Is M12 Alpha?Thursday December 2nd, 1999That's what the mozilla developers would like to know. If you're a member of mozillaZine, you can participate in a survey to help gauge our readers' feelings regarding the current pre-M12 builds. If you're not a member, it's easy to become one (and free, too). Just visit our members page and follow the instructions. Then, visit the survey page, and answer all the questions. You will need to be a member to see the survey results, and you cannot see the results until after you have voted. If you don't have a current pre-M12 build, you can grab the latest nightly build from our builds page. If you have tried the builds, but haven't tried things like mail or news, please vote 10 for those questions pertaining to email or newsgroup usage. I'm really happy with the last few days' builds. I'm using mozilla for 90% of my daily surfing at work and at home. I've also stared using mail and news in the lst couple of days and find mail to be quite functional, enough so that I've adopted it as my sole mail app at home. News still has some performance issued for me that make it difficult to use but once I find out how to limit the number of headers downloaded I think I'll move to it. If you haven't taken a recent build for a test drive, please do. I think you'll be suprised. :) Latest nightly builds are, obviusly, not rock-solid. Yes, Mozilla does crash some times, and yes it is not exactly blazing fast *yet*. However, I can relate to using Mozilla a lot (well, maybe not 90%, but one could well use it 50% of the time). Some sites *are* better seen in Mozilla than in Netscape. I'd say M12 may constitute an alpha. I wonder if 90% of pages you view are plain text optimized for Mozilla 5.0. In my experience, it still sucks big time: - very slow; - craches on some sites and during some actions; - some widgets are disabled on some sites; - items on a page swing from side to side like crazy, thanks to the "wonderful" reflow rendering; - sent email messages are not stored => no feedback at all about success of an operation. I'd say in its current state Mozilla is a very good prototype but not nearly good enough for real usage. Maybe this is a definition of an Alpha software? In general, I'd say... yes, Mozilla M12 is Alpha. There are some things I'd like to see fixed before Alpha, though. One thing that has been irritating me is, the first time you click the URL bar, it turns grey, gets repainted, and does not get focus. Is this filed as a bug? Also, when typing in the URL bar, sometimes the key gets interpreted as 'meta+key', which then pulls menu's down, though you CAN go on typing. Third, the widgets are ugly. Scrollbars aren't (one arrow's on the wrong side though). 'nuff said. Enough nitpicking for one day. Go on coding now. Nothing to see here. Move along. |Third, the widgets are ugly. I second that. I love the scrollbars though. I'm a fan of less "bulky" 3D objects ... note the scrollbars are like 1 pixel out or something ... (Just a note, I missed an option like "Unknown") Hmmm, I'm not entirely sure if this is appropriate, but when a product reaches Alpha stage a considerable additional amount of people will start testing it. It's my concern that with the performance-state which Mozilla (Mac OS) is in right now will scare off alot of people. I'm really not that aware of performance on other platforms, though. But I think this at least should be taken into consideration. Albeit my above worry I should say that in testing the M12 builds I've seen great signs of improvement in the performance departement. So if "we" are to be a bit conservative, I'd say M12.5 (just an abstract of course) would be more suitable for an Alpha. I agree. Even though the Mac builds of Mozilla have been progressing greatly in the performance department recently, declaring the current state of M12 "alpha" could be harmful. Application launch times are still hideous, page rendering is still slower than its main competitor (IE 4.5), and much slower that Communicator 4.7. Plus, as of a couple of days ago, a cache still hadn't been implemented. Bad press over a slow "alpha" release would do more harm to Mozilla than whatever good could come about from M12 simply getting the title "Alpha". First off, it seems like the performance on different platforms seems to vary alot. In my opinion, this should be looked over. One can't have a product that is supposed to show the validity of Open Source perform worse or better on particular on certain platforms (disregarding hardware configurations and OS performance, of course.). It seems to me, that the Win32 port is leading the pack in terms of performance. That troubles me. Some particular points where (on Mac OS, but these could also be valid for other platforms) M12 needs improvements before it's ready for