In interesting releases of web browsers lately, Mozilla 1.4.1 is out, Opera 7.21b for Unix, Firebird 0.6.1, iCab 2.9.6 and Epiphany 1.0.1.
Mozilla, Epiphany, iCab and More Web browsers Updated
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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0.6.1 has been out for several weeks. At least for me the Windows version tends not to finish loading pages and takes a lot of RAM. Overall it isn’t there yet, but for a technology preview it is very promising.
The BeOS version (0.7+) works much better, though slow as a snail. When this gets the debug code out, BeOS will have one great browser. Now we wait on Java integration…
Can’t see Opera 7.21b for UNIX anywhere. 7.21 final was on the FTP server for a few hours last week, but now we’re back to 7.20b7
Firebird 0.6.1 has been out for ages and has some very nice plugins.
Mozilla is now at 1.5rc1 (or beta 2?)
Well I’ve got Mozilla 1.5 RC1 for win98se and I couldn’t be happier! It’s ALOT faster in the page rendering and more stable with tabbed browsing.. versus 1.4 the would cause a nasty video lock-up and crash with 4 or more tabs open.. 1.5 is MUCH better and MUCH improved..
Can’t see Opera 7.21b for UNIX anywhere. 7.21 final was on the FTP server for a few hours last week, but now we’re back to 7.20b7
Well, actually, there was never 7.21b.. It only has 7.21 Preview and RC, so the lastest for Windows is RC6 and Linux/BSD is P3..
Windows:
http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o721_3218_rc6.exe (w/out Java)
http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o721_3218_rc6j.exe (w/ Java)
Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris:
http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/7.21-Preview-3/
If you go to the Opera support forums and click on the Beta testing forum you can get the latest test versions of Opera for various platforms. am currently running Opera 7.21 rc1
See ya,
madmax
Sorry make that >>> Click on the Opera for Linux forum
This is the link from that forum :
ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/721/final/en/
Not only has it been out for a while, 0.7 is supposed to come out tomorrow. At least, that’s what they said last week. It may be a little longer, but it’ll be soon.
Any one have word on NTLM support in Thunderbird? I had it for some time on the Windows side, then a installed a bit new version on my Linux box and did not have NTLM support.. Now I am moving to OS X, and would like to know if Mozilla or Thunderbird has NTLM support…
Any one have any info in this?
MozFirebird 0.7 gets released with Moz1.5, which should get released tomorrow.
This isn’t a news story, it makes out that the news is news.
It is my understanding that Mozilla and Mozilla Thunderbird will only have support for NTLM authentication in the Windows builds. Mozilla just calls the NTLM API provided in Windows and as such is not supported on any other OS.
NTLM support is a Windows-only feature.
I’ve been using Mozilla Firebird for just over two months.
Overall I love it. I love tabbed browsing. I love the UI scheme. I love the bookmarks management. I love the extensions/plugins system, and as a web developer the ‘live http headers plugin’ is incredibly useful.
There are three niggling problems that need to be fixed. I think these are Mozilla engine problems, not just Firebird problems. The first is that it leaks windows graphics image resources. This means that after viewing a lot of pages with large images the system will stop rendering correctly. Windows stop refreshing not just in Mozilla but in all applications. Screen corruption and mess. The only way to get your system back is to quit Firebird entirely. I’ve heard that this has been fixed in the nightly builds and the fix will be included in the upcoming version 0.7. The second problem is that Mozilla Firebird leaks memory. Every page you load adds some amount of memory to the app usage. Usually about 500kb. It starts of at around 20MB, and before you know it you’ve got 50MB or more allocated. Closing windows doesn’t seem to help free up the memory, the only thing that works (again) is quitting the app. Without knowing the specific causes of these bugs, I’d guess they are both symptoms of having a large codebase with some poorly understood object ownership issues. But I digress. The final problem is that when switching tasks away from Mozilla, especially when minimizing it, the whole system freezes. Now this is on Windows 2000 with pre-emptive multitasking, so the fact that other tasks are getting no CPU is an indicator of pretty serious problems. The only thing I can think of to explain this is that it’s actually a symptom of the memory leak problem … Mozilla is taking so much memory from the system that the OS decides to page out the entire task every time it’s not being used, and then it has to write 50MB or more of pages to the swap file. Anyway, that’s just a stab in the dark guess.
