Mozilla is going to final 1.0. How do you rate this good free browser?

[unplugged]

Since about a week I'm using Mozilla 0.99 as web browser and I must admit that has the pros of MS IE and the pros of Opera.

Speed is very good and page downloading is smart as happen with MS IE (first structure and text, 2nd images and heavy stuff), I haven't archieved any kind of problem at this time and this free "Navigator" (GPL?) rolls from page to page very rapidly.
Also the page loading layout is always perfect as happen with MS IE o how it must be.
I have said pros of Opera because it performs quite good on slow machines, I think also due to a not excessive RAM consumption, about 20 Mb.

Months ago I have also tried Netscape Navigator 6 (Mozilla is a project started time ago entirely from sources of Netscape Navigator; but, trust me, now is a totaly different browser ;)) and as first impression it seemed to me even more huge and heavy than MS IE 6.0 !!!
So I have fired it out of my HD in few seconds :D


I met first time Mozilla at www.warp2search.net (great stuff news site).
Does anyone know any other good browser as replacement of MS IE?

[Doom9]

I've been using it extensively since the RC1 release.. here are my comments: rendering: not always perfect.. have a look at this thread:http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23366, 2nd page.. physche's signature get screwed up badly.

another link would be http://www.2002dvdinfo.org/.. scrolling is horrible.

Password manager is annoying because it wants to store every form.. not only .htaccess protected pages as the IE equivalent does.

other than that I liked the browser... rendered every other page I visited as it should be and speed is acceptable, too, though a bit slower than IE (been talking with quite a few people about that).

tabbed browsing is a nice feature (though incompatible with my browsing habits), mail client finally supports multiple pops (which is a big plus as compared with netscape) and it's free software.. hopefully they can iron out the bugs for the 1.00 release... netscape 6.0 was horrible and has shattered the trust of many netscape users for good.

stability seems to be good.. my pc once rebooted when I had mozilla open and switch between the browser and serious sam though it may well be that the game killed it, rather than the browser.

[unplugged]

Originally posted by Doom9
http://www.2002dvdinfo.org/.. scrolling is horrible.

Scrolling works perfect with my Mozilla build 0.99 in this site.

Originally posted by Doom9

tabbed browsing is a nice feature (though incompatible with my browsing habits)


pretty linuxian :)

[gldblade]

Mozilla loads quite slowly on my computer. I know there is a quicklaunch icon that partially loads Mozilla on startup, but I don't like programs that hog memory on startup.

>tabbed browsing is a nice feature (though incompatible with my browsing habits)

I use it all the time. NetCaptor is a great browser with tabbed browsing, though it's no longer freeware... :(

[Doom9]

unplugged: what gfx card do you have? I've discussed the scrolling problem online with a few people.. all nvidia users had problems.. but others didn't. Anyways.. I submitted all the issues I mentioned and a few others to the developers (or rather had somebody do that for me;) It's just that there are still issues that I think need to be ironed out.. but the browser is pretty good and I would already suggest it as an alternative for people who don't like MS products.

[unplugged]

I have a NVIDIA GeForce MX card
driver is Detonator XP 28.32 official
(WinXP)

[avih]

>" I know there is a quicklaunch icon that partially loads Mozilla on startup, but I don't like programs that hog memory on startup."

IE does the same, but u can't control it, and it doesn't have a tray icon that can make it go away :)

[Koepi]

I use mozilla since very early 0.9.x stages regularly and only switch back to IE in cases where it absolutely fails (i.e. windows update ;) ).

Tabbed browsing was against my habbits first as well, but hitting ctrl+t is so fast and easy and your display is always "clean"... the stoppable popups is important as well (hm, dunno if that's still a problem, but before mozilla 0.9.x it definatly was :) ).

Well, I supported mozilla a long time now and maybe I'm a little biased because of that, but for me and all users in my LAN it seems to be the perfect browser.

Btw., I've no problems with oleg's site as well, using 28.32 detonators on win2k (G2 MX [1st genartion, no 200/400 or anything]). Didn't check it with linux though, but I guess you're a windows user anyways ;)

Ah, and I'm using rc1 of course.

Regards,
Koepi

[Doom9]

well.. the thing is.. the guys who had problems with the page used the 23.12 drivers (or whatever the official 23.x revision is).. haven't tried using the latest drivers yet.

[Mikele]

I'm using Smart Explorer (http://www.smarteque.com), why don't you give it a try, maybe you'll like it. It doesn't have its own renderer, it uses IE for the job and has a multi document interface, popup killer and many other useful features.