Alpha: * Incremental reflow should not stop all other activity and input * Scrollbar performance needs some tweaking (in spite of the latest notable improvements) * UI consistency - lack of a genuine UI (in both look and behaviour) will give Mozilla an unproffesional profile. EOF I have seen improvements in the Mac port but haven't downloaded the Win32 version in over a month, so I can't compare them. But I do know it the general UI needs some work, things don't line up nicely in Preferences for example. And as far as speed, I know this is probably a debug build but running Mozilla Mail,etc. on MacOS 9 a 400Mhz G3 with 64MB of RAM is painful to watch. It just seems slow and Communicator is easier to work with for long periods of time. But I don't want to just come off complaining, I think the browser looks and feels great and I just can wait till all the features are turned on and stable. Michael Well I regularly test out the Win32 builds (because I have frickin' a Windoze PC) and I sometimes download Mozilla builds to run on the Macs at my work. On a older G3 with MacOS 8.51 and 64 megs of RAM, it ran just as fast as my Pentium 233MHz MMX with 96 megs of ran and Windoze 98, or at least fairly close. Although the first time it takes for it to start up takes forever, much longer than on with Windoze, but it's much closer to the MozWin32 start up speed after the first time. There are a few other things I've noticed that in the Mac builds were a little slower than the PC builds but a great improvement in the Mac builds. Although I want to test Mozilla on the iMacs there because they only have 32 megs of RAM. <:3)~~ There are several bugs on this issue. I think that http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8894 is pretty out of date but it should point you in the right direction. also check out http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18232 and http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12991 and maybe http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20174 I think that M12 is probably an acceptable alpha release. The only issues that would possibly prevent this from being a good alpha release is simply that form controls are still so flaky. I think that the post M11 builds have been very good though, I have also been using mozilla almost exclusively since that time. I do have to agree with one of the previous posters about at least the radio widget, it is really ugly, doesn't anti-alias well or something, the others are find by me though, I prefer this scroll bar to the windows one. You need to update your survey. I have probably skewed your results because I answered no to every question that had to do with e-mail or with newsgroups. The reason being that I have never even tried to do any of these things because I do not use my web browser for these things and do not want to use a web browser to do so. If You had some other option in the survey for me to select I would have, but I did not really see any other choice. As far as web browseing is concerned I would consider Mozilla for Win32 to be Alpha already, but for Linux it is still a bit to flaky for regular use. Can anyone tell me what this; "mozilla-win32-installer.exe" File is on the Latest Builds Dir.? It's a full 1 meg smaller than the "mozilla-win32.zip" File Thx --Jedbro mozilla-win32-installer.exe has an installer wizard that installs the files, creates program groups, etc. It includes all of the functionality the regular nightly build. I suspect it's smaller because it doesn't include all the debug/test libraries. It seams like for the past couple weeks the semi native widgets have not been working. is the plan to get rid of native widgets all together. I like them better they are more consistant and support copy and paste. No native widgets for you! You will get used to Mac like UI and like it. The Mac widgets look lousy on a Win32 desktop!! Why can't we select our default widget set during installation, and at least have SOME more professional looking widgets to choose from? I'm sorry, but the UI shock from Netscape 4.X to 5.0 is a little too much, makes the Mozilla product look unpolished... Mac-like? The Mac version sure doesn't look maclike, at least to my eyes! It's really annoying to me -- I've got the double scroll arrows turned on, but Mozilla and Hotline are the only apps that make their own scroll bars, ignoring the OS's widgets. I hate having to move my mouse all the way to the top to scroll up! Yeah, native widgets are going to go away. They don't support CSS on any platform, which is why GFX widgets were created. Vote 10 when you don't know, because you don't use that feature or whatever. It's better than voting 0 because 10 is a neutral note... (that's what Chrisn recommended to us while chatting on #mozillazine) Perhaps