Mozilla 1.0 User FAQ and Reviewer's GuideSaturday May 25th, 2002David Gerard writes: "The start page for Mozilla 1.0 is in the works, with some results ready for comment from the Mozillaverse. Take a look at the Draft 1.0 User FAQ (there's also an XML/XSLT version if you want to try triggering bug 146119 ;-) and give feedback using the link at the top of the page. Also check out an early draft of the 1.0 Reviewer's Guide and send comments to ralph[AT]dimp.com. "We're also after standards-compliant eye candy to show off what Mozilla can do — stuff with the appeal of the Complexspiral Demo or the 'Time Is On The Move' DHTML clock." MozCube: http://www.formula-one.nu/dhtml/moz3d.htm Pinball (one of theses demonstrates a bug tho): http://www.formula-one.nu/mozilla/pinballtest/pinball2textAlignCenter.htm# Pinball: http://www.formula-one.nu/mozilla/pinballtest/pinball2textAlignLeft.htm Live SideBar: http://livesidebar.com/lsblabs/desktabs/index-desktop.html DOM1 scroll effect (with background): http://taboca.com/tests/credits.html DOM1 scroll effect (without background): http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/samples/dom-css-fonts/credits.html But Pinball works better in IE 5.5 than in RC3, at least for me. The things the ball hits light up in IE but not in RC3. Also, the Time Is On The Move mentioned at the very top of this page works just as well in IE. live sidebar is a crasher - is it just me ? (2002 05 18 22 sparc solaris) how about hosting sample files for people to download to pre configure their browsers? USER.JS lends itself brilliantly to this as perhaps does image blocking, unless it runs the risk of the image server names changing Perhaps these are of interest www.nomad-jedi.com - the menu on the left is ie4+ and ns6+ compatible. http://www.nomad-jedi.com/ws/forum/nj/forum.asp - threaded view shows expanding and collapsing threads. Post a reply or new message also features some CSS2 - colors of textboxes change as you focus on them + smilies is dhtml dropdown. www.barrysworld.com/news - dropdown menu along top is gecko compliant. I also have a timezone image map and a tabbed dhtml widget on my work PC that I will put on a web server. http://webfx.eae.net I see an ugly bug (or are these several?) with the complexspiral demo (<http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html>). Making the browser window narrow makes the vertical scrollbar disappear and does not show the horizontal scroll bar. Making it wider lets other windows "shine through" the current window. n/t Try changing the background to shuttle for example and see the results... Not a good example of standards compliance... Can't wait for final 1.0 release. We will indeed be cutting it into sections, it won't be the 74KB flat file it is now. So, you all love the FAQ, then? How about question 1.1 ("Who is Mozilla 1.0 for?") and section 11 ("End User Support")? I'm amazed no-one's been screaming about these in the newsgroups ... maybe we got it right. *fingers crossed* #11 Oh, and please comment on the reviewer's guide tooby DavidGerard Saturday May 25th, 2002 12:13 PM The FAQ is ready to roll as is, but the Reviewer's Guide is in need of lots of lovin'. See also Reviewer's Guide discussion on news:netscape.public.mozilla.general . Great evangelism but I would advocate a more positive spin in 1.1 Mozilla 1.0 (as released by mozilla.org) can be used by the general user – and those wanting to use Mozilla as released by mozilla.org are more than welcome to do so. Mozilla.org does not provide end-user support and is not recommended for cautious, conservative or inexperienced users who may be more comfortable with Netscape 7.0 or Beonex etc. There are several websites and newsgroups (link to 1.8, 11.1 and 11.2) which offer useful advice, FAQs and user tips. If the Webmasters of the following tip sites were willing to change titles to Mozilla 1.0 / Netscape 7.0 Tips & FAQs Netscape 6 FAQs: http://www.ufaq.org/ns6_faq.html Netscape 6/7 Tips: http://www.hmetzger.de/net6e.html Netscape 6 FAQ: http://home.adelphia.net/~sremick/ns6faq.html Netscape 7 Help/Tips: http://techaholic.net/ns7.html Windows End-User Newsgroups snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.mozilla.user.win32 Mac End-User Newsgroups snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.mozilla.user.mac Unix End-User Newsgroups snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.mozilla.user.unix Mozilla.org encourages new users to join the community of testers and bug reporters Thanks shipdoc To enhance this page I would suggest adding a little more information in 1.3 with links to popular add-ons such as Calendar, Spellchecker and Sidebar with a brief description on how to install or download (shift + enter) xpis. Thanks shipdoc And when you cut it down, please include the appropriate <link> tags. That way, when the Site Nav toolbar does get enabled, or if we manually enable it, we can use that to navigate more easily. - mxn #54 Re: Re: The FAQ will be cut into sections for releby DavidGerard Wednesday May 29th, 2002 1:52 PM "And when you cut it down, please include the appropriate <link> tags. That way, when the Site Nav toolbar does get enabled, or if we manually enable it, we can use that to navigate more easily." Won't happen this release. But the FAQ will be maintained, so it's possible and even likely for next rev. #23 Re: The FAQ will be cut into sections for releaseby DavidGerard Saturday May 25th, 2002 7:34 PM For a sample of the faq cut into sections, try http://velvet.net/~fun/mozilla/faq-demo/index.html - rather than one 74KB flat file, that's a pile of shorter files, 10KB index file. All other eyecandy pales before: http://www.mozillazine.org/jason/blake/ Its a funny web page, but when I visit it in Netscape 7.0pr(Moz RC2) my cpu