[gldblade]

>IE does the same, but u can't control it, and it doesn't have a tray icon that can make it go away

Well, then my logic is why add to it by loading another browser on startup? But if I don't, loading Mozilla is quite slow.

[avih]

>Well, then my logic is why add to it by loading another browser on startup? But if I don't, loading Mozilla is quite slow.

because i like it more :), and i have at least one browser window open all the time...

i used IE5/5.5/6 before when it was better and more stable than ns/mozilla. i don't like opera's user interface too much, and it's not as compatible with web pages as mozilla.

i find the features, and the stability better in mozilla than in IE. it's a personal oppinion, but that's what good for me. yes, it has few 'glitches' as doom noted, but overall, for me, i enjoy using mozilla more/

avi

[Doom9]

btw.. the slow scrolling issue is mentioned in bugzilla.. in fact there's still loads of bugs ;)

also.. I'd like someone to point me out how exactly IE is being pre-loaded because I have a hard time finding any evidence.. specifically I don't see any large process being loaded into memory upon starting up the system.. there's nothing quite comparable to the mozilla loader.

[avih]

>"I'd like someone to point me out how exactly IE is being pre-loaded.."

well, i boot my xp, i don't use explorer, and in the task manager it takes 12M....

[Doom9]

explorer.exe is the window manager of winodws.. try killing the process.. it will restart the gui, especially the taskbar
explorer.exe is the rather buggy (by xp standards) task that crashes every now and then but you see the system recovering.

[avih]

that's the point. they turned the whole UI to explorer. so u can't get rid of it...

[[Toff]]

I'm using mozilla since m18, and I'm very pleased with it.
I can't browse without tabbed browsing now!
It's very usefull on forum. First you open one window for main page. Then you open new window for each forum. Finally you use tab for threads.

I also like the optimoz add-on :
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/
Allow to use gestures to browse.

Another good thing is javascript advanced feature, like enabling pop-up only when you click on link and during a small time.

DOM inspector, Javascript debugger are great also.

Hey! I forget about the direct search in url bar.

Finally it is under the MPL (Mozilla Public License) ;-)
The work done by developpers is very impressing.

[gldblade]

>I'd like someone to point me out how exactly IE is being pre-loaded

I'm not too sure about this, but Windows 98 SE (the OS I'm using) is integrated with Internet Explorer. Load Windows and you load IE.

BTW, there is a way to get rid of IE, but it gets rid of certain features in Windows that I happen to use.

[dvd2svcd]

A funny thing I noticed with Mozilla. If I have a Password Field where it should show * instead of the password it actually shows the password and no *.

[MaTTeR]

I'm actually starting to like it better each day. In fact my gf has now seen me use it and she insists on me installing it on hers:)

Doom9 is correct though, Olegs site (http://www.2002dvdinfo.org/main.html) does indeed scroll horribly on his main entrance page for some reason. I've been using the nightly builds and so far the issue hasn't been resolved. There are other issues as well, right now I'm typing this up in a 3inch by 3inch window within Mozilla. Bookmark Manager isn't very flexible in terms of drag and drop like I'm use to in IE.

I do have to admit, early on I thought the tab browsing was a gimmick. However, I found myself surfing the forums today in record time using tabs and must say it's very impressive if your pipe can handle the bandwidth:)

[Doom9]

I've just installed rc1 on solaris.. works fine but takes ages to load.. and when opening another browser and trying to open olegs browser the browser froze at 100% cpu usage and I had to kill it.. going back to olegs site after that worked and scrolling is okay. However, there seems to be some font problems.. they will not always get rendered properly.

[chemmajik]

I use Mozilla RC1 sometimes, if they would fix the autoscroll to be DirectX complient I'd use it more. You cannot use hypersnap to capture pages, it wont autoscroll(unless you know a fix). So once they fix that feature I'll start to use it more & more. I'm so fed up with the cache system of ie & its damn cookies. Thats one area I like that they built into Mozilla. Once you have it loaded up one time, I find it opens new windows actually faster. But it loads web pages the first time slower, but once you have it cached its faster. I'm also kinda tired of ie55 crashes they don't happen often, but when it crashes it take all my ie's55 down. I refuse to install ie6 do to passport crap, plus it just plain crashes on alot of people I hear, just dealing with driver issue's. I just like the idea that modzilla is open, and if i get tired of a feature I can always rip it out & recompile it if it pisses me off. I used to use netscape gold 3 then 4 just got to bloated, I missed its bookmark editor, so thats what draws me to Mozilla, bec its bookmark editor has alot of really helpful time saving organizing features(organizing 6000 bookmarks is a beach). Why so many well my ie was added to my old netscape. I have to use a external bookmark editor for ie all the time, so I am getting tired of it, its a major hassle. I haven't done a torture test yet to see how many mozilla windows I can open at once, but so far it hasnt crashed yet. The wheel mouse does finally work with RC1 for scrolling which made me also retry it again. So I am keeping my mind open, its still being tested. One other cool thing that I haven't used alot is the scroll back in history window, you can easily see it in the menu & just lick to go to it. It might replace my old opera4, do to spyware I havent upgraded to opera6.

