Mozilla 1.6 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’ve been waiting for this for over a month!
Based on the changelogs, it doesn’t seem like much has changed especially with regards to the browser.
Yeee-hawww…Cross-platform NTLM!!! 🙂 Life is goood…now I just need to find some fedora-ready RPMS of this.
and it’s much faster than Firebird. UI sucks but it’s stable and really fast.
> Yeee-hawww…Cross-platform NTLM!!! 🙂 Life is goood…now > I just need to find some fedora-ready RPMS of this.
Seems to work fine for me in Fedora Core 1 – Only complaint: The install did not create any shortcuts. I performed an Install only (rpm -ivv package) not an Ugrade (rpm -Uvv package)
PS: ‘Internet Horror’ — oops, I meant ‘Explorer’ blows goats!
Firebird 0.8 just right around the corner, bay-bee!!
Going by the changelog, it doesn’t seem to change much from 1.5 other than speed-related fixes. Hmmm, I’ll pass on this one.
Then what the heck have they been working on for half a year for? Not a troll, serioussly curious. Firebird? Bugfixes that didnt make it to the changelog? thier plan to try to take over the world?
Yeah..it does feel rather snappy…
It’s strange, but NTLM worked for me in Mozilla 1.5. This is true on both FreeBSD and Slackware. Anyone else noticed this?
Some one said that in 1.6 the spell checker will be integrated through out the system, much like what i talk about in my Slashdot journal (http://slashdot.org/~POds/journal/57667). Im not sure if this guy was telling the truth, but it would seem like an obvious thing to do within mozilla, so maybe one day?
Some one said that in 1.6 the spell checker will be integrated through out the system, much like what i talk about in my Slashdot journal (http://slashdot.org/~POds/journal/57667). Im not sure if this guy was telling the truth, but it would seem like an obvious thing to do within mozilla, so maybe one day?
yes, at one point they were, however, the QA team deemed that the addition wasn’t up to scratch and instead of holding back the release, they continued on without it.
IIRC, I think it is a seperate download/add-on.
Was that associated with the bird’s taking over as default browser and mailer?
I have a cable modem connection. Mozilla 1.5 and IE6 were about the same speed when loading pages. Mozilla 1.6 blows IE6 away! I’ve never seen pages load so quickly. I’ve used Firefird 0.7 as well but even it doesn’t compare to the speed of Mozilla 1.6! Rock on internet surfers!
It’s not speed what bothers me, but the fact that takes up hundreds of MB of ram, when konqueror or firebird take much much less…
I agree that a spell checker is a good idea.
It is posible for a workaround in windows to map a hotkey to a macro that sends it to an application.
I don’t remember the name of the app, but I remember one of the kmeleon developers wrote an app that handles stuff like this.
I know I often don’t bother to spell check posts because it is a pain to copy text, minimise window, open word, wait, past in text, spell check, copy, close, open window, paste text. That is just too many steps for something that should be as simple as right-click spell check or ctrl-a ctrl-s.
Can some give me a quick explanation of what NTLM is and what it is used for?
NTLM is a Microsoft proprietary authentication method
Mozilla info here
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/2203931
More info on the protocol used for HTTP authentication here
http://www.innovation.ch/java/ntlm.html
“It’s not speed what bothers me, but the fact that takes up hundreds of MB of ram, when konqueror or firebird take much much less… ”
That is a lie. On my system Mozilla with the browser open takes 16.45MB of RAM. Stop trolling.
It’s not speed what bothers me, but the fact that takes up hundreds of MB of ram, when konqueror or firebird take much much less…
Konqueror rendering of CSS sites is very poor. Konqueror is several years behind Mozilla developement.
curious, isn’t Konquerer based on KHTML? I thought Konqueror would benefit upon all the developements Apple has done on the KHTML engine, after all Safari’s almost perfect.
For anyone that doesn’t know, when compiled with XFT and GTK2, flash playback slows down to the point where it is virtually unwatchable. It is a problem that effects all mozilla derivations that I know of (Mozilla, Firebird, Galeon, Epiphany).
