Mozilla 1.5 Alpha ReleasedTuesday July 22nd, 2003Lots of folks wrote in to let us know that mozilla.org today released Mozilla 1.5 Alpha. Release Notes and a slew of builds are available. New in 1.5a are a number of Composer enhancements, tab browser clean up, and the usual crash and performance fixes. Looking ahead, mozilla.org hopes to release a Firebird 0.6.1 in the coming week to pick up some of the latest changes, including some crashes that were present in the 0.6 release. Following that, the current plan is to release a Thunderbird 0.1 prior to 1.5b, and a Firebird 0.7 alongside Mozilla 1.5 final, and continue to move towards replacing the trunk with the new standalone applications. More info on all these plans is available in the recently updated roadmap. Windows 1.5a is 2.4MB smaller than 1.4, cool! What's going on? There doesn't seem to be any missing stuff. Actually some things are gone, such as MNG/JNG support, see bug 195280 bug 18574 and bug 204520 which builds are you comparing? the full Windows installer for 1.4 is 11.7MB, and for 1.5a it is 11.6MB. That's a difference of 0.1MB, not 2.4 I was just looking at what it says on the front page of mozilla.org I'm new to Mozilla (but a long-time Netscape user, may it rest in peace), and am quite pleased with 1.4. However, looking at the roadmap, it looks to me like there will be parallel development tracks for 1.4 and the new 1.5 release. As an end user, which should I follow? Stick with the 1.4 releases as they become available, or make the switch to 1.5 when it is released? (I'm reluctant to go with betas, so I'll wait for releases in either case.) Thanks. go to 1.5 once it is released if you want new features. Stick with 1.4 if you want better stability. My advice go to 1.5 Version 1.4 is being maintained as a long-term stable branch, like 1.0 was, so that companies using Mozilla as part of their application can take security and some crash fixes without having to take new features or other changes. This was mostly for Netscape's benefit so I don't know if it will stay like that. Netscape used 1.0 (the last long-term stable branch) until the latest release, skipping 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. Since actually not many changes are being made to Mozilla app suite these days (as it's being phased out), IMO it seems likely that Mozilla 1.5 will actually contain little more than bugfixes in itself - so 1.5 should probably be a good, fairly safe version to use. I would assume that the 1.5 release will be reasonably tested... I'd go for 1.5 personally, just as a guess from here, but it won't be out for quite a while anyhow. When it does come out you can just see what the response is and find out if there's anything broken... --sam To my understanding, Mozilla 1.4 should be the last edition for All-in-One AppSuite while Mozilla 1.5 and onwards would be break into various standalone programs such as Mozilla Browser = Mozilla Firebird Mozilla Mail/News = Thunderbird ..... Over at the july 14th Minutes, there is a quote stating "It'll take a year to get something shippable to end users (brendan)" Just wanted to refer everyone to what Brenden had to say about that on slashdot: " That quote from staff minutes was out of context. I was citing the agreement I'd reached with all-volunteer Mozilla Firebird developers before the Mozilla Foundation was announced, where 0.7 would coincide with 1.5, 0.8 with 1.6, etc. I went on to say to staff, at that meeting, that if we get more time from the developers, the schedule could be shortened. Now, we hope to hire a Firebird developer fulltime at the Mozilla Foundation, and we expect to go faster. No promises yet; the roadmap will be updated in due course." From Brendan's quote: "Now, we hope to hire a Firebird developer fulltime at the Mozilla Foundation, and we expect to go faster. No promises yet; the roadmap will be updated in due course." This I'm sure would make a lot of people happy and would definitely encourage more people to donate. Will this be someone who's already worked on Moz and Fb? It seems that there are 2 development teams, one for the AppSuite and one for MozillaFirebird.(I know MF builds from the trunk) I think that if everbody works together, then, all will be go faster and then the final user will have a better product, earlier. I've noticed a couple of odd things with 1.5a; mostly to do with tabbed browsing. First of all, opening a bookmark group no longer creates one new tab for each bookmark; they now override existing tabs and whatever page they previously contained. I've had a look through about:config but haven't been able to find the specific option that controls this - I'd say this change was a bad thing, since there is no prior warning and the standard Preferences dialog doesn't appear to let you change this behaviour. Also (although I <em>was</em> able to disable this in Preferences) new tabs now load your homepage upon creation. Although I'm pretty sure I read about this being planned (or already implemented in 1.4? can't remember) this was a new change here which I can't understand; why would a user open a new tab to their homepage, when the most likely purpose would be to go to a specific address? Loading a page shifts focus to the page itself, rather than the address bar (as previously). Oh, one more pet peeve: previous new installations preserved all installed extensions - 1.5a removed them all. I've had to try and remember all the various XPIs I've installed (either manually or from mozdev.org), and worse yet, after reinstalling it, smoothwheel doesn't always work any more (I'm none the wiser as to whether or not this is a smoothwheel or mozilla bug). Anyone else experienced these woes and share my concerns, or am I alone in this? Moz 1.5a is stable enough as 1.4? Can I use it? If not, how can i use either 1.5a and 1.4 without sharing data? No, Moz 1.5alpha is not even close to as stable as 1.4. It does have a number of improvements, so if you want to take the risks, you can certainly use it. The should not be any problem with sharing data, but if you want to keep it separate, you need to use profile manager to create a second profile, and use one profile with 1.4 and one profile for 1.5alpha. You also need to choose a different directory to install the program, of course. I just tried the new 1.5 and its way slower than my 1.4. I have a cable modem speed test page and I usually get 5500+ kpbs. As soon as I installed 1.5 it bogged down to 2200 kpbs and was very sluggish. Went back to 1.4 and speed went back up again. |