[twistee]

I have started to use Mozilla on windows. It works fine, I like it. I havent had any troubles with it yet...

[Doom9]

some updates on the solaris situation.. I had a lot of freezes.. more than netscape4.79 crashes on solaris.. so either something went wrong during compilation (maybe there have to be some special switches set for solaris8, I dunno) or mozilla is corrently no viable alternative for solaris. I went back to IE5.5.. that is far from being perfect because it can't browse local files and often doesn't display a page so you have to press f5 to get what you want... but it's stable and has no rendering problems.

[twistee]

I have now had a few problems. There are a few sites that dont really load well, and i get pissed off when it doesnt want to download the plugins automatically (i like how ie does it automatically) so my internet banking doesnt work straight away...

[chemmajik]

Yeah I wish the mozilla auto pluging download worked myself. It looks like it attempts too, I could be a security flag that just needs toggling.

[MaTTeR]

I finally got Flash working yesterday with the latest nightly build. If you visit Macromedia's web site and download the We Flash Player installer, it should solve your problems. All the Flash animations are workig great for me finally.

On another note, the latest nightly build seems to have improved on speed and reliability; at least on my two dualie machines. A few known bugs have been fixed, one of which Doom9 reported and I verified with the nasty scrolling issue on Oleg's site. The new download manager is a very nifty feature and just might replace my GetRight:)

Edit- If your like me and have dumped Outlook for Mozilla's mail, you might like to know the spell checker is working great now also.

[avih]

@mat:
:) hehe, i'm happy to see another mozilla fan born :)

flash (from macromedia page) has been working for me since 0.98 (or 0.99, can't remember). i use rc1 now, but i'll switch to a new nightly build, mat got me exccited ;) . but i can't download 10M with 56K every night :( :)

it would be fun like to see the spellchecker working for arbitrary edit boxes (like when i'm typing a post right now).

nice
avi

[Emp3r0r]

i think internet explorer is still best... although mozilla has come a long way. From a web developers view it is leaps and bounds better than having to deal with netscape 4. i'd much rather people be using mozilla than old netscape... that's my view.

[chemmajik]

Hmm I havent test the mail portion yet.

[Doom9]

hmm.. scrolling on oleg's is still dead slow using the 5/4 build. back to ie then..

[avih]

@doom9
oleg's site ( http://www.2002dvdinfo.org ) works perfectly smooth for me now (better than the last time i checked when we talked on irc) either with mouse scroll or scroll-bar drag.

i'm using nightly a build from 3-May-2002.

cheers
avi

[MaTTeR]

Yeh, that Oleg scrolling bug seems to have been resolved 2 or 3 builds ago. It works just as good as IE6 for me.

Most likely the culprit is the $%*& Nvidia drivers. When will they ever get a stable build out?:rolleyes:

[Doom9]

well.. considering that I've used these 23.11 drivers since the day they were released and have never had any problems in any application, wouldn't it be presumptous to blame the drivers? works with other browsers after all..

[MaTTeR]

Not really. Both of us have the same video card, same OS but different drivers. So I wouldn't know where else to look.

The only other thing I could think of is that I have all Windows updates, Flash installed for Mozilla and a 16Mb memory cache allocated to Mozilla instead of the default 8Mb. I doubt either of those would be the problem but who knows, seen stranger things happen:)

@Everyone,
If you have problems with the Mozilla mail crashing, simply disbale the spell check and it should taker care of it temporarily.

[Doom9]

well.. using the latest nvidia reference drivers now and scrolling still sucks on oleg's page... back to IE again :devil:

[Doom9]

using the latest daily and the 23.12 drivers (I'm on another comp) oleg's site works.. still no fix for the linewrapping issue though.. and the password manager is annoying as ever.. but I'm using mozilla more than ie right now which should said a lot.. seems to be able to keep up with IE in most of the cases

[MaTTeR]

Doom9 is slowly progressing to Mozilla...I can feel it:D

For those of you that don't know, RC2 ws released yesterday and appears to be pretty solid.