So, if the Mozilla crew can tidy up those three problems I’ll be happy to proclaim Firebird as the best browser ever built.
right now firebird works great for me, in fact i’m using it right now
but, epiphany crashed ALOT the last time i used it, anyone had any luck with epiphany?
Running it now. Seems like many of the previous stability issues with 7.20b12 have been resolved. Good work, Opera team!
I’m using Epiphany 1.01 right now, after using 1.00 for a few weeks as my primary browser. I like it: Faster than big brother Mozilla; tabs with that little “click-me-to-close” X; and it tells me when I try to bookmark the same URL twice.
Quirks: No “export bookmarks” command; no “paste” option on a right-click; help files need a bit of work.
Give it a try.
I click on remove images yet ads still download about EVERY time ,slows browsing. Nothing like Opera. It’s most annoying when using the back button ,the ads prevent quick back to another page. I am going to respond on the firebird messageboard about this. This browser still has problems. I agree with the earlier message about Memory leaks.
I run Mac 10.1.5 (no need to upgrade here) and all the browsers for this platform.
icab – Has tons of configurability in the GUI (prefs) compared to other browsers, although most of which can be set with about:config on Gecko browsers. This browser has tons of unique features such as a embedded HTML validater on the toolbar. The rendering engine isn’t as mature as Gecko. It’s actually bad enough that I never use this browser.
IE 5.2.3 – I basically never use this browser. Ever. I honestly don’t ever find a need to. Anyway, IE Mac isn’t too bad. The font rendering in Quartz is nice, compared to the fonts on Windows IE, which I have never seen AA like in the Mac version. IE Mac has a vertical toolbar called ‘Explorer Bar’ that I really like. Just like sidebar in Mozilla, but this one has a scrapbook which lets you take “snapshots” of sites which saves them for future loading and offline viewing. This is nice for dialup users. Honestly that’s probably the only nice thing about this browser, besides the IE engine, that I personally can mention. The prefs also just seem counterintuitive; for example you can’t delete all cookies with one button like other browsers have added in their prefs. Instead you have to shift click the top cookie and bottom cookie in a vertical list which really is a pain with many cookies because you have to scroll all the way down. It just feels unintuitive to me.
cont’d below
How soon before epiphany can be a small download, I mean without needing to have Mozilla installed also.
What needs to happen first, and what is the known timeframe for that?
It is my understanding that Mozilla and Mozilla Thunderbird will only have support for NTLM authentication in the Windows builds. Mozilla just calls the NTLM API provided in Windows and as such is not supported on any other OS.
This could be provided by SAMBA on *NIX, however, due to licensing conflicts between Mozilla (which is multi-licenced) and SAMBA (which is uni-licenced), that can’t occur 🙁
Mind you, most people I know, who have a proxy use squid, it isn’t pretty but it gets the job done with minimum fuss and bother.
Mozilla is now at 1.5rc1 (or beta 2?)
Mozilla 1.5 is at RC2, however, for some reason there has been no update to when the final will be released.
As for Mozilla 1.4.1, it is rock solid with a tonne of bug fixes. I found that Mozilla 1.5rc2 would constantly drop “connections” and claim that it couldn’t connect to osnews.com even though I could with Safari.
I’ve since moved back to Mozilla 1.4.1 and waiting until 1.6 or 1.8 rolls around before moving forward.
Opera – Opera for Mac isn’t that great in my experience. Opera has come up with some nice features for thier browser, but if the thing doesn’t start thatn what use are those features? Seriously this thing crashes on startup more than any other application on my Mac box. Also for some reason Opera just sucks at rendering multiple tabs simultaneosly. I’ve tested this several times, and it always take the longest of all tabbed browsers on my connection. Opera is a nice browser, but I just wish it were OSS, because at least then we could get some bugs out and maybe get it to stop crashing, although OSS browsers do crash alot.
Omniweb – This browser is nice because it’s fully Aqua UI. The widgets even change to all gray if you set that as a pref in the System Prefs, which is very well-done integration if you ask me. Omniweb is a decent browser, but has no tabs. It has never crashed on me. Omniweb is what Safari should have been IMO, fast, simple, stable, and integrated. It really has no niche features. It’s a good overall alternative browser that I would personaly recommend over Safari ATM for non-tech users such as my mother. She needs no tabs
Camino – Nothin special here. It’s nicely integrated like Omniweb, but crashes the most of any app I have ever used. It has very few preferences than you can set, rivaling only epiphany in this area. I have sent in tons of bug reports, but the developers still haven’t release a new version for a long time. This is basically a less-stable omniweb with tabs. It’s decent, but I don’t use it too much.