I have no right to say this, considering I have nothing to contribute to the Mozilla code, but ... Would a reasonable goal before going Alpha be to try to get the features and performance up to the same level on all platforms? (Mac OS, Linux, Win32) This is a cross-platform browser, and when you call it alpha that is an invitation for daring individuals to test it. So wouldn't it be nice to test the same features on all platforms at the same time? Any thoughts on this? um, the features are the same on all platforms. thats one of the reasons they reprogrammed it. As for the preformance... they are still working on it. Windows is lightning fast but I hear Mac and Linux are slow... although I haven't seen them. should be pretty much the same on the platforms, unless the Moz developers felt that a feature wasn't ready. I think one of the reasons for milestones was to make sure browser features were parallel per platform (no aliteration intended :) Mozilla running on my Linux is actually faster than the Mozilla running on my same machine but under Windoze. But it's buggier than the Windoze version of the build. I've tried Mozilla on an iMac (the first one) and an old PowerComputing PowerTower 200, and they are significantly slower than my PC (Pentium 233). Well I'll wait to check some more once Alpha is rolled out. <:3)~~ Do you really think it's lightning fast? I hope you're not a Mozilla developer. yes I do, and yes I have helped out. (I've sent in 1 or 2 patches and I've filed a lot of bug reports) I'm not saying that every day its fast, but when I resize the window the page adjusts itself quickly. It appears to be exactly the same speed as ie5 (I have both open at the moment and I'm resizing the windows) - and thats with the debug code in there. I think it is fast, but the memory requirement is too large. When I post this (on Linux), it requires 25M resident. The machine have 64M, so it is okay. On my other machine which have only 32M, it really crawl. you made a very good point, here : people usually don't realize that what slows an app most is lack of RAM. no application can be fast when your OS is swapping ! that's why i think that, given people with equivalent processors, some are complaining that moz crawls because they have, perhaps, 32 MB RAM whereas people whith more than 64 MB RAM are satisfied with the current speed. My personnal experience is that i have lots of RAM and for me moz is much faster than Nav4.x on some points, the most important being resizing a page containing tables (and lots of pages around the web contain many tables). Yes, sometimes it's freezing, but those O(N!) problems are solvable. M3 could be considered as a rough draft, but M12 is a perfect alpha software ! -- Hervé My machine ( Win NT) has 128 MB which I think is enough. Mozilla is fast on small pages but extremely slow on larger ones (hundreds of KB) while NC 4.7 and IE have no problems. I am sorry, but this doesn't fit my definition of being lightning fast. It's my concern that with the performance-state which Mozilla (Mac OS) is in right now will scare off alot of people ----- I totally agree. I don't think we're at alpha-level across all platforms yet. I mean, like whoever posted the above said, a lot of people are gonna be tryin' out Mozilla for the first time with the alpha.. so let's like, wow 'em. W this thing shouldn't go alpha before the display issues are resolved. my DSL line is causing this thing to choke and seem to freeze... W I have been downloading nightly builds every day or so for the last couple of months and while I've seen lots of improvements, Mozilla has a ways to go before Alpha as far as I'm concerned. I have yet to be able to use it for more than 10 minutes before it blows up. I never do anything strange just view the following sites: mozillazine slashdot gnome dev pages infoworld dilbert freshmeat and linuxworld. usually before I can hit them all it explodes and then I go back to 4.7 I can't speak for the windows version, but the Linux version of Mozilla is still unusable. It is _extremely_ slow, the text-entry widgets don't work right, usenet is non-functional, and it crashes in under five minutes. Perhaps the windows version is getting somewhere, but this is not even close to an alpha-level product right now. ps, yes I completely delete all of my prefs before installing new versions. On my Debian 2.1 updated to potato, mozilla is just unusable. Looks like mozilla+gtk just doesnt work... I am pretty sure that Mozilla breaks on Debian because of an incompatibility with the glibc libraries. I tried to find the pertinent bug report but failed to turn it up. Perhaps someone else is familiar with it. i agree.. i just tried to reply to this thread using the linux version, but when it got down to the bottom of the form.. it