I can’t, no I won’t, use a browser that doesn’t support flash, and I can’t use a browser that isn’t Firebird (I’ll settle for Mozilla), so I am stuck with a GTK version of Firebird and Mozilla and the non anti-aliased fonts are killing me in my otherwise perfect desktop.
Simon
“That is a lie. On my system Mozilla with the browser open takes 16.45MB of RAM. Stop trolling”
Don’t assume it’s a lie just because you’ve never had a problem, on occassion I’ve found Mozilla 1.5 using upto 100Mb! It’s quite a pain as it make my system seem slugish when otherwise it is not.
Did anyone else notice that the linux tarballs at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6 are actually Mozilla 1.4.1?
Sounds like a distro specific problem to me. I use Gentoo and have no problems with flash here, neither with Mozilla or Thunderbird. I have also compiled Mozilla directly before-no problems with flash. My bet is that you are using a distro with outdated GNOME libs or an antiquated version of Netscape-Flash(I am using 6.0.79). I also had no problems with flash during my brief stint with SuSE 8.0/9.0 which is now thankfully, history.
I would also like to remind people about Netscape-Plugger-5.0 it is trully incredible. Netscape-Plugger has been around a while, but the 5.0 version is trully a major step towards seemless integration. Now if only the Helix folks could get there Helixplayer to a stable state-you can download the nightly builds now, but they are still very, very buggy. Lastly I am still waiting for Mozilla/Thunderbird to come up with a simple method for transfering stored emails between versions, under Linux this process is still to time consuming and difficult.
Where are the Source Code Tarball for this release ?!?!?
“…an option to separate the Recipient and Sender columns in the thread pane, has been implemented”.
This is GREAT if you use imap mailboxes shared with other people. I was waiting for this from two years ago. A big step forward in corporate use.
Also now you have distinction between [Secure SSL connection] and [Secure authentication] on IMAP servers… going to investigate further with Courier-IMAP.
Great job Mozilla!
Just look at the “known issues”. Seems like there are a little to many of them, and they didn’t even bother to fix the infamous URI fraud bug…
Which URI problem is that? If you’re talking about URL spoofing, that doesn’t affect Mozilla.
“curious, isn’t Konquerer based on KHTML? I thought Konqueror would benefit upon all the developements Apple has done on the KHTML engine, after all Safari’s almost perfect.”
Konq does benefit form Apples work, but there is still much to be done. Mozilla actually renders many complex sites better. And while Safari is ver good, it still has some rendering issues. It works well 95% of the time, though.
As the saying goes: “Nobody’s perfect, but we’re working on it”
you can say that again, these pages are rendered the fastest ive ever seen. i have to say mozilla is the best browser hands down.
It’s not speed what bothers me, but the fact that takes up hundreds of MB of ram, when konqueror or firebird take much much less…
I think you need to learn the difference between allocated memory and actual amount of memory used.
I hear people who say, “MacOS X is bloated because xyz uses xyz amount of virtual memory” when in actual fact, applications pre-allocate but it doesn’t mean that the memory is in use.
Eh. It’s still an order of magnitude slower and less featureful than Opera and still unusable on a PII or lower; I doubt the Firebird build from 1.6 will be much better. I don’t see myself switching back to Moz-based browsers for a while.
@ChocolateCheeseCake (IP: —.a.002.cba.iprimus.net.au)
It’s using about 36MB of RAM and has 64MB pre-allocated right now with two windows and three tabs open. I’d say it’s pretty much for a webbrowser actually, considering that I usually have a lot of tabs open and a few windows.
Yep, just installed it on Win2K Pro and it’s exceedingly speedy. I’m happy
Now waiting for 1.6 final for my eComstation box. Should look good with the Innotek font engine.
@emagius:
Eh. It’s still an order of magnitude slower and less featureful than Opera and still unusable on a PII or lower; I doubt the Firebird build from 1.6 will be much better. I don’t see myself switching back to Moz-based browsers for a while.
Really? That’s funny, I develop all day using Mozilla on a Pentium III 600mhz. I’ve also used Mozilla on a PII-450 as well. Sounds like your system isn’t properly setup…
> Don’t assume it’s a lie just because you’ve never had a
> problem, on occassion I’ve found Mozilla 1.5 using upto
> 100Mb! It’s quite a pain as it make my system seem slugish
> when otherwise it is not.
