is a very useful feature, but how come I have never seen any other program come up with it before? Good job guys. Having said that, I think empahsis should be placed on fixing existing bugs. Whan is the Composer ever going to be decently usable? It seems to have stability issues. And of course tehh perview feature is not working yet. Anyone know when that will be working? The Mail/News also seems to have some issues. Formatting messages using HTML (ie non plain text) is not very flawless. I found some buggy implimentration of bolding feature...play around with it. Type multiple paragraphs and try to bold workds from diff paragraphs by selecting them. The bolding is not very clean. sometimes the text even disappears. I have already reported this bug. Also, in textarea, sometimes, the word closest to the scrollbar(of the textarea) disappear! I think, as I am sure the developers realize, we need to fix these almost "in your face" bugs before 1.0...we seem to awfully close to it. > I really appreciated two new features- the tabbed pane browsing and the new search bar at the top in the Mail/News. Very very useful. Whoever thought of the idea...you are awesome. It is a very useful feature, but how come I have never seen any other program come up with it before? < The tabs are from Opera, and the search bar is from Outlook. I am doing my Mozilla stuff on a FreeBSD system where I tweak a few things in the configuration for my own needs. Regularly, I download the source tarball from the /pub/mozilla/nightly/latest-trunk directory. However, this has not been updated since 31 October. Does anybody know why this is so and when a new tarball can be expected in there? The machine that uploads source was down due to 'network problems' last I heard. It's supposed to be brought up again any time now. See bug 106009. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106009 Just spotted this amusement for folks to ponder: https://www.mozillazine.org/ (i.e. MozillaZine in secure mode) Accept the secure certificate and you get the shoes-boots.com site selling all sorts of boots ! No sign of lizard-skin boots though... :-) Don't worry. Every single shoe is standards compliant. You shouldn't have any problem walking... unless the floor was constructed using propietary materials. It's to do with the fact that a non SSL web server can host multiple domains on the one IP so the people who host MozillaZine will also host a multitude of other sites on the same IP address (the HTTP Host: header is used for this). However there's no such thing as this for SSL and each secure site needs its own IP address. So it just happens that the IP address used for MozillaZine.org is also used for the secure site for a shoe vendor. If MozillaZine decided they needed SSL for some reason they'd need a new IP address. Loving tabbed browsing, loving Netscape 6 (though I\'ll love it more when I can get some more themes for it, esp. OrbitII and Mozillium), loving every thumbs-up nightly that I come across, and very happy with it\'s headway and extensibility which is bringing it beyond the monolithic Internet Explorer series of beast. Got it? I love it! However... There\'s one thing that I\'m really curious about: beyond whatever documentation is provided by Mozilla, do developers of 3rd party plugins and extensions get any other assistance from the Mozilla team? If so, perhaps Macromedia could use one of the guys for a day or two in order to resolve bug 99974 (or even 93959 if they\'re feeling frisky ;D)? I also reckon it\'d be a good idea to go into full lock down until all blocker, critical, major and normal bugs can be condensed into a workable list. Heaps of these are duplicates, and even more are caused because of underlying dependancies, and therefore are resultant of the one bug, not a new bug altogether. The contributors at MozDev are doing a great job with their own extensions, but having the Mozilla base made air tight would make the thing damn-near unbreakable, which would be great both for developers (of pages and/or plugins), and the end users. Unfortunately, I don\'t know much about the current lock down (until 0.9.6), but I\'m curious as to what the lock down is in pace to achieve, and what it\'s constraints are (assuming that the constraints must be satisfied before release of 0.9.6), so if anyone could enlighten me...? I just saw this at our card processor's site: ********** Netscape 6.x or 6.1 - Technical Issues - September 27, 2001 We have recently been informed that customers using Netscape 6.x or 6.1 are encountering errors when attempting to purchase from an InternetSecure merchant. Most commonly, a customer will complete the first page of the InternetSecure order form pages and then will receive a notice stating: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We Cannot Process Your Transaction. Cannot find one or any of these variables: MerchantNumber, Products, ReturnURL or ReturnCGI. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- According to the engineers at Netscape, the newest versions of their internet browser; Netscape 6.0 and higher, use a different encryption algorithm. Unfortunately this algorithm interferes with most online banking software including InternetSecure's payment processing gateway. Netscape recognizes the issue and is working to correct it. Some banks, such as CIBC have issued a statement advising their users "not to upgrade". You may wish to place a notice on your website informing your customers of the issues involved and that Netscape 6.x users may phone or fax their orders to you. ********* Seemed to work fine in the latest nightly, but I didn't go all the way through. Anyone know more? I love the newest nightly btw. ctrl-click with background loading? woohoo! Sounds like it could be a problem with server not being compliant with TLS/SSL 3.0 http://developer.netscape.com/evangelism/docs/technotes/tls-ssl3/ but I believe that was 'fixed'* in 6.1. * By fixed I mean that a workaround was implemented to compensate for the servers' bugs. Alex Anyone know what's up with this release??? Why is netscape woring about this sh*t browser when they have 6.2 out there? Could someone enlightenme? cheers I read on one of the Netscape newsgroups that iPlanet does all the work on Netscape Communicator these days. hmm, let me see ... maybe because many users still prefer 4.x because - it shows more sites as intended by non-standards obeying designers? some people simply cannot affort to not visit sites just because they arent comformant. - it has many useful features especially in MailNews that mozilla lacks? - it is available for more unix flavors and i dont need to go to sun and register to get it for solaris That would be enough reasons for me, wouldnt mozilla be much more stable than 4.74 But if 4.79 has better stability, i wouldnt know why not to prefer it over mozilla. can anybody give me reasons? :) Netscape 6.2 doesn't have roaming. Some of us can't upgrade until the newer versions support roaming. Er, well, you've done better than me at getting NS 4.79 - I went here: ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/english/4.79/ and then tried to go into each of the windows, mac and unix directories. They *all* said "permission denied". This is confirmed by looking at mirrors of the site (e.g. at ftp.mirror.ac.uk), which also can't get anything from the site either. Also, there are no release notes where you'd expect: http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/4.7/relnotes/unix-4.79.html says "Page Not Found". It looks like 4.79 is imminent, but virtually every 4.7X release has come out with a "whimper" (no news sites, not even Linux ones, cover it), so you've got to hope that this will be the last ever 4.X release... I got the following message in my Inbox today. Like all the best pieces of spam, it came twice: Hello, I visited www.mozillazine.org and I noticed that you are not listed on some search engines. I am sure you can increase the number of people who visit www.mozillazine.org . Do you know TrafficMagnet? TrafficMagnet is a unique technology that instantly submits your web site to over 300,000+ search engines and directories every month. This is a very low-cost and effective way of advertising your site. To check our prices and submit www.mozillazine.org to 300,000+ search engines, go to TrafficMagnet.net I would love to hear from you. Best Regards, Christine Hall Sales & Marketing www.TrafficMagnet.net This was followed by a nice animation of a magnet attached to a minaturised MozillaZine screenshot with lots of people being pulled towards it. I guess they harvested my address because it's attached to my comments and assumed that any addresses on the site must be owned by someone involved in its administration. Did anyone else get this message or should I feel special? Alex I've gotten that email on just about every domain I "own". I even got that one once on a website that is totally offline at this point. My assumption is that they are doing some sort of domain search and just sending email to the listed admin. Basically lying that they have visited the site.. No, they had actually visited the site. The message had a screenshot of it and they can't have got my address from the domain registries as I'm not the admin of MozillaZine. Whether or not a real person actually visited the site is another matter, though... Alex I get spam addressed to "Keenspot" all the time. Sure I'm an active participant in the forums there, but I'm not actually affiliated with the company in any way. The funniest ones are the ones that treat "Keenspot" as if it was a person's name. Today's version of mozilla has the bug fix in which stops a page that is loading from overwriting my text in the location bar. Woo hoo! :) There is not yet a MozillaQuest article on this branch, so I thought I would see if I could provide one here. Mozilla 0.9.6 Branched - Late and Buggier Than Ever by Don A. Tello With more than 258 bugs still targeted to it, the upcoming Mozilla Milestone 0.9.6 edition was branched, if you can even call that "branching", Friday, 9 November 2001 from the main development-tree trunk. Moreover, at the time of its Friday branching Mozilla Milestone 0.9.6 had some 3,179 bugs by conservative estimates and some 12,261 bugs by less conservative estimates. The comparable less conservative estimate was around 15,760 bugs a month ago. Moreover, the more conservative bug count is down about 400 bugs since Mozilla 0.9.5 was branched. Both of thse numbers show a decline in the number of outstanding bugs. However, we still consider that Mozilla has gotten buggier. We will let you know how as soon as our staff can think of something. While the branch was originally scheduled to happen on 4PM Friday, internal sources indicate that this was delayed by an unknown amount, possibly up to fifteen minutes. This continues to show a pattern of technical irresponsibility that is bringing the once-great Netscape to its knees. When it finally dies we will be there to give you full coverage; watch for a headline on this site called "Mozilla Dies -- Told You So" for more information. If the Mozilla developers work to