basically locked up and i had to kill it.. there're also some kinda weird errors, which i'm sure have been reported. windows seems to be pretty far ahead of the linux version (which in a way surprises me..) but i don't really think any version is really alpha yet.. as i think before they're called alpha, they should be useable.. but not have fatal bugs like the linux version has.. Call me stupid, but shouldn't they be working mainly on the win32 build, then porting it over? Linux users will hate me for saying this but if you think of the Stats, 95% of internet users are unfortunatly using WIndowz. So shouldn't this be the main Priority then later porting to ther OS. That, or work primarily in Linux and win32 versions.. but not all the ones out there now. feedback anyone? Why? One of the goals in Mozilla is to create some of the most cross-platformable code ever written and you can't do that by focusing on a single platform. Plus Linux (and MacOS) are small but important minorities: You forget that the majority of IT managers that operate the servers that run the web use Linux, and THEY need a good browser. Even ZDnet highlighted the importance of browsers for IT managers in their "Mozilla does not support XML" limbo, even though the overall article was a flop. And Macs have the majority in publishing and graphics, such as the place where I work. We NEED a good browser. And although they are not as prominent as they used to be, a lot of schools still use Macs. <:3)~~ Maybe 95% of internet users are Windows, but what percentage of _mozilla_ users are windows? I'd wager that Mozilla currently has a larger than 5% interest/standing within the Linux community (although I myself am windoz, so it's really just a guess). For the record, I'm all in favor of getting Win, Linux & Mac to an acceptable level before declaring alpha/beta/whatever.. That would be like shooting yourself in the foot. I bet that the people willing to help with Mozilla are much larger in the Linux community. Think Open Source and not the size of the market. Very true... I agree with all of you to an extent. Linux is a must, I don't mark that as false, what I do think though, is that the win32 build IS the most important. Right now, the competition is IE, IE is basically Windowz (ok, and Mac too). I just think that once the win32 verion is a hit and incredibly stable, then ports to Linux and others would be looked at even more importante.. But right now, windows is the key to regaining the market. Again, I'm not saying they should "halt" other os support for the moment, but just make win32 a priority for bugs and optimization until it is done, then we can all hack away at the already stable code for Linux.. No? --Jedbro this is cross platform software. it works everywhere. the only code that doesn't is where it hooks in to the OS. Mozilla used to be developed in a way similar to what you describe (although I won't call it "ported", as each FE project ran concurrently), and there were simply not the resources to achieve the desired results. Consumers have already suffered - through the lack of features on some platforms. This way, everyone gets a fair go, everyone gets an identical product, everyone gets a browser at the same time. I've tryed the M11 build on Win32 and Linux. They were both very fast. The only bug that really annoyed me, and that was only present on linux, is the non-redrawing after a windows got over something else. Seems like it is GTK related..? If this is fixed the rest could be considered alpha quality, and maybe that could bring a few more people in the bug fixing process... Tester tester@no-spam@videotron.ca Yesterday, I wrote a post here commenting (negative comments mostly) on how Mozilla needs to get MUCH faster and look MUCH more professional. Today, the post is gone! What's going on!?!? THERE IS NO NEGATIVITY, ONLY XUL! #41 No posts were deleted-check the other forums (n/t)by mozineAdmin Friday December 3rd, 1999 5:33 AM
UI is still ugly. Making Mozilla public (well... more public than it is right now) would be a mistake because it would scare many people away. i agree that making would be a mistake at this point.. but not because of the UI. i actually like the UI better than netscape's or IE's.. but the only thing i would change is the ability to have a backwards/fowards list when you right click on the back/fwd buttons.. I agree with people who says Mozilla must get speed and more conservative skin before it becomes alfa. The first impression is the the most factor for people to use or not to use product in future. Speed and skin. Not bugs are the point (alfa = many bugs. All people realize it!). Agreed, speed + skin + robustness = Alpha-ready. By robustness, I mean does it stay up and running without blowing up more than a few times in a day? All severity 