eWeek Evaluates Mozilla 1.3Friday March 21st, 2003Marc Rust (amr) writes: "There is an article posted on eWeek.com about the Mozilla 1.3 release. Among the features mentioned are increased stability and the new junk mail fitering capabilities." Other reports about Mozilla 1.3 can be found at Slashdot, OSNews, GnomeDesktop.org FootNotes and MacCentral. This article got me thinking (uh oh). You can't switch themes on the fly, but the added the ability to switch profiles on the fly. Theme information is stored in the profiles so I used the Switch profile command to create a new profile. I switched to it and set it's theme to modern. It told me I had to start moz over again, but instead of doing that, I switched the profiles back to my normal one... which resulted in a crash. I loaded up moz again and it loaded in my classic themed profile. I went back into Switch profile to see if I could reproduce the crash, but instead, it worked. It switched profiles and skins. So it might be able to switch the theme, then switch to the other profile and back again... then you'll have your changes without rebooting mozilla. I don't know if it's any faster, but it's more work :) it works. You don't have to exit mozilla to get your skin changed. You just need to swap out of the current profile and then back again. But then the question remains why Mozilla currently still needs to be restarted before a theme can be changed... It one can now switch an entire profile on-the-fly then switching a theme can't be much more difficult. "It one can now switch an entire profile on-the-fly then switching a theme can't be much more difficult." Profile switching doesn't have to preserve the state of data like html forms or an email compose window. Profile switching actually exits out of all of that and fires up a Mozilla window with a new Profile selected. Dynamic theme switching would need to preserve the contents of an email compose window or other user data and that gets harder. --Asa <b>Mozilla 1.3 also includes a demonstration of a capability, code-named Midas, that will be supported in future versions of the browser. Midas lets Web developers add rich-text editable controls to pages using standard script commands. We found this feature interesting but were not sure why it was included--there are already standards-based ways to do basically the same thing across all browsers.</b> I do not know a lot about Midas and have limited Web development skills. Is eWeeks assessment of Midas correct in that it is not needed since other tools to do the same thing already exist? What are the strengths of Midas over other tools? Is Midas needed? Is it a better tool than others which perform similar tasks? hmm, I also wondered about it. When I first so the Midas example I thought *cooool*. Finally you can have this type of editors in mozilla. Then I tried the same sample under IE and it worked too. That was even better. But I remember searching for a solution that would also work in mozilla not so long ago without any result. After reading this it seems that was possible. Anyone with pointers? If there is something that works like it but without Midas, it would seem like a better alternative, since it would run all the way from NS6->7 to Moz 1.0 and up. AFAIK the statement that cross-browser editor functionality can be built using only standards-compliant code is a mistake. Certianly the bug that led to Midas contained a *lot* of people who wanted to switch their company to Mozilla but couldn't do it because it couldn't be used with Content Management Systems. Of course, that *might* mean that all exisiting CMS's used the IE extensions, and so Mozilla had to support them in order to work with exisiting products. GeekVoice.com ( http://www.geekvoice.com ) has an article ( http://www.geekvoice.com/articulo/guias/71 ) in spanish about the mozilla web browser and the new features it includes in version 1.3... Using 1.3 on Windows 98 I find far less stable than previous releases. I have already reinstalled 1.2.1 due to multiple browser and mail crashes. The UI has deteriorated as well in Mail/News - the number of messages is no longer updated unless you actually click on the folder. Is it me, or does it seem that odd numbered releases are almost beta standard in quality, whilst even numbered releases are far more stable and polished? I had usability problems with 1.1 as well, but 1.0 and 1.2 seem to be pretty stable releases. I agree that Mozilla 1.1 had many problems, but I find Mozilla 1.3 to be quite solid on both Linux and Win2k/XP. I can't speak for Win95, though. |