Firefox 1.0 RC 1: marching towards GM!

[Brad]

250 or so bug fixes (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/qa/changelog-rc1.html) have been made since the Preview Release! :)

My personal favorite: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=223545

SWEET MOTHER OF CREAMED CORN, THEY FINALLY FIXED IT. :eek: :eek: :eek: *dies*

If you want to hop onto the bleeding edge, downloads can be found here (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0rc1/).

[alcimedes]

i want apple-m to minimize the damn program.

[Paul]

yeah, thats a big one...

[Brad]

One step at a time, I guess. Another personal peeve of mine is middle-click not working. :\

In other news, the Mozilla devs are trying to splash a little cold water on my excitement:
This is a fake release candidate: it was made knowing that it would not be identical to 1.0 (and not just in the version number). The remaining 1.0 blockers are not very exciting. They are mostly version number changes, obscure crashes, and localization changes.
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/archives/000616.html

[Moogs]

The FTP servers are getting slammed; anyone got a mirror site for RC1? All that's up on the Mozilla main page is the PR1 version.

[MCQ]

Try any of the mirrors off this page:
http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html

[Moogs]

Thanks!


(download and install complete... thing is fast rendering for sure. Anxious for the final)

[torifile]

Does it finally look less like ass and more like a browser I'd want to use?

[Akumulator]

It still looks like ass and the downloadable themes don't seem to be compatible yet... but it is tons faster than the previous versions.

[Brad]

Akumulator is right. It still looks and acts like ass in a lot of ways on Mac OS X, but it takes names and kicks ass on Windows.

It also makes a really good browser for older Macs because it is so much faster than Safari.

Personally, I'm still hoping for an update to Camino that will allow extensions or have something built-in that is equivalent to AdBlock. *sigh* Yes, I know about the ExtraPrefs thing, but it's not the same.

[DMBand0026]

Any word on OS X's built in spell check being implemented? I'd love that, because quite honestly, I can't spell worth jack.

[Brad]

Last I heard, we'll probably be seeing "OSX on x86" before they get the native spellchecker implemented in any of the Mozilla apps. :(

[Luca]

Found a link to this at MacNN:

AltiVec optimized Firefox (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=149532)

[DMBand0026]

Last I heard, we'll probably be seeing "OSX on x86" before they get the native spellchecker implemented in any of the Mozilla apps. :(

Ouch. Very ouch.

That's one of the biggest things lacking from Fire Fox IMHO. I love it for what it is, but hate it for what it isn't. So I'll continue to be a Safari user.

[Brad]

Same here.

On a related note, I used to think that Camino had the greatest potential in the world to be a kick-ass Mac OS X browser. Development progressed very quickly at first and it literally just came out of nowhere to make great strides in practically no time at all. Then it seemed that development stopped cold and that it was going to die a sad, quiet death.

Truth be told, there was very good reason for the sudden drop in activity. Rather than retell the drama in my own words, I'll quote an interview (http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20040923.ars) with Mike Pinkerton, Chimera's current project leader:


In mid-2002, the project suffered a blow when we lost Hyatt to what became the Safari team at Apple. I stepped up as the sole technical lead and project owner. About the same time, we got a small team together within Netscape, with dedicated development and QA, to put together a Netscape-branded technology preview for January MacWorld in 2003. We worked very hard to get our little browser ready. It was energizing to again be working on a Mac product at Netscape that one could feel proud of after so many years of delivering second (or third) rate software.

We were on track and all of our hard work was about to pay off. We had several hundred CDs pressed with the plan of handing them out on the show floor. Two days before the show, AOL management decided to pull the plug on the entire project. Needless to say, we were devastated. I still have a handful of those CDs which might even be considered collectors' items. That was also the MacWorld when Apple announced the first beta of Safari [January 2003]. Fresh off our disappointment from not shipping our own product, we played with Safari and saw that Apple had hit the exact market and feature set we were targeting. We were up against another OS company with a built-in browser and we knew from history that we were toast.

On top of that, for a long time Pinkerton was the only active developer and then he started a new job teaching a class at GWU. Camino simply wasn't getting any love from the developer community. With Safari out there, there simply wasn't the drive that there was before.