And what were you doing with Mozilla? Anyone can say program Y uses Z amount of RAM and that’s because there must be one possible occasion when it will happen.
//Really? That’s funny, I develop all day using Mozilla on a Pentium III 600mhz. //
Really? Can’t you read? He said it’s “still unusable on a PII or lower.”
Last I checked, a Pentium III is faster than a Pentium II.
To throw in my three cents:
Background:
* My colleagues and I have used Mozilla/Firebird/Phoenix/Netscape incarnations for several years
* We’re all comp-sci majors
* We use them on several OSes (Solaris, Win2k, WinXP, various Linux kernels)
We’re baffled when we hear about claims of low memory use. We can’t even hypothesize about a situation where Mozilla derivations *could* use the small amounts of memory discussed.
I suppose that if you only have 32 MB of physical RAM, turn off any virtual memory/paging, don’t use tabs, constantly clear out your cache and history, and relaunch Mozilla constantly, then you won’t use much memory.
My thoughts:
* Mozilla’s memory usage does include such peripheral objects to a degree as cookies, history, URL bar, etc.
* Tabs escalate memory use quickly
* Mozilla from a coding perspective still needs to do more clean-up; too many objects/widgets are sitting in memory that should be aced.
Conclusion:
If you have memory to spare, put no caps on individual processes, use multiple tabs and use any of these products for any amount of time, you can easily use 60-100 MB.
Yes, with around 10 tabs open, mozilla 1.4 (latest I’ve tried)
was taking around 200mb of virtual memory, with 90 resident, I had 256mb of ram and it was horrendously sluggish to switch from a heavy application to another, and mozilla had a delay of several seconds to come back and be responsive.Even if it has some errors rendering pages, i’d rather use konqueror which used probably ten times less memory, becoming allways responsive.
And no, RAM is NOT cheap for the rest of the world, many of us live in devaluated countries too and cant run applications of this kind of machines that are say, two years old.
I’ve been using Moz for a long time. A long time. I’ve even written part of a browser from a long dead browser company. In my day to day, I use Moz, IE, and Opera 7.5 beta.
And this latest Moz is by far the fastest browser.
IE and Opera are left choking in the dust. And I mean choking, like in not breathing. Moz is fast.
Moz has had a habit of crashing when heavily loaded… and I’ve seen this a lot as I’m typically pushing 60+ open tabs in 2-4 different Mozilla windows. Moz 1.6 crashes less than the ones before, infrequently now. IE and Opera crash a lot faster than Moz if you open many windows/tabs which is why I do the Moz in the first place.
And that indefinable ‘smoothness’ … Moz is creamy like butter. Opera is harsh and digital, IE is spastic and secret. Moz feels the best.
I would recommend all fans of Moz to get the latest.
Under Windows XP, for 35 open tabs and two open windows, Moz uses 92MB of RAM (peak usage 125MB).
Moz uses less memory for a large number of number of open tabs/windows than IE or Opera.
Well, neither one of the others can open this many tabs/windows, so perhaps the point is moot.
I’ve extensively compared the main three browsers under Windows XP and Moz is by far the best for managing memory.
I’ll check later this weekend to see how Moz 1.6 does on Gentoo.
Why doesn’t Mozilla keep skin compatibility between versions? Really, I’d like to make skins for it but it’s such a waste of time to keep having to update the skin every time a new Mozilla comes out.
As a FreeBSD user, I have been anxious for 1.6.
XP_UNIX DNS lookups are serialized:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70213
I have installed Mozilla 1.6 on windows 2000.
It does use (with only 3 tab bars open), from win32 task manager > 40.544 Kb.
Can’t tell me differenly.
______________________
Still, it much faster and I use it more than IE 6.
Good Job on this release version.