1 (and probably 2) functionality bugs should also be fixed. Also, learn from Microsoft on releasing alphas for platforms WHEN THAT PLATFORM IS READY. That is, limit the alpha to Win32 (and maybe Linux) platform(s) and for heaven's sake, get it out there!! Give the Mac folks some ballpark timeframe for platform catchup, we all will understand. Mozilla is taking a lot of heat for missing deadlines. Why not give the world a taste of it to whet their appetites for the finished product!! Having said this, I think the current skin is NOT adequate, and robustness is not quite what it should be. Speed seems to be very good though. Maybe lucky 13 for Mozilla would be a better Alpha candidate... And yet nightly builds are lovely fast as long as you have RAM free. Apart from that everyone seems happy to make it Alpha. How about just releasing with some nice big warning requirements for RAM and processor speed? Dave You can't do that! That's just like Microsoft! Mozilla has to have lean system requirements - no more than IE5. On my Cyrix 120 with 48mb RAM and Win98, it's not too bad. Ok, ok, ok, I know that the end result has to be lean. It will be. Mozilla already rocks and will kick serious butt when the emphasis is put on optimisation. After Alpha! This happens after Alpha!! Mozilla *will* be fine. But rather than delay Alpha until it's just perfect, what's wrong with saying "This is still full of debugging code and optimisation hasn't started. It will be gone by final release, but expect it to hurt you if your system is heavily loaded, or does not meet the following requirements..." Dave ALPHA! We're not talking about a massive beta rollout here. I'll say it again, ALPHA! Ummmm, maybe I'm going way out on a limb but I've played with _beta_ versions of literally dozens of other applications (some of them large projects like IE, Eudora and RealPlayers) and many of them (at beta)were in no better shape than Mozilla is now. This is _NOT_ beta. This is not going to magically appear on the desktops of millions of clueless end users (repeat: this is not beta!). This is alpha, a developer and QA level product. To judge it by end user standards can wait until final release or at least beta release. I can't remember using any beta product as much as I use this almost alpha browser. I just don't get all the negative reaction to calling it alpha. Someone please help me understand this oposition. :) Asa Correct me if I'm wrong, but the purpose of Alpha release is to test the product for the purpose of de-bugging. No one should expect it to be bug free. My major objection (and I think some people actually agree with me!) is that the level of bugs and usability is not the same across different platforms. If the purpose is to de-bug a cross-platform program, it stands to reason that it should work about the same on all platforms going into the testing. Otherwise you end up with the version for one OS getting a lot more testing than another, and consequently one stable Beta and one unusable Alpha. Very true Asa.. I personally agree with you, but the public doesn't. yes, many products in Beta are even worse that this is.. but this isn't just ANY program, this is the next generation browser by netscape, that everyone and their dog have been waiting for. One wisp of "alpha" on any news site, will pour in thousands of people downloading Mozilla. Sure this is great, but these are the same people who have download the ICQ99Alpha, wich in my experience rocked and had very very few bugs. The word Apha has been misleading by the media.. it now seems to mean, Almost Beta, and Betas are not suposed to be almost flawless. Sorry to bust your bubble.. but that's how it seems to be. --Jedbro The main thing I'd want to see changed before *any* kind of semi-public release (I know alpha is not beta, but still) is to get rid of that damn ugly menu-bar at the top, or fix it to fit in with the skin... I think the skin itself looks nice (spinner excepted) and is perfectly "conservative". Also, Mozilla doesn't work with the forum at http://www.animeondvd.com/ - you can read messages, but try to log in to the forum, it doesn't accept a password - but I don't know enough to file an even halfway intelligent bug report about this, or what to search on to see if it's known... Apart from that, not being able to drag a link into another window to load it is stopping me using Mozilla, I need that feature the whole time. ("Open in a new window" is ok but you end up w/ too many windows...) --sam leafdigital, I checked your link to the anime site and was able to set up an account and log in (it accepted both username and password) with a 120113 build. There was a problem for a few days with forms. I think you were experiencing the bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20148 which