fix all, or even close to all, the bugs targeted to Mozilla 0.9.6 before releasing it, as opposed to (say) working to make all the bugs even worse, it could take some time. However, if the Mozilla developers follow past practices, they will fix only some of these bugs. Then they will merely sweep the rest under the carpet, so to speak, by re-assigning the remaining bugs to other targets in order to try to maintain schedule. Please see our 0.9.5 branching article, Mozilla 0.9.5 Branched -- Buggier Than Ever, You Bastards, for more detail and information about the Mozilla bugs. Mozilla pre-1.0 Milestone and daily development builds normally are available for the BSD, Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, Sun, and several UNIX platforms. Source code usually is available if you want to custom compile your own Mozilla builds. Please note that if you do this, it will eat your hard disc. I'm not kidding. Don't even try it unless you want to lose all your data and have it sent to Netscape as well. Incidentally, please check the MozillaQuest Magazine front-page (mozillaquest.com) sidebar every now and then for bug count updates and for Mozilla Milestone 0.9.6 progress updates. Please see our article, Mozilla Roadmap - Mozilla 1.0 Set Back to 2002 - Mozilla 0.9.4 Set for 7 September, for more information about the August 2001 Mozilla Development Roadmap and development schedule revisions. There is lots of bug information in that article too. Just lots and lots of great information. I really amaze myself sometimes. So much great information, so little me. If you like, you can grab a copy of the latest Mozilla 0.9.6 branch build from the Mozilla Organization FTP server. Don't forget to report any bugs you find to Bugzilla. Please. We need to get the bug numbers back up. I actually had to write a new sentence this time instead of just pasting in new bug numbers. My fingers hurt. Or, if you never have tried the Mozilla browser suite, you can download and try Mozilla 0.9.5. Please see our article, Mozilla Milestone 0.9.5 Browser-Suite Released, for more information about 0.9.5 and for download links. Of course, the scary thing is how Mozillaquest and a parody of Mozillaquest are virtually indistinguishable. If you were reading them blind (as opposed to having read Mozillaquest and gone blind through over-exposure to cyan) I think you'd be hard pressed to distinguish between the two. There's a weird first attempt at a full screen mode in Mozilla at the moment, basically all it does is remove most of the chrome just leaving back, forward reload and stop (why they got rid of the URL bar when it'd take up no space is beyond me). As a full screen mode, so far it's terrible, however I do like the way you can now hide most of the chrome quickly. Still, it's nowhere near as useful as a proper full screen mode and this hack should be called something other than full screen. why they remove the URL bar is easy. The buttons will be replaced by text only ones that will take far less space vertically but this isn't working yet. Hey.. was wondering, What builds have this new SEMI-Full screen patch implemented. would love to check it out. Thanks --Jedbro Comments: There are three reasons this full-screen version doesn't look as good as IE's yet (on Windows). 1. The toolbar for the full screen version, as suggested, should have much smaller icons, or text, or better a pref for either. 2. It doesn't suppress the title bar, which IE does (as do other applications - one thinks of WinAmp and MusicMatch). 3. The tool bar for the full screen version doesn't autohide. Admittedly, you can collapse it if you want to; and that's a nice feature; but an autohide preference would be nice, too. Here's a cool bit: turn on full screen, hide the toolbar, and open a new tab. My ideal full screen mode would have a toolbar that 1. autohid on a pref; 2. was no taller than the personal toolbar, and 3. had an address bar and/or a tiny throbber on prefs. It would also hide the title bar. However, if they keep out the address bar and throbber, the tool bar could be made as small as the status bar. But doesn't this count as a new feature? I mean, I do want to see it, but . . . How do you turn it on? #137 How to Turn on Full Screen (no chome) Mode --> F11by peterlairo Friday November 16th, 2001 8:48 AM How to Turn on Full Screen (no chome) Mode: - Press F11 or - View - Full Screen (middle of menu). :) There is a major blocker bug for Mac users (OS 8.6). This is bug 10622 (Each character typed is repeated). This causes Mozilla to be totally unuseable. Is it possible that this bug might be fixed before the release of 0.96? :) Resolved, fixed. Download a nightly build for 0.9.5, or wait for 0.9.6. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10622 -IN THE SYSTEM TRY ICON MENU ADD A SHURTCUT TO THE INSTANT MESSENGER WINDOW(...the sidebar individualized) -MULTIZILLA WHEN!!!!???? -A OPTION TO TAKE THE TOOLBARS OUT OF THE WINDOWS TO ADD THEM TO THE UP OR BOTTOM SIDE OF THE SCREEN, THEN MULTIZILLA WILL NOT NEED A TOOLBAR. I think Mozilla really need now a very stable version to come out. Please, stop adding features that get the whole thing buggier and buggier. I still looking forward a version when I can see gif as they should !!! It\'s amazing not to have a decent look for a such common image format ! They are flickering or not displaying well. And they use to be good (in 0.8.1 release for example). So please, stop new features, release a very \"stable\" version and then, go for a whole new version with extra features. Be do things in the right order. |