You guys are all comp-sci majors? Well, then tell me how you calculate that total amount of memory usage? Because I don’t get it. I’m using Mozilla on Windows 2K and in the task manager it says that it is using 24,816 K. It can’t possible use 60-100 MB. If it loaded every single file into memory, which I think it practically did since I have it running in my system tray, it still wouldn’t take up that much space. There’s really no reason to exaggerate the performance (or lack there of) of the browser. Mozilla is kinda slow, no doubt. But I would say that has a lot less to do with bloat and memory usage and a lot more to do with the fact that a lot of the program is written in JavaScript and this is interpreted rather than compiled.
Why doesn’t Mozilla keep skin compatibility between versions? Really, I’d like to make skins for it but it’s such a waste of time to keep having to update the skin
My favorite feature for Mozilla doesn’t work on 1.6 either. The “Prefrences tolbar” is rather powerfull and manageable but now I can’t use it. I used it to identify my win 2000 box as Linux + Mozilla 5. Can’t do that now.
What a shame.
It can’t possible use 60-100 MB. If it loaded every single file into memory, which I think it practically did since I have it running in my system tray, it still wouldn’t take up that much space.
Well my Internet connected PC has 512 RAM. My Mozilla is installed with all components (including chat and tallback) can you tell waht you have there ?
And, yes, it can use 100 Mb if it has RAM available and windows is set to use large RAM memory. In this case there will be less meory for other applications to use.
My favorite feature for Mozilla doesn’t work on 1.6 either. The “Prefrences tolbar” is rather
Ops, it works now. It’s difficult ot install, tough.
Nice.
—————
Go into Task Manager, select “View”->”Select Columns” in the menu and click the box for “Virtual Memory Size” (“Peak Memory Usage” is also helpful).
—————
I would agree though, I am not seeing memory usage that high with 6 tabs open, i am using 36mb.
I would agree though, I am not seeing memory usage that high with 6 tabs open, i am using 36mb.
Win2k and Firebird 0.7 with 6 tabs open – 21.5MB
now you can post on Slashdot
*Please* before you start complaining about the memory usage of any browser, take a look at your cache settings.
Opera will, by default, consume a large portion of your RAM with its in-memory cache. This is a memory usage/rendering speed tradeoff (so it doesn’t have to load commonly used page elements from disk) and is fully configurable. I assume Mozilla behaves much in the same way.
>”There’s really no reason to exaggerate the performance (or lack there of) of the browser. Mozilla is kinda slow, no doubt. But I would say that has a lot less to do with bloat and memory usage and a lot more to do with the fact that a lot of the program is written in JavaScript and this is interpreted rather than compiled.”
Mozilla is slow because the XUL interface is slow, use Firebird if you want a speedy browser in Windows; well Opera is quick too. Mozilla’s rendering engine is quite quick, but the interface is bloated so it can be hard to tell.
Mozilla should use 20MB if you have just one page open, it also depends on if you have it using Memory cache.
Somebody tell me when Firebird .8 comes out, that’s what I am waiting for.
Firebird also uses XUL
If somebody wants Gecko without XUL on Windows, try K-meleon
I had 1.5 installed and using the pinball skin. When I installed 1.6, it used the same pinball skin with no issues. This doesn’t prove all 1.5 skins are useable, but at least one is.
Firebird also uses XUL
I thought Firebird used somethign called XSLT, or XUL 2.0 ?
> now you can post on Slashdot <
No thanks,
________________
I just use it to fool (spoof) hotmail and others.
(firebird also has one nad it’s even better)
By ChocolateCheeseCake:
” It’s not speed what bothers me, but the fact that takes up hundreds of MB of ram, when konqueror or firebird take much much less…
I think you need to learn the difference between allocated memory and actual amount of memory used.
I hear people who say, “MacOS X is bloated because xyz uses xyz amount of virtual memory” when in actual fact, applications pre-allocate but it doesn’t mean that the memory is in use.””
Well, if an application gets pre-allocated 100 MB of memory, and only that application can write there, then what is the difference? It doesn’t matter if the memory isn’t actually being used by the program, all that matters is that those memory locations cannot be used by other applications, so in reality, there is no difference.
Yes Mozilla will quite happily use 100MB+ of RAM if it isn’t in use – not because Mozilla is bloated, but because you’ve enabled the use of memory browser cache, which means better surfing performance.