was fixed on 12/01. If you still see that problem let me know and I'll investigate. And if you're interested in some help with bug reporting/searching then drop by one of the weekly BugDay! events on Tuesdays on IRC #mozillazine (see BugDay articles or post followup for more info).I can be reached at asadotzler@netscape.net Unfortunately I tried to reproduce the problem "clean" in the current nightly build (after installing fresh & deleting profile and mozregistry), but that's completely broken and crashes before I get anywhere near it, so. :) Hopefully it was a problem with my system - I may have forgotten to delete profile/mozregistry last time, for instance. I'll watch out for it when I download another mozilla build. thanks, --sam In the poll I found myself having to put a 0 in for many things because I have yet to be able to use Mozilla for regular browsing. Why? Because the proxies are pretty well completely broken. Everything from setting the proxy preferences to the proxy actually getting used simply don't work. And as I am sitting behind a firewall, I can't use Mozilla for any serious browsing. Currently those proxy fixes are slated for M14. I wouldn't consider Mozilla alpha (read somewhat useable) until then. - Avery J. Regier I have a proxy server on my home set-up and one of my machines which I have mozilla on connects through this proxy server. I set up the proxies through the prefs GUI and they didn't work so I closed mozilla and re-launched it and then mozilla was able to connect through my proxy server (http at least). Also if your build is kind old I remember a time a few weeks back when the proxy settings were getting written to the prefs.js slightly incorrect. If you open your prefs.js (located in the Users50\yourprofilename directory) and look at the proxy setting and you compare that to the settings in the prefs.js file for Netscape Navigator, they should look the same. For a while I remember that the proxy pref when added from the prefs dialog was including some extraneous character that once deleted fixed the proxy connection problem. If this isn't working for you after you've checked these possible solutions come visit #mozillazine any weekday evening (USA time) and I'll be glad to try to help. Asa Tried this on last nights build with a cut and paste of my 4.7 settings - no joy. The comments in bug 15927 indicate an awareness that this is a problem, but it does stop a large number of potentially interested testers from playing with the builds. Kai. I have had the same problems with M12 proxy behind a corporate firewall as reported by Kai. I have confirmed that the info in the perfs.js file is the same as used for my Netscape 4.7 for auto proxy. I also tried manual proxy using the settings I've got for StarOffice and IE 5.01. Still no luck. Hard to really test M12 out if I can't get to the Internet world. Johnny If M12 is in some ways even better than M11 - which is BY FAR the best Milestone I've ever seen - then it should be Alpha! I don't understand all this discussion about this detail and that detail question. It's important to show Mozilla is moving on and on, and Alpha release is the best way to do that. Of course, it's still buggy (but there are final releases of other products that are even more buggy). And of course, it's not complete in any way (not ALL features do work, not EVERYBODY gets the skin he wants) - but it's ALPHA. And as far as I'm concerned, that's "not even Beta"!!!! So, please, let M12 be Alpha - and make as good as possible, of course! BTW, even if you wouldn't release M12 as Alpha - please tell users who download Mozilla (Milestone release notes!) how they can get Java applets working. I, for example haven't any NS plugin installed - Nav4.7 and MSIE 4.01 execute applets without any problems - and Mozilla can't show applets on web pages. That's awful! I heard you have to download some Sun plugin for Netscape and then it works - is that right? If yes, then please tell M12 - Alpha or not - users how they can enable applets!!! Ok, after playing with the latest version for a bit today (and reporting a CSS bug, which is probably either a duplicate or me not understanding how it's supposed to work, but what the hell), I finally filled in the survey. I don't use Mozilla for reading email or reading/posting news, so I left those options as 10... but I *would* like to use it for sending email, by which I mean, clicking on mailto: links and having things work. Sadly, it appears to launch the internal mail client rather than my Windows-default mail client [i.e. the one I actually use]. Hence it's all but useless for sending mail (okay, so I could maybe configure it, but why should I have to configure mail twice? Does it support MS Exchange servers anyway?), and I gave it a 2. I really hope this'll change