Netscape – The recent version runs nice here. Thsi is my main browsers, and most vetern Mac users I know browser with Netscape. It’s all around nice, but does crash occasionally.
Mozilla Firebird – I download the Nightly Build (yes even on dial-up) every few days. This browser gets a lot of patronage in places like osnews and other technology news sites, but honestly I don’t think it’s that great. I don’t like the vertical iconofied preference pane. I like the drop down list of netscape/mozilla more. I never use the built in google search. Once I open firebird and close all windows, it stops working: it won’t load any pages, just times out. I know this is the flagship of the free software community, but it has a long way to progress if you ask me.
Conclusion – I don’t use Mozilla because I have netscape and don’t feel like downloading both on dial-up given that they are so similar. I personally use netscape because I think Gecko is greatand it’s a good browser with tabs. Omniweb is used here occasionally when someone rarely uses my box, but for me it’s mostsly netscape. Yes I know I should be using moz, but I’m not downloading it! I would like it if someon could do a similar brief comaprision of text-based browsers, including lynx, all the versions of links, like hacked linuks, links2, and elinks, as well as ws3m. Also if somone could review *nix browsers that would be nice because I would like to know about epiph 1.0.1 and galeon-cvs compared with konq.’s newer releases as well. Thanks.
It’s the offical Gnome browser, so honestly I doubt it if this will ever happen, and if it does I doubt the core developers will be the ones to offer this.
I’ve all but replaced iexplore with firebird – being a web developer, I still need to test on iexplore.
Firebird is the pretty much the best browser out there, imho.
One thing I’ve been trying to migrate to is Thunderbird.
I recently tried the 0.2 release.
Has anyone found that it’s really slow if you import outlook express documents ? – overall, the performance of it is way too slow for me to switch to it. Hopefully in later releases, that will be amended in the same way mozilla has become extremely fast.
as for my experience, I use full Mozilla. And why? I need to print some pages from time to time and I use composer to very easily edit them and delete unwanted table elements (columns as menu, etc.), – quite handy.
What is more, somehow Mozilla feels more robust to me, than Firebird and Thunderbird.
I also don’t think I save quite so much hd space using Firebird instead of mozilla – few MBs?
And – folks – to be honest – Firebird + Thunderbird UI is quite terrible for me – either I am old and used to menus, or i just can’t swallow that icon based UI – feels quite funky to me.
As my friend needed to replace Outlook, I tried Thunderbird – I hought it will be as high quality as I find Mozilla’s mail client, but hey – does Thunderbird team really mean it? Seem like a joke to me – On my Athlon 1.8 machine UI simply lags big way – trying to resize panes here or there, releasing the mouse, it still runs, jumps here or there. I just don’t understand, why the UI is not at least the same quailty (speed wise) as the UI of Mozilla?
Still waiting for better to leave my favorite Mozilla .-)
-pekr-
You can use this http://apserver.sourceforge.net/ (requires Python) to overcome your NTLM problems.
You want to point to the Firebird URL (http://texturizer.net/firebird) if you actually want someone to download Firebird instead of Mozilla 🙂
For those who need NTLM from a browser/app that doesn’t support it, check NTLMAPS (google it, I think that’s the right acronym). I run it routinely at work to allow me to use firebird and it works great! It’s like a mini proxy server…
The released versions of Opera 7.21 are FINAL releases. You will find a version for your system here:
http://www.opera.com
Full release versions:
Opera 7.21 for FreeBSD Intel
Opera 7.21 for Linux Intel
Opera 7.21 for Linux PPC
Opera 7.21 for Linux Sparc
Opera 7.21 for Solaris Sparc
Opera 7.21 for Windows
Why not just use safari? I went from MacIE->Camino->Safari personally. In my experience, Safari is the best browser on any system/OS that I’ve found. It’s the best integrated with the OS and seems to render the pages in the prettiest form (maybe Mozilla renders them slightly better, but it’s just damn ugly)
Mac Opera used to bite btw, hope it’s gotten better.
Also, if Apple ever ported Safari to windows, I think it’d kill any other browser except for IE. It’d definatly kill Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird for sure.
But Apple will never do it :/
I haven’t upgraded to Safari because (I noted this in my post) I am running 10.1.5. I haven’t been able to justify the Jaguar upgrade. I might get panther. I have never used Safari, therefore didnt’ write FUD about it.