What’s the problem? Turn if off or turn it down to a very little value if you don’t have enough RAM, and don’t open 60+ tabs.
By Doug:
“Well, if an application gets pre-allocated 100 MB of memory, and only that application can write there, then what is the difference?”
Actually most modern operating systems use on-demand paging, so a program that only allocates 100 MB memory but never uses it will not actually get these 100 MB. All memory is allocated from a pool of so called virtual memory that is very big and is typically much bigger than the actual amount of physical memory+swap. For example in my computer I have 512 MB of memory + 1 GB of swap. But I have no problem running a program that allocates 2 GB of memory. However if such a program tries to actually use all of its allocated memory, I will get a segmentation fault sooner or later.
why is mozilla rendering so fast. Its the fastest browser I have ever tried.
yeah baby! this thing is FAST!!! it’s much faster than firebird. though it eats up more memory.
I faintly recall reading there being an issue/bug with mozilla using more than approx. 20 tabs. Honestly, I never open more than a dozen or so tabs just because it becomes hard to manage. — I don’t think I recall seeing mem. usage exceed 45MB.
Those of you having _large_ memory issues have you experienced these issues with fewer than 20 tabs open?
PS: I noticed that flash pages using Mozilla on my Win2k machine cause mem. usage to jump. Saddly, I can’t get the flash plugin to work with Fedora Core 1 on my home system, and therefore can’t duplicate issue!
Anyone notice that http://www.mozilla.org is one of the few open source projects that does _not_ contain screen shots?
It would prob. be a good idea to have some screenshots made of mozilla browser, mail, composer, IRC, and have a link to them on their site.
Mozilla 1.6 is OK, but it isn’t FAST. I’ll use it for testing webpages I’m building, but for everday use it’s back to IE. It seems they still haven’t fixed GECKO with regards to JavaScript rendering. Some scripts still fail with this build. JPEG image loading is slower than than IE.
Well I have only OSNews.com open, and I am at 38MB of RAM (according to WinXP’s Taskmanager). But it is sooooooo fast! I don’t think it’s just the page rendering – I think something about the page-retrieval code must have changed too.
Get it now!
Some scripts still fail with this build.
I always love it when I see these kinds of comments. OK, which version of Javascript where you trying to use? 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, or the Microsoft one? (really JScript) Remember, Netscape invented Javascript, and the Mozilla browsers have always supported “true” Javascript better than all other browsers.
In fact, it is probably not even Javascript itself that is the problem. Usually the problems people have with Mozilla and Javascript are related to having IE-expectations of the DOM/DHTML object tree (Another area where Mozilla supports the standards more completely than IE).
>I suppose that if you only have 32 MB of physical RAM, >turn off any virtual memory/paging, don’t use tabs, >constantly clear out your cache and history, and relaunch >Mozilla constantly, then you won’t use much memory.
Windows would not start never mind Mozilla
40MB 3tabs & JVM
this thing runs like a bat outta hell..
[professor@ *.adsl.catt.com professor]$ uname -a
Linux *.adsl.catt.com 2.4.22-1.2138.nptl #1 Mon Jan 5 11:29:07 EST 2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
IP omitted….
It looks like if java is broken, at least on SuSE 9.0 or is this related to that SuSE use is compiled with gcc 3.3.1 instead of gcc 3.2 that is used for ths Sun plugin
i am a new learner of linux.thanx!!i installed it in a folder but when i run it from the panel it seems still mozilla 1.2.1
“Eh. It’s still an order of magnitude slower and less featureful than Opera and still unusable on a PII or lower; I doubt the Firebird build from 1.6 will be much better. I don’t see myself switching back to Moz-based browsers for a while.”
Mozilla is far from unusable on my 400 mhz PII. In fact it’s been my primary browser since 1.3 and has been working fine under both win2k and Linux on said PII. So far 1.6 has been performing very well. It has been performing at least as well as Epiphany for speed, which is a much more lightweight browser. You are probably right about Opera being faster (I hear that a lot), but Mozilla is plenty fast.