With that history out of the way, I'll get back to where I started. I agree completely with you, DMB. There are several big things lacking in Camino that has pushed its relevance behind Firefox now. The spellchecker is one, but Firefox suffers the same. The second big one is the inconsistent use of native-looking widgets. Not only does a textarea, for example, not behave like a native textarea, it only gets the "look" half-right with odd gaps around the edges. Buttons apply only parts of CSS styles, making for a haphazard half-mozilla half-Aqua appearance. Someone needs to pick one and stick with it. The biggest drawback, though, is that Camino doesn't have a way of supporting any of the great extensions for Firefox. I think a simple mechanism for blocking ads would appease me and most people that hark about this point.

*sigh*

[Brad]

Ooh, on another related note, I've been digging and digging for any signs of developer comments of the spell checker issue. I found this:

http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/camino/2004-January/001330.html

their plan is to eventually switch all of mozilla onto the cocoa widget layer so we only have to maintain one and not two widget layers on the mac. this really won't make fb and more or less of a mac browser, just makes the architecture a little more up to date and easier to work with. There shouldn't be any visible side effect, except now they'll share our bugs with NSQuickdrawView.

If that ever happens, it means that text services could finally be properly implemented. Since Firefox is actually a funded project whereas Camino is strictly volunteer work, this has a much greater chance of happening. I've seen nothing else about it, though.

To splash some cold water on those wishes, though...

http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/camino/2004-January/001363.html

Yes, I believe they'd switch as well. The reason they haven't yet is because there isn't a way to do the native popup lists from carbon (or something along those lines).

Keep in mind, this is just talk at this stage. It's not going to happen for a while.

On Jan 24, 2004, at 9:28 PM, Andrew Thompson wrote:

> Does this mean XBL widgets are coming online for form elements?
> It would be nice if Mozilla/Firebird's forms looked native.

[Brad]

Okay, one more post before I shut up about Camino and the spell checker. :)

It looks like at least one person has been actually trying to get the native spell checker working:

http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/archives/000348.html

On the Camino development side, code is being commited by Pinkerton while Josh is organizing documentation, website and other administrative duties needed for the 1.0 release. I have not made much progress on the spell checker front but maybe this will be integrated into seamonkey and thus we might get it.
Emphasis mine.

And a relevant bug link for the native widgets:

"Bugzilla Bug 148098: Switch to native text widget for HTML text fields" (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148098)

[autodata]

Firefox is great, but on my mac it's like my SUV or swiss army knife browser (web developer + the zoom for images are necessary for me when I'm doing work) whereas safari stays as the everyday one. SUV is also a good description because it's slower for me than safari and it's much slower than my PC firefox, so I don't think it's an adblock/pithhelmet issues, though it could be.

[Luca]

Slower than Safari? I thought only Internet Explorer could claim that title. Safari seems very slow to me. It doesn't help that it beachballs for a few seconds if you try to open three or four tabs in quick succession.

[autodata]

Slower than Safari? I thought only Internet Explorer could claim that title. Safari seems very slow to me.
I just tried a couple pages and right now they seem to basically be the same. But I do switch between the two constantly and browsing in firefox seems clunkier. I try to pay more attention. Firefox on XP, however, is blazingly fast.

[onlyafterdark]

I notice a huge speed difference between Safari and Camino. Camino just blows Safari out of the water. However, Safari does have some features that I wish would be implemented into Camino. Hopefully, Safari will be sped up in future builds.

[DMBand0026]

Speed is my biggest gripe in Safari. Other than that, it has the features, it's compatible, it's solid, and it's not ugly. It's an awesome browser, but I really wish it was faster.

I use FireFox every once in a while just for the heck of it and I find myself drooling over the sheer speed. But than I realize that it's ugly, it's not as solid as I need, it's not as compatible, and it's lacking in the features.

I'll keep my fingers crossed, but right now I just can't make the transition, like I said...I love FireFox for what it is, but hate it for what it isn't.

Same with Adium, but I've pretty much gone on to using that full time instead of iChat. The new build of Adium is wonderful. But that's another story for another thread. ;)

[Brad]

i want apple-m to minimize the damn program.
This should make you a very happy person. :)

Fixed: 204636 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204636) - [Mac] Make minimize (Cmd+M) and zoom menu commands work.

[Moogs]

RC 2 available at Burning Edge.

Here. (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0rc2/mac/en-US/Firefox%201.0rc2.dmg.gz)

[Moogs]

1.0 is now availble (MacUpdate, VT, etc.)

[Brad]

And since it is at GM, I guess this thread has served it's purpose. :)

Closing! New thread here: Firefox 1.0 Released! (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?p=41456)