gets pegged at 100% and the scrolling is not as fast as it should be. On IE6 it scrolls really fast and only give like 10% cpu usages. Its not a bug, its just that moz and multimedia don't go together very well yet. I'm surprized. I know MozillaZine was promising more daily news, but, news on a Saturday? One less thing for MQ to complain about, I guess. :^) Mozillazine is very open to reader contributions, this article is up here today because David Gerard submitted it last night and mozillazine decided to put it up. If you see something that you think is cool, spend five minutes writing it up and send it in as a story, it'll probably show up on the front page. BTW, you can also submit news to my news page http://grayrest.com/moz/ with even less effort. Just send me (grayrest@grayrest.com) a link when you see or hear something of note and I'll do the writing ;] "Mozillazine is very open to reader contributions, this article is up here today because David Gerard submitted it last night and mozillazine decided to put it up." Actually, he sent it in today. "If you see something that you think is cool, spend five minutes writing it up and send it in as a story, it'll probably show up on the front page. BTW, you can also submit news to my news page with even less effort. Just send me (grayrest@grayrest.com) a link when you see or hear something of note and I'll do the writing ;]" Hey! Stop trying to steal our readers! ;-) If you (you being any MozillaZine reader) see an article etc. that you think MozillaZine should know about, you can just send us a link with a brief description of the page (just the title will do) and we'll write the text to go with it. Also, if you do decide to write a piece yourself, you don't have to worry about spelling, grammar or diction; we'll tidy it up or rewrite it as necessary. As always, the article submission page is here: http://www.mozillazine.org/submit/ Alex "Actually, he sent it in today." Are you implying that I've had no life for the past week and have been working on Mozilla-related stuff eighteen hours a day or something? I think it's the fact that with the lead-up to 1.0, there's a lot more news actually happening out there. "Are you implying that I've had no life for the past week and have been working on Mozilla-related stuff eighteen hours a day or something?" No, merely that in the article database your submission was tagged as being received on Saturday 25th May (US Eastern Time). I'm having trouble figuring out where I said you have no life. Alex "No, merely that in the article database your submission was tagged as being received on Saturday 25th May (US Eastern Time). I'm having trouble figuring out where I said you have no life." Ah, it must be because I don't then, and I'm assuming it's obvious ;-) "Ah, it must be because I don't then, and I'm assuming it's obvious ;-)" Oh, I see. I don't either; my timezone is currently British Summer Time (GMT +0100). Sometimes it still confuses me that I can post an article at 3:00am on Tuesday and it gets listed under Monday. Sorry for any confusion caused. Alex "Oh, I see. I don't either; my timezone is currently British Summer Time (GMT +0100). Sometimes it still confuses me that I can post an article at 3:00am on Tuesday and it gets listed under Monday." I've probably confused you even more now! I read your "Ah, it must be because I don't then" comment too quickly and somehow got it in to my head that you meant that you don't live in the US Eastern time zone. Which obviously is completely different to not having a life. Unless you believe that it's impossible to have a life if you don't live on the US East Coast. Hmmm. I'll stop now. Just ignore my ramblings. Alex A first read of the reviers guide, one thing that did stick out was the use of the term "Netscape Communicator", Netscape has never called any of their Mozilla based browsers "Communicator", 4.x was the only series of browsers called that. Beonex does use the term Communicator however. "Beonex does use the term Communicator however." Just out of curiosity, what kind of user base does Beonex have? Like.. how many users, roughly? I am having difficulty reading some of the FAQs on my W2K setup with RC3 http://velvet.net/~fun/mozilla/faq1.0rc2.html The FAQs are surrounded by a broad (approx 1.5") tan border and a 0.0625" black border on left and a 0.125" black border on R. In Paras 2.2, 11.1 and 11.2 the text - URLs bleeds through the black border on the Right and into dark tan area making it difficult to read. When I checked with IE there was no black or dark tan border on the Right and the text was easily readable on light tan background. Is this just on my setup or is there a bug in RC3? Thanks shipdoc The current design is broken in 800x600 or with very large text. We're at work on fixing the first one, at least. If you need large text, try View | Use Style | Basic Page Style - which is there to get rid of fancy schmancy stuff ;-) Hi, Reading the FAQ I found a link to keyboard shortcuts for mozilla. I then noticed findagain is Ctrl+G or F3 for Windows. I never noticed that F3 was hooked to FindAgain and when I tested it - it didn't work. I found a bug about this http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71832 that has a patch (not sure if it works) that has been lying there since Jan 2002 - is this going to be checked in somtime soon? After just taking a quick look that patch hasn't been reviewed/super reviewed. Before any code can be inserted into mozilla, it needs to be checked by 2 (or sometimes 3) people first. The first person is the reviewer, they look over the code to make sure the patch programmer hasn't made any errors. The super reviewer (for gui I believe alexf is the guy) does the same thing. Then sometimes, depending on what mozilla.org is