MozillaZine

Minotaur Trunk Build for Windows Released

Thursday April 10th, 2003

joe wrote in to tell us that the first trunk build of Minotaur is now available for Windows. While earlier Minotaur builds made use of and could share settings with Mozilla profiles, this version — like all builds dated April 7th or later — uses separate Minotaur-specific profiles. However, it is possible to transfer your settings from a Mozilla profile.

You can download this Windows build from ftp.mozilla.org/pub/minotaur/. Look for the 2003-04-09-win32-trunk.zip file. Note that not all of the patches have landed on the trunk yet, so it's not possible to build this version yourself.

#1 seems very large

by miken32

Thursday April 10th, 2003 12:16 PM

A 23 meg installation compared to 8 for my Eudora? Could be because it's got an *entire web browser* built into it. I was thinking of switching over for the spam filtering, but I think I'll wait for it to be a little less bloated. Hopefully the Minotaur -> Thunderbird switch will be similar to the planned Mozilla -> Phoenix switch: Smaller, faster, and less bulky.

#3 Re: seems very large

by neptune

Thursday April 10th, 2003 12:43 PM

if you have hardware from the late 90s on, i don't see how this can possibly be an issue for you...a 15mb difference on a 50gb hard disk really seems like a non-issue to me. bloat should obviously go down as builds are released, but i would take mozmail/minotaur over any eudora product any day of the week.

#5 The PC isn't the future

by jdakula

Thursday April 10th, 2003 4:02 PM

But what about when PDA's get sophisticated enough that they can run real web browsers. I think there's a good chance someone will be porting Mozilla to Palm 7s. Size may very well matter then... Soon, though, PDAs will be as powerful as a PC is today...but then there's your cell-phone computer...

#9 Re: The PC isn't the future

by jsoderba

Friday April 11th, 2003 4:36 AM

I don't think PDAs have ever been a target of mozilla.org's applications. Any Gecko-based PDA browser would need a radical UI redesign, as well as a huge amount of work on footprint and performance.

In any event, the PC is not going anywhere. People will be doing most of their browsing/mail-handling on high-res/high-power devices for a long time.

#6 Eudora?

by thelem

Thursday April 10th, 2003 4:51 PM

Eudora is the official university email client, and it takes longer to load than NS4 on the same computers and is very un-intuitive. Personally I normally wait till I'm home to check my email because mozilla is faster and much easier to use.

AFAIK at the moment minotaur is just Mozilla without chatzilla, composer and navigator. 23MB still sounds like a lot to me though, I thought Mozilla without plugins was atill around the 10MB mark?

#7 Re: Eudora?

by tve

Thursday April 10th, 2003 7:16 PM

the download is 10.2MB, I think miken32 was referring to the uncompressed size which is ~23MB (without profile stuff)..

most of the Mozilla code is still included in Minotaur, but this will change in the upcoming weeks.

#11 A bit too big!

by offmdan

Saturday April 12th, 2003 6:01 AM

I agree with Miken32, it is pretty huge! Unless Minotaur is much different than Mozilla, then perhaps I'll consider the wait for 20 megs to come over my slowspeed countryside phone lines...

#2 Pointers to screenshots anyone? (n/t)

by jensend

Thursday April 10th, 2003 12:21 PM

#8 Re: Pointers to screenshots anyone? (n/t)

by tve

Thursday April 10th, 2003 7:23 PM

open Mozilla Mail, thats how Minotaur looks at the moment ;) but the author of Qute (the Phoenix theme) is working on a Minotaur theme.

#4 Preference Defaults

by Anagoge

Thursday April 10th, 2003 1:38 PM

What about turning off JavaScript and remote loaded images by default for Minotaur? New/inexperienced users might be confused by missing images, but the benefits are big to privacy, stopping spammers, and potential future security holes in JavaScript. New/inexperienced users probably the least likely to customize their privacy settings.

#13 Re: Preference Defaults

by benfaust

Saturday June 10th, 2006 8:20 AM

I'm new to this thread and found it accidentally while looking for something else. I must comment though that distributing a browser to the general public which has the images and JavaScript turned off by default would be a major disservice to the public. Unless you're a geek like some of us, the Internet is dead without images. And the number of sites which use JavaScript for pull-down menus is growing daily.

Internet privacy is a joke. People turn off cookies because they don't want their "privacy" violated. And people buy banner blockers because they don't want to see ads. I'm not sure what kind of a world some people are hoping we live in, but advertisement is what keeps a free enterprise going. Everything can't be open source and ad-free. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, we can't eat digital food or live in digital homes.

Back on topic, as a website developer who works with both large corporations and individuals starting new businesses, it's hard enough explaining why something doesn't work like they expected without having to walk them through turning on images and Javascript. And honest, unless this is a browser for us geeks, what user out there doesn't want to see any images?

#14 Re: Preference Defaults

by benfaust

Saturday June 10th, 2006 8:23 AM

I'm new to this thread and found it accidentally while looking for something else. I must comment though that distributing a browser to the general public which has the images and JavaScript turned off by default would be a major disservice to the public. Unless you're a geek like some of us, the Internet is dead without images. And the number of sites which use JavaScript for pull-down menus is growing daily.

Internet privacy is a joke. People turn off cookies because they don't want their "privacy" violated. And people buy banner blockers because they don't want to see ads. I'm not sure what kind of a world some people are hoping we live in, but advertisement is what keeps a free enterprise going. Everything can't be open source and ad-free. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, we can't eat digital food or live in digital homes.

Back on topic, as a website developer who works with both large corporations and individuals starting new businesses, it's hard enough explaining why something doesn't work like they expected without having to walk them through turning on images and Javascript. And honest, unless this is a browser for us geeks, what user out there doesn't want to see any images?

#15 Re: Preference Defaults

by benfaust

Saturday June 10th, 2006 8:24 AM

I'm new to this thread and found it accidentally while looking for something else. I must comment though that distributing a browser to the general public which has the images and JavaScript turned off by default would be a major disservice to the public. Unless you're a geek like some of us, the Internet is dead without images. And the number of sites which use JavaScript for pull-down menus is growing daily.

Internet privacy is a joke. People turn off cookies because they don't want their "privacy" violated. And people buy banner blockers because they don't want to see ads. I'm not sure what kind of a world some people are hoping we live in, but advertisement is what keeps a free enterprise going. Everything can't be open source and ad-free. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, we can't eat digital food or live in digital homes.

Back on topic, as a website developer who works with both large corporations and individuals starting new businesses, it's hard enough explaining why something doesn't work like they expected without having to walk them through turning on images and Javascript. And honest, unless this is a browser for us geeks, what user out there doesn't want to see any images?

#10 Hrumph

by volkris

Friday April 11th, 2003 1:28 PM

Hrumph.... I liked that my profile was shared so that a change in one would automatically show up in the other...

#12 Oh, $DEITY, not another profile SNAFU

by mwood

Monday April 14th, 2003 12:00 PM

I *still* haven't got all of my Netscape 4 profile recovered into NS7 and now someone is inventing Yet Another Profile Mutation. Could someone please spend a little time figuring out why the last N profile schemes were *all* insufficient, and design one we can keep for a while?