for release... I know 4.7 sucks in the same way but this is pretty important in companies or institutions which use Outlook (etc.) for their internal mail... --sam Cut-and-paste must be working for Alpha. End users consider this a basic feature that is inherant to all GUI environments. Mozilla needs to speed up alot right now it takes up so much resources and is so slugish in everything its just going to turn people off. aswell there are so many painting bugs and widget bugs (atleast for Linux) i don't think its close to alpha yet. So, I spent half an hour downloading the current Mac nightly build and tried it out. First thing it did was give me an empty dialogs labeled the Profile Manager, with no content in the dialog. I pressed Next (next what?) and then Finish; the browser promptly crashed. Launch again; this time it didn't crash or bring up dialogs. I then tried going to my home page by doing a Cmd-L; turns out Cmd-L and Cmd-O have had their meanings reversed. So then I looked in the menu and found that the keyboard shortcuts didn't follow platform standards, missing the Command symbol. I tried the Cmd-O dialog and checked "Open in new window", noting that some text in the dialog was weirdly clipped. It didn't open the page in a new window or otherwise. Then I tried Cmd-O without checking this box, and it opened it. I clicked on a link that tries to open a new window by using the "target=_blank" attribute and instead the link opened in the same window. About halfway through loading the new page I selected, the browser crashed again. So is this alpha? Two crashes in five minutes, major failures to support platform UI standards, gross sloppy dialogs, major missing features -- I don't fricking well think so! Echinacea Feldercarb So, I spent half an hour downloading the current Mac nightly build and tried it out. First thing it did was give me an empty dialogs labeled the Profile Manager, with no content in the dialog. I pressed Next (next what?) and then Finish; the browser promptly crashed. Launch again; this time it didn't crash or bring up dialogs. I then tried going to my home page by doing a Cmd-L; turns out Cmd-L and Cmd-O have had their meanings reversed. So then I looked in the menu and found that the keyboard shortcuts didn't follow platform standards, missing the Command symbol. I tried the Cmd-O dialog and checked "Open in new window", noting that some text in the dialog was weirdly clipped. It didn't open the page in a new window or otherwise. Then I tried Cmd-O without checking this box, and it opened it. I clicked on a link that tries to open a new window by using the "target=_blank" attribute and instead the link opened in the same window. About halfway through loading the new page I selected, the browser crashed again. So is this alpha? Two crashes in five minutes, major failures to support platform UI standards, gross sloppy dialogs, major missing features -- I don't fricking well think so! Echinacea Feldercarb So, I spent half an hour downloading the current Mac nightly build and tried it out. First thing it did was give me an empty dialogs labeled the Profile Manager, with no content in the dialog. I pressed Next (next what?) and then Finish; the browser promptly crashed. Launch again; this time it didn't crash or bring up dialogs. I then tried going to my home page by doing a Cmd-L; turns out Cmd-L and Cmd-O have had their meanings reversed. So then I looked in the menu and found that the keyboard shortcuts didn't follow platform standards, missing the Command symbol. I tried the Cmd-O dialog and checked "Open in new window", noting that some text in the dialog was weirdly clipped. It didn't open the page in a new window or otherwise. Then I tried Cmd-O without checking this box, and it opened it. I clicked on a link that tries to open a new window by using the "target=_blank" attribute and instead the link opened in the same window. About halfway through loading the new page I selected, the browser crashed again. So is this alpha? Two crashes in five minutes, major failures to support platform UI standards, gross sloppy dialogs, major missing features -- I don't fricking well think so! Echinacea Feldercarb I downloaded the 12/14/99 Windows build and found it to be very fast. I conducted a some speed "benchmarks" between Mozilla and IE5 and found Mozilla as fast, near as fast, or faster than IE in every case. In no case did the performance lag significantly behind IE. Not bad for a pre-Alpha. So let's just go ahead and make it official! The Linux builds I downloaded a few days ago had some stability problems though...hopefully this will be solved soon. By the way, where's autocomplete (in typing URLs)? I read months ago that the developers were working on it, but we haven't seen the fruits of their labor on that yet... |