saying, your patch needs one more review. I find this is usually done by Asa for gui modifications like this one. In order for all of this to happen, the person who wrote the patch or someone really interested in it needs to contact the proper people. If they don't, the patch will most likely just sit there unnoticed due to the size of bugzilla and the business of people reviewing/super reviewing. You can read all the details here <http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/> Given that Mozilla is marketed as open source software, I find part of question 1.1 ("Who is Mozilla 1.0 intended for?") slightly odd. It refers to Mozilla as "free software" with a link to the FSF's Free Software Definition, without /any/ reference to OSS or the Open Source Definition. thats because Mozilla is Free Software, not the not-quite-as-free Open Source software No. In the words of the Mozilla Organization, "Mozilla is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability." thegoldenear -- I'm not trying to start a "Free Software vs. Open Source" flame war, but if Mozilla.org calls Mozilla open source, surely you should respect that. Free Software and Open Source refer to the same software. They're not actually at war with each other. Both are relevant to Mozilla: the Open Source angle because it gives us a better Mozilla, the Free Software angle because users and web developers can get out from under Microsoft's thumb: http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_customers.html - that link is on opensource.org, but it starts with a rant about freedom. The MPL and NPL are both listed as Free Software licenses by the FSF, but the NPL *isn't* listed as an OSI-accredited Open Source license. I've emailed them asking about this, because they should be linked as well. There is a draft page on the subject on the 1.0 start page which mentions both in tandem most of the way down. As a product, Mozilla is roughly comparable to IE 6 or Opera 6. But freedom makes *all* the difference. Being beholden to a vendor is, um, bad and annoying. normally i keep 2 browser win open so i don't need the back button much. instead i drag a link and press ctrl+tab and drop it. the tabs are supposed to eliminate the need to do so. but without a way (standard is ctrl+tab), it becomes largely useless. even if i drag a link to another tab, that tab doesn't get the focus, so i have to click it. this is too complicated. there should also be a way to open links in an existing tab. Mark the link and Ctrl + C, Ctrl + T to open a new tab, and since nothing says in it, and the marker is at the correct possition you just Ctrl + V and Enter. Viola! Want to go back to the first tab? Ctrl + Page Up/Down switches. Unless you want to show off how much better at DHTML IE is...stop looking for flashy stuff for Mozilla, it all works better in IE than in Mozilla. Mozilla still has too many rendering bugs in even basic html tags (fieldset, button...etc), not to mention dhtml bugs, and while DHTML performance is almost acceptable on the latest trunk, it still gets blown away by IE. A better idea is to show off some of the nice css support that Mozilla has. That's what really matters to the majority of people anyway. "A better idea is to show off some of the nice css support that Mozilla has. That's what really matters to the majority of people anyway." The majority of people have absolutely no idea what CSS or DHTML is. To them, what REALLY matters is that the application doesn't crash, that it looks good, that it feels good, consistent, high quality and that it allows them to browse the web without any problems. Web site developers might care about CSS or DHTML but web site developers aren't the "majority" of people. Absolutely amazing demo of just what a browser that can handle alpha transparency for PNG images can do: PNGDEMO: http://www.ncf.ca/~bh447/pngdemo/ Full alpha blending on the shadow effects, that moves as the sun/bird moves. It's a great demo, and really visually nice too. I think it would be good to have a chapter on this, since this could be quite confusing for some people: what are add ons like calendar, banner blind etc? What about security? How to install on a multiuser system with a central, write protected mozilla directory? How to uninstall? Looks like it's going to be trashed and replaced with a Word document. Ah well. "Looks like it's going to be trashed and replaced with a Word document. Ah well." When did this happen?! Alex That demo... the Complexspiral Demo worked fine here on Opera 6.03 too... Flawlessly. Seems he didn't care to check it... The most good part is... You can imagine how web look like if those moron companies totally used those CSS,CSS2 standard stuff. Oh that time demo works too. Yeah, I presume the Complexspiral page is talking about Opera 5. He needs to update it. And to note that you can get the different stylesheets in Mozilla/Netscape with View->Use Style, whereas there's no UI for stylesheet-switching (that I could find) on Opera 6. 'Time Is On The Move' doesn't work for me on Opera 6.0 for Windows - the clock won't follow the cursor unless the cursor is inside the clock circle itself. Does it work properly in 6.03? "'Time Is On The Move' doesn't work for me on Opera 6.0 for Windows - the clock won't follow the cursor unless the cursor is inside the clock circle itself. Does it work properly in 6.03?" It works as you described in 6.03. The Complexspiral demo mostly works but the menu on the left isn't quite right. Alex There are more demos at: http://xpdom.sourceforge.net (see examples) XPDOM is a W3C-DOM-2 JavaScript compatibility layer to programming DOM using W3C-DOM-2 standard in MSIE 4-5-6, Navigator 4.x and Mozilla/Netscape 6. The most compliant implementation is Mozilla 1.0 RCx of course. Enjoy. |