[rmatei]

I have an ATI card and have no scrolling problems whatsoever. I agree with unplugged that it has the pros of Opera and of IE. (I've been using Opera for a couple months, now I'm toggling between the three)

Tabbed browsing is a must for me. It's a little strange at first but once you get used to it's hard to go back to the IE style, especially since I tend to have many windows open at once.

The one decisive thing about Mozilla vs Opera is that Opera has a lot more rendering problems. I'll need to get used to Mozilla a little more, but I feel it will become my browser of choice. It's also a plus that it's open source.

[Doom9]

finally, starting with builds from 05/11 I can visit oleg's page without problems on my 2 computers (using 2 sets of nvidia drivers). Unfortunately a day later they've introduced yet another (known and reported) bug concerning the password manager.. a sec or so after a password dialogue comes up you can no longer see what you're typing... still hasn't been fixed on the latest daily I'm using.

or then there's the thing with the download manager.. sometimes it activates automatically and unless you know what line to put into prefs.js there's no way to get rid of it anymore (ask matter;).

or the linewrapping thing (psyche's signature for instance).. here's where the whole open source mentality begins to shine through.. why do it when it's not in the html specs seems to be the developer's opinion. They seem to forget that any not blind IE user will prefer to have a hack instead of a table that creates a horizontal scrollbar..

and eventually they should separate all the apps... no need to have all kinds of browser controls in chatzilla, is there? talking about it they should have a look at some download manager and mirc to make those really good.

but assuming all the bugs get fixed and the linewrapping included it's a pretty good browser.. in fact.. I use it more than IE these days and I'm writing this post in mozilla (and btw you may have noted that the textarea to type a post is larger in mozilla now.. may break NS6 but it just works better for mozilla)

one more thing.. does anybody know what signature NS6 has? does it report as netscape6? mozilla reports as netscape5 and as a matter of fact the percentage of netscape5 hits has been augmenting lately..

@edit: the password dialogue problem seems to be fixed in build 051404 :)

[MaTTeR]

RC3 is out:)

This is good and bad news to me. I'm getting a little worried about the amount of these "release canidates" and yet still see the same old bugs. One has to wonder how they justify these releases with major issues still existing.

@Doom9,
I'll save you some time again, yes the line wrap issue still exists. Yes, the password manager window is still not very flexible. No scrolling issues with Oleg's site though. The browser is still somewhat unstable on both my AMD and Intel SMP systems.

I've been in the #mozilla chat room nagging them but it seems all they are worried about is getting 1.0 out the door. Timeless told me not to expect an RC4:rolleyes:

[BlackSun]

I'm still waiting for a way to install the flash plugin... Well let's download RC3.

[avih]

@blacksun:
goto http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alternates/
and download the flash 6 for netscape. install normally, it should work ;)

cheers
avi.

ps, any progress with the playlist?

[MaTTeR]

For those of you that have Bugzilla accts please vote on the line wrapping bug here- http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95067

By voting for the bug it should get a little more attention and hopefully addressed really soon. If you dont have a Bugzilla acct, it just takes a few moments to signup. Thx!

[Doom9]

didn't knew you could vote for bugs.. now that I know I have a couple more suggestions to vote for:

download manager enhancements: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75364
general linewrapping issue:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146703
feature enhancement for the mail client (make using multiple email acounts much easier): http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146703

btw.. as you can see.. some people simply don't get the linewrapping... look at the last comments for the 2nd link I mentioned.

[DSPguru]

download here :
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/7/download.jsp

[binky the stunt cat]

or you can get other plugins here (http://wp.netscape.com/plugins/index.html?cp=brictrpr3)

[chemmajik]

I've been test IE6 for awhile its cookies & caching has improved, but it crashing has to be the worst piece of crap browser I have seen. Wish Modzilla would fix autoscroll direct X capturing. I don't know about you but I seriously hate the new macromedia flashing ad's big time, about to turn them off perminently in IE6 as soon as I find a way. Bright red blues just drive you crazy.

[MaTTeR]

Another bug I frequently have- http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132517

Please vote if you have any left:)

[gldblade]

How do you make feature requests? Anyway...

Here's the feature I want: In Internet Explorer and Opera, if you click on the middle button on the mouse, a circle pops up wherever you click and if you move the mouse above the circle, the page scrolls upwards and if you move downwards, etc...

I want this because rolling the mouse wheel takes too much work...and my mouse wheel is broken :)